Software developers’ routine to maintain quality and healthy environment to grow at Untitled Kingdom

• Who doesn’t like that satisfaction of finding the perfect solution?
• What do you feel after saving plenty of hours by automating a repetitive task?
• Does reaching out for something new give you a pleasure of personal development?
• How does it feel to improve life quality for thousands of people?

My name is Kamil, I’m an iOS developer at Untitled Kingdom. In this article, I’d like to point out some rules that let me sense all those feelings every day.

(If you do something…) do it well. Teamwork, unit tests, project management, instrument testing

Finding the perfect solution sometimes requires involving other people. That’s why any change made in the code repository has to be reviewed by team members. If something can be done better - it will be done better.

Maintaining quality is possible thanks to unit tests. We make sure every little ‘brick’ added to our `construction` is behaving as expected in any possible situation. Thus, we know that implementing a new feature won’t cause a regression.

Documenting changes is getting more and more important along with the growth of the project. Every task in Jira has its branch in the repository. Before merging it to the assigned version’s branch we squash the commits to one with the issue number and description. That gives us a clean git history in which we can easily search for changes.

Before releasing a version e.g. to the AppStore we make sure everything is set. Our release checklist includes things like instrument testing to avoid memory leaks and improve performance, verifying all TODO/FIXME notes or double-checking dependencies in order to detect critical changes.

Do it efficiently. CI/CD, tests, communication

A good example of automating repetitive tasks is using CI/CD. We save a lot of time thanks to automatically generated builds and triggered tests in pull requests. What’s more, we generate screenshots for the app for every possible screen state and supported language.

A very important thing for us, developers, is to have a clear understanding of tasks. That’s why every Monday we go through the upcoming tasks and mark them as ‘ready to develop’ only if we have all the information needed (assets, expected behavior, etc).

If something is unclear, the best time for clarifying it is during daily calls. Every day we have a chance to talk to our partners, affect the changes and we’re up to date with plans, priorities. We know each other - cooperation is more enjoyable that way.

Develop (yourself!). Time for self-development, pair programming, conferences, ‘edulunches’

If you want to be the best at what you do in the IT industry, you need to take some time to improve your skills and keep up to date with technology. Therefore, we have 2,5 hours weekly for our self-development. Use it wisely!

Learning, however, can be a quicker process if you’re not on your own. Every week we have pair programming sessions, usually with developers from a different project. Thanks to that we share our point of views and choose better solutions while learning at the same time.

Further development is possible thanks to provided tickets for IT conferences. Apart from that, almost every Friday we have an ‘edulunch’ in the office, where you can give a presentation about a topic of your interest.

Do what (and where) you love. Meaningful projects, pride, remote work, values

Our code improves people’s quality of life. That’s because we work on meaningful projects from IoT, digital health and FemTech industries like Elvie and MysteryVibe. Keeping a BLE connection and controlling devices is a challenging but also fun thing to do. Especially when the devices have such an impact on people’s health. That gives a feeling of pride.

Even though we can work remotely, we like to spend time in our office. Conference rooms with glass walls, open space and a kitchen where we meet to chat.

All the above reminds us of Untitled Kingdom’s three main values. Quality, Transparency, Family. Surely it’s a place worth recommending.

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• Read more about our recruitment process - Untitled Kingdom? It’s a match! Recruitment process from the point of view of android developer
• Our current job openings - We’re hiring