Onboarding and Legacy Killing During the Pandemic

Hey everyone,

This article is about how we made a new team and replatform a product during the pandemic. In July 2020, I was informed that there will be a new dev team who are responsible for software products which connect warehouse/supplier operations to Trendyol’s orders/sales.

We faced a lot of challenges such as onboarding, new business, new technologies, working without QA, doing replatforming(killing legacy). But also, we have strengths; we are warm and modest, we embrace change and improvement, we are results oriented and take on responsibility. We see ourselves as a small start-up under Trendyol.

First of all, I will tell you how we did onboarding. I wrote an onboarding page on wiki which helps new teammates to reach important links and documents. In an agile environment, we generally don’t have time for documentation so we recorded business-meet up videos where I inform the team about concepts and processes for further use.

Second challenge was using new technologies. First week, we didn’t have our servers to develop the code. Furthermore, most of the technologies were new to us. By the way, we scheduled tech meet-ups, shared the research subjects. Second week, we had servers and did POCs and shared our knowledge with each other in tech meet-ups. Then we started coding.

Third one was new business and legacy killing. We had a really limited time for development because we had to kill legacy before a big campaign. A teammate who works for Trendyol within similar domains for more than 6 years, had our back. Everyone except him is new to Trendyol. Everyone in the team was genuinely helpful. We did a lot of pair programming. We did code review for legacy killing. Most importantly, we established an open communication within the team. We didn’t have any so-called bloody retro. If our product fails, we fail as a team.

The other challenge was working without a QA. We backed our code with integration tests. However we realized that we need to do test-driven-development, write some automated ui tests and contract tests and have an isolated test environment. For quick and dirty, we decided to do an end-to-end functional test together after a product finishes and fix all the bugs seen on stage together.

We struggled about a week after our first deployment. At the same time, everyone took responsibility and made fixes asap. We answered their postponed needs and requirements before the second big campaign (black friday) which resulted in gaining trust of our customers within 2,3 months.

After 7 months, our team has 10 members. While we were working without a QA, testing business stories was too time-consuming and we started to cross-test small increments. It relieved us a lot. We solved potential bugs before the business story deployed. When you analyze the graph, you conclude that our pace decreased a little bit but we saved a lot of time and potential complaints by doing it.

Lessons we learned:

• Importance of the quality check and difficulties are well understood within team
• We implement isolated test environments at the beginning of all projects now
• We will now be working on regression tests

We haven’t seen each other in person until our first product deployed to production. After that, we arranged a small celebration at our office. I believe that challenges we faced make us who we are today. I hope that none of us lose excitement in the long run.

Thanks for reading…