BusyFlow integrates cloud applications into one dashboard, helping teams collaborate and work together more efficiently. The company works with numerous APIs, codes in Python and has just launched their Android app. We are talking with their CEO Jaro Satkevic on their development process – and how they adjusted it to make developers happier.

Tell us about yourself. What does your company do and what is your role?

I am the CEO and co-founder of BusyFlow. Busy Flow is app that integrates different productivity and collaboration tools, like Dropbox, Trello, BaseCamp, Google Drive and other tools into one workspace where people can see the changes, act on them and collaborate together. I am a co-founder and I manage the developer team.

Are you a developer yourself?

Yes, I am. But at the moment most of the time I am doing other activities in our start-up.

Can you tell us how big is your team? How many people and how is it organised?

At the moment we have four people. We also have two more people related to our company – a designer and an iOS developer – who help us when needed. So actually it is me and three other developers in our team.

Can you tell us about your development process? How does it typically work?



Our development process is “chaotic agile”. In my previous company we used to use Scrum with all its techniques. But we have now switched to a more chaotic process – because it is more creative. We use a few extreme programming techniques, like test-driven development. Also our client is available all of the time – it is me!

We also do weekly stand-ups. We usually do the planning on Mondays and try not to change the plan during that week. However, we do not have stand-up meetings every day, because we are a small team and talk all the time, so each of us knows what the others are doing. We also use BusyFlow to track everything – the changes made in GitHub and the tasks in Pivotal Tracker. So I feel that we do not need the daily stand-ups. We also use continuous deployment and sometimes we are deploying five or six times a day.

That’s a lot!

Actually, we are almost ready to deploy automatically. We do not have a testing server at all, so we actually push code, our Jenkins system runs all the tests, and then pushes some emails if something is wrong. And if it is OK, then we are ready to deploy.