Thursday June 30th 2022
Team lead Jouke Stoel
Can you tell me a bit more about the work of your team?
As a lead, I am in charge of the day-to-day management of the team that serves the High Tech and Rail segment. Within Axini, our team is referred to as the 'Tech team' for short. The team works on projects for our key customers, such as Thermo Fisher and ProRail, who use the Axini Modeling Platform (AMP) to design and test their software faster, cheaper and more efficiently. The team is also responsible for the technology behind the platform, both in terms of content and process. This includes various trainings on Model Based working and testing. In addition, we supervise quite a few students annually, from different universities, who want to graduate or intern at Axini. At the core, these four pillars, customers, technology, training and coaching, form the backbone of our Tech team.
We work with an Agile methodology in our team. In iterations of two weeks, we work on a variety of matters. This can include product improvements, customer projects or preparing and giving training. This diversity of work is what makes working on the Tech team so much fun.
Where is the main focus of your activities at the moment?
The main spearhead for the moment is the upgrade of the programming language to a newer version. This means that the upgrade needs to be implemented in the different modules of the platform, tested and checked for errors. It is important that these kinds of changes are made in a timely manner. Running software on outdated versions can lead to unwanted situations. Important security updates are not always implemented on older versions. This so-called 'backporting' of solutions to earlier versions only happens for a limited time. These kinds of changes are less visible to the customer, but they are essential!
What is the most important achievement of the past year?
Although I really like the technology, I think the main gain of the past year is in the team dynamics. We are getting more and more in tune with each other. I think this is also where my main job lies: making sure the team can work well together. Take the training sessions, for example. The number of these has grown significantly in the past year. The way we handled that as a team, I'm proud of that.
What are the challenges for the coming years?
Axini has strong growth ambitions. That means our store needs to be in order. More concrete, this means that we are working behind the scenes to scale up our current application so that more customers can access our platform. The focus is mainly on further automation of the platform and improving the usability of the platform. In order to continuously improve these, we are in dialogue with our key users, software developers, testers and architects, and take this feedback into account in the further development and improvement of our application.
There is still a very challenging and interesting journey ahead of us. We have a good product and the team, together with our partners, is continuously working to improve the ease of use and customer satisfaction. I hope that more customers will acknowledge our product so that it can be used in more and more places!