Management

Product Backlog Refinement. Is it worth the effort or a simple waste of your team's time? Vladimir Zolotopupov, Head of Analytics for Innotech's Automation Department, shares his team's experience and describes how they handle the PBR process.

Games can give positive emotions and provide relaxation to a person. However, the main purpose of my project is to get a better understanding of the Verilog language. In addition, coding a game into FPGA will help to define the bounds of this programming language.

The e-commerce market in 2022 leaves entrepreneurs no choice but immediately incorporate new technologies. Today it is not enough to follow the latest trends, because you need to be two steps ahead. How to do it?

Consumer behavior has changed, especially since this pandemic. You get used to good things quickly, so online shopping and fast delivery services made us all appreciate our time and comfort.

You have to pay for everything in this life, so retailers and marketplaces have to pay for the growth of demand and profits in the field of e-commerce by regularly introducing new technologies, fighting for consumer loyalty, and rivalry in endless competition.

Here are a few of the latest e-commerce trends that cannot be missed if you want to achieve stable profits and customer growth.

All attention to CRO

Hello! My name is Mikhail Emelyanov, I am embedded software engineer, and I was inspired to write this little roadmap on the capabilities of Python language by a certain commonality among the existing Python tutorials found on the web.

The usual suggestions to study, say, “Algorithms and Data Structures” or “Databases” are especially jarring. You can spend years studying these topics, and even after decades you'd still be able to find something you didn't know yet even without ever venturing outside the scope of Algorithms!

Using video game analogies, we can say that novice programmers often stand on the shore of the lake of boiling lava with an island with the ever-coveted jobs in the center, while the islands in between, which you have to jump on, gradually increasing your skills in successive mini-quests, are either missing, or arranged haphazardly, or their fairly smooth sequence breaks off, never having managed to get you any farther from the shore. Let's try to build a path of hint islands, a number of which, although not without effort, will finally allow us to reach our goal.

Hi everyone! My name is Dmitrii Konstantinov and this is a personal story of experience and growth in a cozy startup. How we made a business pivot and adapted the server and mobile apps for it. What challenges did we face and how did we solve them.

In the world of academic knowledge evaluation, objective calculation of large data presents a serious problem. Can a student studying in an Advanced Maths class and getting B-marks be evaluated equally with another student, getting B-marks in a General Maths class? Can we create a system that would take into account the level of difficulty those students face?

This article will describe a system of independent evaluation we have been using for school olympics in five subjects (Mathematics, English Language, Russian Language, Tatar Language, Social Science) for students grades 1 to 11. In each academic year we organise six qualification tournaments, with about 15,000 students from different regions of Russia. Then we select the top ten participants in each subject and each grade for their future participation in the final (seventh) tournament, where only the best of the best are chosen. It means that 550 participants compete in the final tournament, which is about 5.5% of all participants in the academic year. 

It is obvious that those multiple tournaments cannot be absolutely homogenous, and inevitably the levels of difficulty for each set of tasks vary. Therefore, it is critical for us to take into consideration those variations of difficulty and calculate the results in the most objective manner.

One of the major challenges facing companies that transitioned online is how to deliver quality and personal customer service to their clients without face-to-face interaction. It’s true that technology can cause exponential growth to companies. However, business owners and leaders must also guard this important aspect of running a business. Fortunately, there are now a lot of CRM systems or customer relationship management systems available online.

What are the features and objectives of CRM tools? Its most basic definition is any technology in the form of a system or an app that aims to manage all your relationships and interactions with clients and potential customers. 

Today, over 87% of businesses use a cloud-based CRM. That’s because it enhances business relationships and operations by giving organizations a more streamlined way to interact with their leads and customers. A CRM system enables companies to engage their customers, simplify processes, and increase income generation.

A job interview is one of the most stressful life events. According to research IT specialists change their jobs every 2-3 years, and every tame they are faced with interviews with HR, tech leads and future managers. Artem Golovachev, Director of IT architecture at Innotech, shares his insights on how to successfully pass an interview.

This question comes up for a lot of us as we trying to advance our career and reach new heights. At the moment when I was challenged by it, I came across a wonderful book by Edmond Lau "Effective Engineer".

As always going through the book, I write new thoughts down. And today I want to share the compilation of things that I have found useful from the book. This is by no means an ad for the book, but I think it has some really interesting approaches for us to explore together.

Testers and developers are the driving force of any IT enterprise. Their work directly influences the quality of the final product. Pavel Petrov, our Lead tester-engineer of the risk detection monitoring service for corporate clients, shares his insights on building a productive relationship between two different IT camps.

I wonder why IT developer interviews are so strange most of the time. It feels as if the people are looking for computer science teachers, not engineers. All those theoretical questions that have no relation to the working reality. It is strange to be looking for eloquent teachers, who can perfectly explain any term or pattern, and then ask them to do the actual work. Maybe it is the imprint from the years spent in university when the teachers looked like all-knowing gods and seemed to solve any issue in your life. May be, may not. Anyway, these teachers stay in unis and don't do the work.

You know, what would be my universal answer to all interview questions? “I have no idea how and why it works, but I can use it, and I can use it for good”. This is the reality. Actually, no one knows exactly these hows and whys. What is a computer? What is electricity? What is an electron? No one knows for sure. But it works and we use it.

Imagine a famous author, like Stephen King, asked a question about the difference between deus ex machina and Mary Sue. Would his answer change the quality of his books? He may or he may not know all those scientific literature terms, but he can use the language and use it for good.

Every time I turn on my computer it is a wonder. I have no idea what is going on, but it awakes, it becomes alive, and I can communicate with it in its own sublime and subtle language.

Have you ever realised that all these electronic devices are monsters, Frankenstein's monsters? Some pieces of dead matter were put together, and then, with some electricity involved, it suddenly awoke. “It's alive!”. Had Frankenstein any idea why it turned alive? Of course not, or why he was so surprised? Every developer experiences this feeling almost every day. “It's working!”

On average, online store users make 64 clicks before adding a product to the cart. Some clicks are useful - so-called discovery clicks that help lead to users finding a product they wish to buy, and some are useless that come as the result of poor UX. With great competition for convenience and increasingly reducing attention spans of users, each useless click reduces the number of visitors that will reach checkout.

Konstantin Kotelnik, an analyst at Innotech, ponders over making technical documentation easier to understand for developers and helping the clip-thought generation work effectively with large quantities of data. Read the article to find out about the potential emergence of a graphical IT-Esperanto and the standardisation of technical language.

Creating a product startup can be an exciting experience, but it can be a daunting one as well. On average, only 1 out of 10 startups is successful, according to the Global Startup Ecosystem Report. Therefore, to raise your prospects, there are quite a number of important considerations to make in advance. 

Bearing in mind everything you need when launching a startup is a challenging task, so it’d be a sound idea to rely on some well-established methodology. That's why we were inspired by the Systems Engineering methodology, presented in such industry standards as ISO 15288 and CFR21. In this article, we’ll make a brief overview of this methodology and highlight how it can help entrepreneurs to encompass and structure the process of creating and developing a startup.

Conference participation is one of the most important practices for professional development. Hence, Innotech is actively sending out both its speakers and listeners for the biggest events. Senior Analyst Anastasia Kochetova shares her impressions from the Analyst Days/14 conference.

Most people fear of artificial intelligence (AI) for the unpredictability of its possible actions and impact [1], [2]. In regard to this technology concerns are voiced also by AI experts themselves - scientists, engineers, among whom are the foremost faces of their professions [3], [4], [5]. And you possibly share these concerns because it's like leaving a child alone at home with a loaded gun on the table - in 2021, AI was first used on the battlefield in completely autonomous way: with an independent determination of a target and a decision to defeat it without operator participation [6]. But let’s be honest, since humanity has taken in the opportunities this new tool could give us, there is already no way back – this is how the law of gengle works [7].

Imagine the feeling of a caveman observing our modern routine world: electricity, Internet, smartphones, robots... etc. In the next two hundred years in large part thankfully to AI humankind will undergo the number of transformations it has since the moment we have learned to control the fire [8]. The effect of this technology will surpass all our previous changes as a civilization. And even as a species, because our destiny is not to create AI, but to literally become it.

A similar article should have appeared earlier, about ten or fifthteen years ago, when Agile was just starting to be implemented in companies. How many mistakes, problems, conflicts could be avoided if managers immediately approached the issue correctly ...

But during this time, the experience of "implementing" Agile in different conditions, in different companies has accumulated, which should be generalized and widely disseminated.

In previous post I've described an example of kogito-based microservice on quarkus in native mode, containing one embedded pmml model with decision tree. While it can be successfully used for prototyping purposes, in the real life microservice might contain several prediction models. From the first view I've got an impression, that inclusion of several models should be a trivial extension of the prototype with one model. We were completely wrong in our assumption, that's the reason, why I've decided to write this post. Another reason, is absence of guides, in which 2 (or more models) are put inside DMN diagrams in kogito framework.

Very often we've heard that some frameworks fit together so good, that they are considered as "match made in heaven". In this article I would like to share our experience regarding integration of those frameworks.