The Tech Collective’s DevTestOps hub offers a dedicated full-stack team of software developers. We call the team .tech that. We work by Lean Software Development and Continuous Delivery principles; always supported by a fully automated declarative pipeline and containerized infrastructure and environments as code. Quality is built in; Jidoka.

The Tech Collective (.ttc) is an independent consulting bureau initiated, owned and powered by Implement Consulting Group (IM_). .ttc gathers the best tech competences in the field and we share the same dedicated focus as IM_ on implementing and optimizing all aspects of Digital Transformations. Only; we do the tech.

The Tech Collective has pillars in various competence hubs. One of them is referred to as the DevTestOps hub, We excel in forming and optimizing the Software Development Life Cycle for large or complex systems in large and distributed teams.

Our belief is that software should be invisible — to the end users. All they should ever see is a delicious end-product that supports them and makes them feel good. Our dedication is to ensure high quality in software products and deliveries through building quality-in by automated verification pipelines and containerized infrastructure as code. In our nerdy world of tech this is sometimes referred to as shift-left which is the philosophy of integrating Quality Assurance (QA) and testing activities earlier — in the development team — as opposed to the traditional QA approach where testing happens towards the end of development, The benefit is simply Continuous Delivery; a continuously improved one-piece-flow with no excess lead time.

Our initial focus in DevTestOPs was to support other teams; They could focus on the business logic and specific domain knowledge and we could make the teams go faster. When non-techies asked us “what do you do for a living” we would reply:

“We make software,
that software developers use,
when they make software”

This focus remains a big and important part of what we do. But our approach was so popular with our clients and collaboration partners that we started getting demands if we could just build the software — period.

To accommodate this demand ”just build the software — period” and honestly also because we’re just crazy about building software — period. We have formed a strong full-stack team. We call it .tech that — our credo do is that "whatever your problem is..."

“...we can make it go away
— with code”

In .tech that we develop front-end, back-end and complex business logic, we design UX and CX, we automate all our tests and verifications, we define infrastructure, deploys and workflows declaratively, we believe in anything-as-code. We build quality in. We fight technical debt in the code base and muda, mura and muri¹ in our value stream.

We do not use neither SAFe® nor Scrum, but we do use both kanban, paired- and mob programming and we adhere to the principles of DevX, kaizen and lean software development. We are a distributed team that rely on social coding and asynchronous communication. Our assignments can be anywhere but still the team meets regularly in Copenhagen or Aarhus.

We defy both phases and estimates, rather we believe in the scientific method, experiments, hypothesis testing, validated learning and plan-do-check-act cycles.

“...Our primary measure of progress is happy end-users”

We measure their mood, we test in production, we're data-driven.

Here’s a list of what our full-stack team can do:

We offer our clients and collaboration partners to utilize this resource pool of .tech that specialists through an affordable pricing model based on burn rate per month typically chopped up in concrete feature deliveries or assignments. In other words, we do not offer a traditional body-shop contract of dedicated head counts — sold by a game of CV bingo. It's the team that's full-stack, not the necessarily the individual. The team has the assignment, not the individual.

For our clients and collaboration partners this has a lot of advantages:

• We can offer intense engagements with high volume and short notice.
• We can adjust the capacity with the changing demands.
• We can offer a wide (dare say unlimited) fan of different competences on the same contract - full-stack eeh? Just ask!
• We can offer service and maintenance agreements, done by the same team - “you build it — you run it”.
• We can collaborate seamlessly with the client's or partner's existing personnel.
• We can mitigate traditional challenges in resource allocation such as vacation, illness, and internal training in a way that will not influence the delivery.

Internally in the .tech that team we spare with each other about all assignments. No one sits alone with a task. Mentoring, paired programming and social coding is an integrated part of our work day. We run our team on the inspiration and approach of well-established Open Source communities. All our work environments are containerized and declaratively configured using Developer Experience philosophy and tools. This allows teammates and contributors to be onboarded to assignments in minutes - as opposed to days or weeks. It also allows the client’s and collaboration partner’s own personnel to gain real-time status and full insight into all processes and to join development — effortlessly, at any time.

All our assignments are always solved with a codebase version controlled in git and with full documentation in MarkDown — also version controlled. Our deliverables follow the Semantic Versioning scheme and are supported by applicable and relevant package managers.

If you are reading this becasue you are preparing yourself for a first chat with one ot the .tech that team members about the possibilitis of joining our team then your probably want to do the small exerecise; Create a repos, using this as a template, share it with us and then work the issues in your own repo.