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Insights into Software Development
Dynamic and individual
Software Development at zeb approaches topics, products and clients dynamically. No two projects are the same. Each of our clients has specific characteristics and each of our software products has its own special highlights in terms of technology and contents. The solutions are regularly updated or even partly reimplemented to keep up with the latest technological developments. We welcome technological progress and are excited to integrate it into our software products.
Insight into the future
Software Development at zeb is more than the further development of zeb.control, our comprehensive IT solution for the corporate management of banks and insurance companies. We develop customized software for our clients’ particular business requirements. In addition, we bundle all zeb’s digital services in the Digital Services Hub, which we also operate ourselves.
In future, we will gradually make the zeb.control product family cloud-native and offer the individual services and modules as software as a service. In doing so, we will not commit ourselves to one cloud provider and will provide our clients with comprehensive support in implementing their cloud strategy.
Projects
Different roles can be assumed in software development at zeb. We attach great importance to flexible structures in order to continuously promote training and change. Roles such as business/technical software architect and product manager are therefore only ever assigned for a limited period of time and should be deliberately changed and mixed. In this way we promote personal development and avoid inflexible silo thinking.
In Software Development, each person is assigned to exactly one feature team. These teams are responsible for specific software products and projects. This way we create consistency in personal collaboration and at the same time flexibility in the execution of tasks. Feature teams and assignments to products/projects are adjusted once a year, depending on market requirements.
When putting together the teams, we aim to achieve a balance between client and market requirements on the one hand and personal interests on the other. We believe that “what I like to do, I do particularly well” has always been and continues to be a critical factor in zeb’s success. Therefore, we take personal preferences and development goals seriously and factor them in wherever possible.
In Software Development, business trips only occur sporadically, e.g. when experienced colleagues accompany the sales team with architecture and system designs or support our clients with complex challenges such as tuning the performance of massively parallelized computing machines. Due to the increasing relevance of cloud technology, remote support for our clients has been growing steadily in recent years and the average travel time is two working days per year.
Skill Base
zeb has been relying on agile methods in software development for more than 15 years. Individual methods are however not used in a textbook manner. Instead, the teams decide which agile principles and practices they want to use depending on the project. Whatever promises the greatest benefit for the current tasks is selected. Working with sprints and backlogs as well as automated continuous integration pipelines has proven to provide a sound foundation.
In terms of the programming languages we use, the evolution of our most successful products has resulted in a .Net strand and a Java strand. The Java stack has been dominant for about 10 years and accounts for about 3/4 of our activities. In addition to Java, the functional-object-oriented language Scala has been used on a large scale for years, as we have found it to be high-performing, especially for mathematical problems that require high scaling. In software development for the cloud we are familiar with Scala, Spark, Hadoop, Mongo, Kubernetes, Docker, etc. We primarily implement interfaces with React and Material-UI.
Collaboration between the Software Development team and consulting departments at zeb is based on division of labor and dialog. The Software Development department creates the products and solutions, which are then introduced or supported by the consultants from IT Consulting at the client’s site. This way, profound business expertise and technical know-how complement each other. The collaboration is close, people know and appreciate each other and have usually been working together successfully for years.
Further information
Do you want to know more? Take a look at the following pages and get to know us even better.
