My 2013 At Frontline; From Desktop To Cloud, Scrum To Kanban, BA To CTO, UK To NBO.

Hello, I’m Alex, and I am the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) here at Social Impact Lab. I work with our developers here in Nairobi, and remotely with our team in Washington, DC. Together, we make FrontlineSMS, FrontlineCloud, and other awesome SIMLab apps.

As CTO, it’s my job to facilitate our technical team to work as well as possible, whilst throwing opinions around to keep the teams working together and continuously improving our apps. You can read about how we use a combination of Scrum and XP in our development process in Sitati’s post from last year.

Since I joined the team at the beginning of 2013, I’ve been working on improving our development ‘sprints’ (they’re never perfect, right?), keep our product documentation polished, and make sure we’re testing (y)our code in detail, both manually and automatically — important measures for an agile development team.  Whilst working on our Scrum process, I have also found that as a company we have goals to achieve outside of our scrum sprints, and for this we have implemented another agile workflow methodology called ‘Kanban’.