No matter how many rules and procedures you define, if there's no open communication and collaboration in a team, then the solution will suffer in cost and quality. Our value statement therefore reads: inclusiveness, collaboration and technical excellence. Meet our Kunlabora culture.
We pursue creating an environment in which everybody feels appreciated and can be true to her or himself. A sparkling environment, which we carry to our customers. Every Kunlaborant can contribute to the company’s growth. We are open about everything. At the same time this implies that everyone is responsible to take care of our company. Inclusiveness also translates into the project level. We are a multifunctional team and fill the roles of developer, analyst, tester, architect, scrum master, coach, etc. These roles are not strictly demarcated to people or in time but are fulfilled by the whole team and whenever necessary. This results in a strong and cohesive team, with far less dependencies on individual team members. We frequently discuss why and what we are building, either at the customer’s site, or at our Kunlabora office. Our customers also regularly use our office space. In our weekly online sync the whole team participates in a status update on our projects, the sales and recruitment pipelines, activities, Kunlabora’s financial numbers, etc.
Agile is about working together towards a solution. Collaboration is one of our core values. It is not just a fancy word on paper. We are inherently convinced that cooperation is the basic requirement for achieving an end result supported by all stakeholders. Our customers fulfil a major role here. We need them to continuously validate, test, give feedback, and discuss alternatives. They have to let us look into their world and map their needs so that we can build the right solution. Moreover, we also need our teams to be real teams! Our unique strength is that we offer true development teams and not merely a group of individuals minding their own business, adding their piece to the puzzle and hoping it will work out.
In the end we want to provide a solution to customers facing a specific problem or need. We want to build the right thing right. To achieve this, we aim for technical excellence. Everything we do must be of adequate quality. Moreover, we want to expand our knowledge base on modern techniques and technologies and we strive to excel at this. It’s about having enough tools in our toolbox, being able to use them, and assessing which tool is best used at which occasion. Data science is one of the modern technologies we sink our teeth in. We were thrilled to discover that the Mezuri project lends itself to a sentiment analysis experiment and gratefully brought our expertise into practice. We often apply pair programming, with a driver and a navigator: an XP practice to write clean high-quality code and ensure shared code ownership.
We aspire collaboration, inclusiveness and technical excellence to deliver quality software solutions. One key factor is teamplay. We take this very serious at Kunlabora and... have a lot of fun. We regularly eat together at lunch time and biweekly get-togethers, and we organise numerous Interproject Table Tennis Leagues.