HackWeek 2021: A Closer Look At Project “Intelligent Support Bot”
This year, our HackWeek took place offline as well as online. More than 110 Scouts from different teams participated in the event and we enjoyed learning about 38 project pitches. There was something for everyone because we had three categories: Give Something Back, Outside the Box and Hack the Strategy.
One of the winner teams (David Rochow, Felix Schüler, Ralph Thormann, Ikram Babajanov, Hussam Khrais and Abdul Al-Kibbe) took time to talk to us about their project Intelligent Support Bot. They also revealed the project’s next steps and what they will do with the prize money.
Congratulations on winning a prize at Scout24’s HackWeek 2021! Like many other teams who took part in this internal hackathon, the members of your team also come from different units of the company. Could you introduce yourselves a bit?
David Rochow: I have been working as a Senior Security Engineer in the Security Engineering Team at Scout24 for two years now. Apart from that I’m a proud father of 2 awesome kids.
Felix Schüler: I started my journey at Scout24 last year in March just before the pandemic happened and we all had to work from home. I am part of the Trust & Identity Team which focuses on fighting fraud on our platform and making ImmoScout24 safer for users.
Abdul Al-Kibbe: I have been with Scout24 since January 2021 and enjoy my job as a Security Engineer in the Security Engineering Team. I love to learn and discover new things.
Could you give us some background information on the project that you worked on? What was the problem and how did you solve it?
David Rochow: Our HackWeek group consists of members from 2 teams. Among other things, we have in common that both of our teams have a dedicated support channel on Slack. Having such a support channel you soon realise that many questions do repeat themselves in different variations. Other questions get asked because the respective documentation/documents which contain the necessary information are hard to find due to the distribution of information through many services (Tech Docs, Microsoft SharePoint, Slack, Confluence and Intranet).
The initial idea for this bot came from Abdul, and it evolved as a team effort to the concept of a bot that recognises whenever a question is being asked under the condition:
- this question is not addressed to individuals
- is not a reply to a thread
If it is the case, the bot should scan:
- curated manually written FAQ entries
- previous questions that got asked in relevant Slack channels
- question on Slack that got marked as useful
- documents on other services
If the bot does find any similar question in the FAQ/Slack questions or relevant information in indexed documents that may be related to the asked question, it should reply to the user’s question in a thread.
To do this in just a week we utilised AWS Kendra which is incredibly useful for recognising similar questions and documents that may include relevant information.
The business logic is written entirely in Python, and for wiring everything up we used, AWS Lambda, AWS Parameter Store, AWS S3, AWS API Gateway, AWS CDK, and for sure the Slack API.
Felix Schüler: David explained it perfectly: Our teams get many support questions from other teams and often they have similar requests. We want to automate some of the answers to questions that have been previously asked to save us some time and preserve valuable responses e.g., on Slack.
What are your biggest learnings after taking part in HackWeek?
David Rochow: It was a fun, motivating and successful week and I’d encourage every company to make such events happen. Therefore my learning is: Don’t stay away from such events, take the opportunity, create something awesome, and have a good time.
Felix Schüler: I totally agree with David: Scout24’s HackWeek was fun and productive, and we got so much done while all working remotely. In some sense, it was also a perfect example of agile working where we delivered the result in just one week all while self-organising and still enjoying the process.
Abdul Al-Kibbe: For me, the collaboration with colleagues from different teams was nice. We brainstormed a lot as a team to find solutions for the problems we faced, and to come up with a design for our HackWeek project. Then, we did some rapid development to turn our design into a working code. It was a great and fun experience as everyone had several ideas to contribute and having ideas from different perspectives was a good learning experience.
Do you have any plans for this project after HackWeek?
David Rochow: We have created some stories for further developing the Support Bot to provide its value to the whole company. We hope these get into one of the next cycles to have the bot running on all Scout24 Support channels.
Abdul Al-Kibbe: The Security Engineering team discussed how we can further enhance the Support Bot and how we can get the maximum value out of it. Based on the discussion, we have added stories to our backlog. The bot can be used by Scout24 teams which provide support such as Security, Application Platform, Help Desk and People Team.
What are you going to do with the prize money?
David Rochow: I personally know a little girl who got the so-called Rett Syndrome. Imagine the symptoms of autism, Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and anxiety disorders all in one little girl. Rett syndrome is a genetic disorder that hits 1 of 12,000 born girls every year and is most likely healable.
Thinking of her, and all the other affected little girls around the world always brings tears into my eyes and I’m very happy that the team agreed to donate our prize money to the “Rett Syndrom Deutschland e.V.” which is supporting the Rett Syndrome Research Trust with the aim of healing this disease.
Abdul Al-Kibbe: I would like the prize money to be donated to an organisation which provides aid and support for patients affected with rare diseases. I don’t have a particular organisation in mind. However, my colleague David suggested the “Rett Syndrom Deutschland e.V.” foundation and I highly support donating the money to that organisation.
HackWeek sounds like something that you would enjoy as well? Discover what’s possible with us: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/company/career/jobs/
