DEV Community: Hélder Vasconcelos

10 Key Metrics for measuring the success of Software Development Teams

Hélder Vasconcelos — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 10:05:00 +0000

In Post-Covid Era, software development teams are absolutely reconstructing processes and foundations that they are based on.

New paradigms and trends are emerging in tech organizations, startups, and remote teams especially when the majority of their teams are global, remote, and decentralized.

Organizations are still understanding how to tackle these new issues that are arising in their operations, but the reality is that this is the new normal - for the good or for the bad. 🤩

Our ultimate and main objective remains the same:

Deliver to clients high-quality services and software that simplifies their processes.

With remote teams spanning throw multiple time zones, levels of proficiency and cultural backgrounds, engineering managers in traditional organizations have to continually adjust their methods for optimal productivity and efficiency.

As a Software Engineer Manager or Technical Lead, our main role is to guide and educate our teams to deliver flawless and exceptional software that makes our customers come back and our community proud of 👏.

Since TAIKAI's genesis, we have been constantly monitoring the quality of our software, measuring team performance, and checking customer satisfaction to make sure that the company is heading in the right direction to achieve our grand vision. 🚀

During this long and hard journey, we identified the so-called Northstar ⭐️ metrics for our software teams, which help us to improve our processes and deliverables.

So let's find out what metrics are we talking about 👇

The 10 Key Metrics to Measure the Success of Software Development Teams 📏

1.Bugs/Month

These are the number of bugs identified during the month period. Knowing the phase in which a bug was reported is key to determining whether it had been identified too late when the software has already been released and is being used by customers.

2. High Priority Bugs Ratio %

These are the number of high-priority bugs divided by the number of low and medium-priority bugs identified.

3. Bugs/Month Detected in Production

This metric refers to the number of bugs detected in production during the month period.

A healthy development pipeline should be optimized to identify potential issues as early in the process as possible via code review, QA testing, and staging. That said, every once in a while an issue or bugs are only detected when you are in production in front of your crowd 😭.

Although it's natural to happen and part of the software manager's job, an abundance of bugs being noticed in production shouldn't be taken lightly.

When a high percentage of bugs are detected in production, it signals that measures must be adopted to improve your testing and code review processes before any more issues arise.

You can increment the number of code reviewers, review the QA process or analyze with the team what could be improved to decrease this fundamental metric.

4. Velocity/Month

The number of story points delivered by a team during a month. This allows us to verify if productivity levels and deliverability remain at a constant pace.

During festive periods such as December or August, for example, the velocity normally drops by 50%, but this is something that completely aligns with our market cycles.

One thing that I truly don’t recommend is to use this metric to compare teams. Every team has its own set of processes for estimating stories, making it unwise to attempt to compare apples and oranges.

5. Velocity/Sprint

The Number of Story Points per sprint by the whole team. We use this metric to benchmark sprints against previous team sprints, so that we can identify blocking contexts on teams.

The reason for velocity drops are extensive, so be sure your team is able to identify the source of the issue before you implement measures. Poor onboarding processes, low team-motivated teams, bad story plannings, or a high number of drop-ins can ruin the team's delivery and health.

6. Velocity/Developer

This metric refers to the velocity of a team divided by the number of team members it has. In a perfect world, adding team members should lead to improved speed and efficiency. Unfortunately, this is not always the case in reality.

When you have onboarding periods, productivity can be adversely affected. In larger teams - where expertise is diffused across various levels - senior developers could experience a drop in efficiency due to the time consumed when mentoring junior developers.

Be sure to find the right size for your team, otherwise, you will end up getting a very low velocity per developer ratio.

7. Delivery Ratio % (Velocity/Commitment)

This is the ratio between the number of story points committed at the beginning of the sprint versus the number of story points delivered.

If the ratio dips below 60%, it is a clear sign that something went wrong with the team planning or they are experiencing roadblocks on their journey that need to be addressed promptly.

8. Bug Time to Fix (50th percentile) Days /Month

The number of days that the team usually takes to deliver a fix for 50% of the bugs. This metric safeguards your "Time to Fix" KPI from being skewed by an anomalous sample, ensuring that you get accurate insights.

9. Bug Time to Fix (Average) / Month

A traditional average for the time to fix all the bugs closed during a month.

10. Bug Time to Fix High Priority Bugs (Median)/Month 🐞

The number of days that the team usually takes to deliver a fix for 50% of the bugs.

11. Bug Time to Fix High Priority Bugs (Average)/Month 🐞

Average of all the High Priority time to fix” bugs.

Usually, these last two metrics are extremely important in our development cycle. High-priority bugs usually have an impact on an end user so we try to prioritize the delivery of these bugs in our development pipeline.

...

This simple framework was formulated to streamline our development process and eliminate decisions based on intuition and gut feelings.

When you manage a significant number of global software teams your role is to design the foundations, create a good developer experience, and have a single ruler to manage and assess them fairly.

And what better than numbers to manage a computer science team? 😲

"Numbers don't lie" 💯

The challenges of collecting metrics from tracking tools

I personally really believe in this motto, “Numbers don't lie” so the only way to have a broader perspective of the output of our two development teams is to look at metrics and act accordingly to mitigate risks and improve efficiency and productivity.

Most of the metrics described above could not be exported from traditional issue-tracking tools, at least for now. Sometimes you need to bring up your inner ninja script skills to collect all the information from the reports generated by your tracking tools.

One of our team resolutions for 2023 is to export these metrics automatically and get rid of the manual process required to collect them.

Maybe this could be a topic for another technical blog post. 🤞

Benefits of implementing this framework

This framework was created in a very specific context to measure our teams, notwithstanding, we firmly believe it can be implemented in other contexts - from larger organizations to teams that operate on agile methodologies.

To get these metrics from your issue management software sometimes you need to do manual work, but the effort completely pays off when you identify trends and you are able to act and guide your team to find the perfect strategy to mitigate a problem.

At the end of the day, that is the main role of a Software Manager, CTO, Team Lead, or Engineering Manager: to help our teams deliver high-quality software that stands up in front of your crowd.

Nothing should worry you more than this, especially if you are fully committed to growing a startup that wants to become a reference on the market.

Aim to deliver flawless customer experiences

When I wake up in the morning, my goal is to ensure that the members of my team are inspired, motivated, and have all of the necessary resources at their disposal to produce outstanding products.

This could not be the silver bullet framework to achieve success, but we believe it serves as a starting point for any team to start looking more carefully at their deliverables and outputs.

I like to think of the software development process as a traditional factory. It's critical that our processes are efficient and organized, with trained resources who comprehend their mission within each division.

This ensures a steady output in an expeditious manner from all members working together at the same pace.

Final Thoughts 🤔

At TAIKAI Labs, as a customer-centric company, our main goal is to deliver flawless experiences, and we are obsessed to detect issues as soon as possible in our development pipeline.

We tend to optimize our teams to reduce the number of bugs detected in production and have a low bug time to fix issues that have an impact on the user experience or are high priority.

During the last couple of years, this obsession had a good impact on our growth.

If we take a closer look at our Customer Satisfaction Score, we can surely conclude that they are truly satisfied with the service and quality of our delivered software and usually come back to work with us again without looking for another competitor just around the corner.

I hope this article was useful to you as it was useful for us. You are welcome to send us any kind of feedback to improve our efficiency in measuring our software teams. This framework, born from great discussions, is truly our team effort to achieve a proficient and successful delivery team.

Time to focus and keep BUIDLING 💪 🧑‍💻

Happy 2023 Coding, hope to come back soon with some new thoughts about software engineering.

dappKit — The simple way to start your web3 project

Hélder Vasconcelos — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 12:47:47 +0000

As developers 👷‍♀️👷👷🏽‍♂️, we are all familiar with the frustration of having to repeat several operations that can be automated. While writing code from scratch it’s the most effective way to develop a custom structure, it’s also time-consuming and inefficient.

When it comes to web3 development, things can get a little more complicated.

In an emerging market, new frameworks often appear intimidating and hard to master. As a result, we built dappKit: a free web3 SDK that allows developers to create web3 products and features, in as little as three lines of code.

The dappKit framework allows developers to create web3 projects, without having a steep learning curve.

A powerful introduction to web3 development
When we first started developing dappKit, our main concern was creating a framework that was easy to use, well documented, and had the potential to create a world of web3 features and apps.

With dappKit, you can save hours of work by not having to repeat operations and write web3 code from scratch. It also enables you to create a thin layer around custom smart contracts and deploy them effortlessly.

Check https://dappkit.dev/ and start your web3 development

What is dappKit?

dappKit is an easy-to-use framework that builds the foundations required to interact with blockchain nodes. The software development kit allows developers to create and integrate web3 apps with as little as 3 lines of code.

The dappKit can be used by developers, regardless of their experience with web3 programming languages. Web and Javascript/Typescript developers with no Solidity experience will feel completely comfortable using dappKit to interact with EVM standard contracts (ERC-20, ERC-721, ERC1155) and develop web3 products.

It can also be used by creators, gaming studios, enthusiasts and businesses looking to implement NFTs, DAOs, crypto tokens and many other web3 features into their current product and service offerings.

We want to dispel the myth that web3 development requires years of experience and extensive knowledge. Our framework provides the foundation for you to start right away and develop a variety of products and web3 features.

By using dappKit, you don’t have to deeply understand how to connect to a blockchain; simply specify the EVM RPC endpoint (Ethereum, Avalanche, Fantom, Moonbeam, etc…) and you are ready to deploy, read, and interact with smart contracts.

Moreover, the dappKit transpiler can also be used to generate a typescript/javascript SDK for your custom smart contract.

It serves no purpose to have an excellent framework without the appropriate documentation, so we dedicated a significant amount of time to writing, demonstrating, and detailing the most significant use cases that our library can serve.

In addition, you can always rely on our team and community of web3 developers for support in any circumstance. We will try our best to help you on your #web3 mission.

Of course, contributions and feature requests are more than welcome and appreciated :)

In the upcoming months, with the launch of Bepro Network v2, TAIKAI Labs will decentralize the development of this library by giving the power to our community to manage the destiny of this SDK.

Start a web3 project in three steps with dappKit

Install dappKit — available as an npm package;
Select which type of project you want to develop (crypto tokens, NFTs, etc.);
Create a web3 connection — A very simple way to connect your app to the web3 Environment.

That’s all it takes to start your web3 project with dappKit.

What can you develop with dappKit?

Using dappKit, you can create a variety of web3 applications, such as:

NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens)

Create, Deploy and Mint your own NFTs following the industry standards (ERC-721 or ERC1155).

import { Erc721Standard } from “@taikai/dappkit”;

const nftToken = new Erc721Standard(
{ web3Host: “http://localhost:1337", privateKey: “*” },
“0xContractAddress”
);

await nftToken.start();
await nftToken.mint(“0xWalletAddress”, “tokenId-1”);

ERC-20 Tokens

Launch your own ERC-20 tokens. It can be used as currency, as tokens to reward your users via gamification techniques. You cab even tokenise your DAO or a token any asset.

import { ERC20 } from “@taikai/dappkit”;

const erc20 = new ERC20(
{ web3Host: “http://localhost:1337", privateKey: “*” },
“0xContractAddress”
);

await erc20.start();
await erc20.transferTokenAmount(“0xWalletAddress”, 100);

DeFi platforms

dappKit comes preloaded with default DeFi smart contracts you can use to jumpstart your business, using Sablier, Loophole or other contracts.

import { Sablier } from “@taikai/dappkit”;

const sablier = new Sablier(

{ 
web3Host: “http://localhost:1337", 
privateKey: “*” },
“0xContractAddress”
);

await sablier.start();
await sablier.withdrawFromStream(1, 500);

DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations)

Base your DAO on our Network and take advantage of a community-made smart contract (Vote contracts and network contracts).

You can also build DeFi platforms, predictive markets, gaming apps, and features on your website, such as a crypto wallet connection.

import { Network_V2 } from “@taikai/dappkit”;

const network = new Network_V2(
{ web3Host: “http://localhost:1337", privateKey: “*” },
“0xContractAddress”
);

await network.start();
await network.lock(205000);

Develop your own web3 products with dappKit

An open-source SDK
dappKit is an open-source SDK, which means it will be improved and developed in a collaborative public manner on a systematic basis. This way, more developers will benefit from future functionalities, higher code quality, and more flexibility.
If you wish to contribute to the dappKit development, make sure to join our web3 dev community on Github, Discord, and dappKit, where you can also work in development bounties.

Free to use, now and forever 😱

Unlike other web3 SDKs, dappKit is a free framework and it will always be. Even with advanced features.

Web3 projects built with dappKit

Our codebase has already been used to build successful web3 projects such as RealFevr and Polkamarkets.

RealFevr debuted its NFT football collection and ERC20 token on BSC, generating more than +3M€ in revenue for its initial pack sales plus marketplace volume (data from RealFevr).

RealFevr use case

Polkamarkets, on the other hand, used the SDK in the development of their platform, which may be found at https://app.polkamarkets.com.

dappKit framework has been used in its market prediction engine, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) features, backend infrastructure, and solidity framework.

Polkamarkets use case

Who’s behind the dappKit development?

dappKit was created by TAIKAI — a web3 development hub that connects developers and companies using hackathons, bounties, and hiring challenges.

In the early stages of dappKit development, it was named Bepro.js and developed under our Bepro Lab branch.
After a major SDK overall and improvement, bepro.js was renamed dappKit and released as a free, open-source codebase.

Get started with dappKit

dappKit is the go-to framework for developers looking to kickstart their web3 projects. Regardless if you’re a senior or junior developer, the dappKit SDK enables you to save time and flattens the learning curve of web3 development.

Get started with dappKit today at https://dappkit.dev/ and join our web3 dev community.

Be part of the #web3 revolution 💪

Connect your Hackathon to your Favorite Apps

Hélder Vasconcelos — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 09:46:55 +0000

TAIKAI is able to integrate with your favorite apps to automate workflows and build engaging experiences that will leverage your hackathon to a different level.

As a digital platform where our main goal is to foster innovation and as a customer-centric company, we are always trying to find novel ways to make our hackathon platform a global standard on the SaaS ecosystem.

In order to achieve that remarkable goal, it is essential for our platform to interact with other traditional applications that our customers are using on a daily basis to increase their productivity.

Apart from productivity gains, the integration with other applications allows us to extend our functionalities by allowing the hackathon organizers to create data automation and engagement flows that as a consequence will increment the audience interaction and simplify processes.

The automation also saves you time by taking on some of your more mindless, repetitive tasks and helps you stay organized by making sure information is transferred accurately between your main event participants.

These tailored engagement loops allow without too much hassle to be connected with participants, mentors, and jury on a more frequent basis by delivering them the most up-to-date information generated during the event, as an example, notify a jury when there is a new project submitted.

Let's Connect TAIKAI to the outside world 🤝

Taking all the feedback that we collected from previous hackathon events, we decided that it was crucial to our future to allow our customers to create their own customized automations and engagement loops and give them some freedom to tailor an outstanding experience for their hackathons.

Apart from the level of customization that these integrations allowed us to achieve, this new capability allows our development team to focus their efforts on features that bring more value to our users since the customizations required for some hackathon events can be crafted by someone without coding skills.

During the last month, the TAIKAI team made a significant update on their platform to allow any hackathon organizer to customize the delivery of events generated on the platform to external services like Zappier, n8n, Automate, IFTTT, automation providers, or customized web services developed by organizers.

These events, generated by the interaction of the users with our platform, are propagated in real time with contextualized information that could be used to automate workflows. Some of the events that are currently propagated to external services are:

Participant Registration
Jury Registration
New Project Submission
Hackathon Step Change
Project Submission Update
Voting Submitted
Challenge Update Published
...

Imagine the possibilities that you can bring to the table when you have the freedom to connect the data generated on your hackathon with a set of integrations provided by these no-code platforms.🤩

You don’t need to hire a developer, any person with no code skills can design workflows that fit the hackathon needs just by connecting and assembling some pieces.

It is just like Legos. 😲

In the meantime we have prepared a list of recipes and examples that you can incorporate in your event just by using TAIKAI at your hackathon event:

Twitter, Slack, Discords Bot - Create a bot that will publish the main hackathon updates, new submissions or inform the participants that a new deadline is approaching.
Follow the Hackathon Voting - Gather all the votes and deliver streamlined voting reports or realtime charts to your most important event stakeholders.
Fill a Spreadsheet - Fill a spreadsheet with all projects, all votes, and all actions that take place throughout the hackathon.
Create calendar events - Create calendar events to notify a participant about a deadline.
Create SMS or push notifications - Push mobile notifications to participants, mentors, jury, and organizers when any particular event happens on the platform.

Better Connected than Alone 👫

Composability is a system design principle that deals with the inter-relationships of components. A highly composable system provides components that can be selected and assembled in various combinations to satisfy specific user requirements. In information systems, the essential features that make a component composable are that it be:

self-contained (modular): it can be deployed independently – note that it may cooperate with other components, but dependent components are replaceable
stateless: it treats each request as an independent transaction, unrelated to any previous request. Stateless is just one technique; managed state and transactional systems can also be composable, but with greater difficulty.

View on Wikipedia

Composability leads inevitably toward more choice, and better user experiences, making it easier to use, or adapting it to new use cases requested by our customers to create delightful online hackathons.

Technology and innovation are progressing at a huge pace, and this growth shows no signs of slowing down, so we are preparing the ground for the future. A future where the TAIKAI platform could be interconnected and talk with a myriad of tools that are created today and tomorrow.

We don't imagine a future where TAIKAI works alone to provide you a full hackathon experience, we imagine a world where a hackathon platform can talk with external APIs and services to deliver an outstanding and customized service that matches your needs.

Conclusion

Organizing a successful hackathon is a challenging effort and without the right tools could be a daunting task for organizations with limited resources and time. By using the right platform and by automating your most important processes you can significantly reduce the amount of time wasted performing data processing and organizing information. In the end, you could spend more time interacting and engaging with your hackathon audience.

TAIKAI makes it possible to automate most of these time-consuming tasks by allowing you to design flows with NoCode platforms like Zapier, n8n, Microsoft Logic Apps, Automate.io, or even design your own customized solutions.

Sounds good right 🤩

Talk with us today, we can help you to design an amazing experience and take your hackathon to the next level. 👌

With TAIKAI the sky is always the limit 🚀

PS: In the upcoming months we will prepare some tutorials and recipes that will help you create amazing automations for your hackathon.

Choosing the Right Technology Stack for your SaaS Startup

Hélder Vasconcelos — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 15:36:24 +0000

Looking back to November 2018, when we started to build up the foundations for TAIKAI, one of our engineering team's first important decisions was to choose the right set of frameworks, front-end tools, back-end tools, and services to build a state-of-the-art product that delivers a delightful user experience to our customers. Apart from the end-user experience, it was important for us to choose a collection of tools that allows us to have an enjoyable developer experience for our tech team and future team members.

When you are choosing tech stack from the ground up, you have the power to go to the market and pick the bright tools from the shelves, but then you should be smart enough to pick the right ones for your job.

The technologies used to build up your SaaS product should allow you to:

Deliver new features and changes across components at a high pace;
Continuously deliver changes to production with a small effort, no human intervention, and high reliability (Continuous Delivery);
Scale and manage the production, staging, and testing environments with a limited number of human resources (Almost no DevOps);
Scale the team and quickly onboard new team members and make them productive in a short period of time;
Have a long term vision, the technology should have an active community with plans to maintain and improve it.

Early Days

After a few iterations and POCs(Proof of Concepts) and experiments, we finally found out what was TAIKAI base tech base that remained almost untouched until today and we didn't regret what we have chosen.

This important time window where we did experimentations was crucial to our success since we tried different approaches. We learned what was really important in our infrastructure to build a long-lasting tech stack that delivers our developers' perfect experience. At the same time, it delivers a smooth experience to our customers.

We did our research, we end up finding a Fullstack Advanced React & GraphQL Course from Wes Bos, a premium training course that completely inspired us to try the "Node.Js + React.js + Prisma + GraphQL+ Next.js" tech stack. 🙏

After working with it for a couple of weeks, we were very proficient and productive with it. The vast community, the reliability, and the documentation available for these technologies allow us to move on with confidence and embrace them as our day-by-day base tools to build up the product that we dream of for our customers.

Most of our team, at that time, had vast experience in C++, Java, and Ruby but the transition to our new JavaScript stack was not a huge hurdle for us.

In a couple of days, we constructed our first GraphQL API endpoints, and afterward, we started to integrate the endpoints in our fresh Next.js/React.js web app. The first prototype worked like a charm, so we rolled up our sleeves to deliver our MVP in a couple of months, just in time for our first Hackathon. The rest is history!

🤝 Continuous Integration

Using the experience and skills from other jobs, we built up a continuous integration pipeline based on Docker to integrate our Frontend+Backend and run autonomously our unit tests, fully integrated test suites, and verification processes.

Even though this is an opaque/invisible process for our customers, we keep trying to automate it as much as possible because it allows our tech team to have time to focus on more business-oriented tasks (new features, bug fixes, analysis, etc).

I remember, from some of our previous jobs, how painful and cumbersome this process can be when you need to deliver changes to staging environments with a bunch of scripts following a tedious recipe crafted by the IT Team.

Our continuous integration pipeline, built on Jenkins, can deliver an instance of the whole platform to one of our staging environments in a matter of seconds, allowing us to test a developer change in a snap. 💥 Our approach based on docker containers allows us to test and run our software on a fully controlled operating system that can be instantiated on any cloud provider that supports docker deployments (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon, etc).

BTW, In 2020 we migrated to a new cloud provider successfully in a matter of days. 😲

📏 Measure, Track, and Tune the ship

In a SaaS product's early days, apart from delivering a high number of features to your customers, it is essential to deliver the features that bring value to them with an efficient UI/UX and less service disruption of service as possible. If your product delivers value to them consistently on a daily basis, they will be your best advocates and spread the word about your product to their friends, colleagues, teammates, or even their bosses. This organic growth will save your company from spending a tremendous amount of money on marketing campaigns and extend your startup runaway. 🙌

Since day one, we actively and accurately measure and track our infrastructure, tech stack, and consume the feedback to improve our product and developer experience. We track our Frontend and Backend Crashes, API query/mutations processing times, React.Js rendering metrics, and loading times to continuously enhance our product and provide a five-star ⭐️ experience.

Apart from technical metrics, we also try to gather some feedback from our users to polish the features that matter most to them.

For example, since our matchmaking feature launch, we have been getting feedback from our community to make the team creation in hackathons a pleasant experience in this new fully online context.

Don't waste your precious engineering resources developing features that nobody will pay a dime for it, so please have a simple plan to identify the essential features to your business.

📦 Continuous Delivery

Our development process, inspired by git flow, allows us to iterate and make changes with a high level of confidence. Starting with that and using a Kubernetes based service delivery, we were able to deliver the changes introduced by our engineering team to production, or demo stages in a matter of minutes. This high flexibility allows us to deliver cross-component features, bug fixes, or rolling back deliveries quickly with almost no human intervention.

In my opinion, this is an important process for any SaaS startup, especially at the beginning when you are tuning your product to fit your customer or market needs. I call it the Software Manufacturing Cycle Time, and I recommend you to have it in mind and take it into account when you are building your delivery pipeline.

Summing Up

The technologies and the tools that you embrace on your day to day play have an important role in your SaaS product success.

During your startup growth stages, it is required to embrace changes in circumstances, so your engineering should be ready to adapt and modify the product quickly to fit the customer and community needs. If you use the wrong tools, any change could take weeks to accomplish and burn your tiny startup budget quickly.

Be smart and use the right tools for the job. Simplify and keep testing your assumptions with real users. Always measure and make decisions based on numbers and facts.

Web technologies keep evolving swiftly, so do your research and make sure you choose technologies for the long term. Your goal is not to use the state of the art technology but built a state of the art product that matters today and tomorrow.

…

This post is part of an Engineering series that will publish in the upcoming months to share some insights about our engineering and development processes.

In the next post, we will share more details about our "TAIKAI UI Design System", the UI framework used to build our responsive smart user interfaces.

Thank you for reading!
Want to learn more about us? About what we do? Check our website or ping us on Twitter

Fight Covid-19 - Online Hackathon

Hélder Vasconcelos — Sat, 28 Mar 2020 12:44:43 +0000

Hi Developers and Hackers.

We have an important challenge for you 😷

Fight COVID-19 Open Challenge is an open collaboration effort in which volunteers, designers, students, researchers, computer scientists, health workers, startups, software developers, business developers and others will cooperate and produce creative solutions which can help fight against the current health crisis introduced by COVID-19.

This global hackathon is an opportunity for developers to build software solutions that drive social impact.

GOAL

Create technological solutions to help health professionals to deal with the huge amount of patients that are clogging our health services.
Create concise informational (infographics, videos, written) materials to raise awareness about the virus transmission and spreading factors, epidemic geographic focal points and the right measures to circumvent the transmission.
To call on more people to participate and create works including product prototypes, coding, user experience design, and business or social impact models to combat the COVID-19 epidemic.
To encourage social innovation so that we can help the fight against the epidemic with open collaboration and hence create shared value among volunteers, institutions, businesses enterprises, and platforms.

THEMES

Health Services
Epidemic Analytics
Covid-19 Information Materials

DELIVERABLES:

All project resources (source code, designs, presentation, documentation, sketches, etc.) must be submitted as a TAIKAI Project. All submissions must be in English and must be the original work of the submitter team.

Project Description with:

A description that includes a brief explanation of what the solution is and what problem is it tackling;
Screenshots or pictures from the Application;
Open Source Code link;
Technology stack or services used;

Join this global battle 💪

"Let's find solutions faster than the virus spreads! ✨

How to Capture Disruptive Ideas with Open Innovation Challenges

Hélder Vasconcelos — Sat, 28 Mar 2020 11:15:44 +0000

Henry Chesbrough, a professor at the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business, coined the term “open innovation” almost 2 decades ago.

As originally defined: Open Innovation is a paradigm that assumes, in order to improve their innovation and technology models, organizations should use crowdsourcing knowledge and broader ideation processes combined with internal knowledge to accelerate their digital transformation.

What is an open innovation challenge?

An open innovation challenge is an initiative promoted by organizations, a community or a public institution that serve as a cradle to develop new products, new services, new business lines or solve a technology issue that is hard to solve with the internal organization resources.

The challenge offers the opportunity for bright-minded people to propose solutions following the evaluation criteria and submission templates defined by the challenge promoter.

The desired outcome is to identify promising ideas and teams that can partner on an innovation opportunity with the promoter in the future, but the initiative should be also used to involve external high skilled profiles that can quickly build, test and iterate on fresh new ideas and approaches.

People should be encouraged to take risks, thus the nature of an open innovation challenge or a hackathon is to generate ideas, POCs (proof of concepts) or Prototypes and not production-ready products.

The challenge contest occurs online over a 1–2 month timeboxed period defined by the challenge promoter or materialized in a 1–3 days physical event, frequently coined as “hackathon”, or as a mix of both.

As an example, EDP, the main electricity provider in Portugal launched on TAIKAI, an online challenge that ended in a Demo Day where the finalist had the chance to pitch their ideas to the EDP board of directors in a ceremony at Electricity Museum in Lisbon.

Challenge Goals

Before we dive into the challenge operation, the promoter should identify the answers to the following questions.

What is the main challenge purpose? New Products or Services, Hiring, Marketing and communication purposes?

What organization departments should be involved to generate more value for the organization? Innovation Department, IT, HR, Marketing or Sales?

What are the criteria to provide a valid challenge submission? Ideas, Prototypes or MVPs?

Do you have a post-challenge plan for the solutions? Do you want to use the submitted prototypes and productize them or invest in the best teams? Do you want to hire the challenge best performers?

The next step is to prepare the right set materials to describe your proposal and publish your challenge to a broader community.

But, don’t worry, we enumerated a list of tasks to prepare in advance before the challenge gets published.

Challenge Pre-Launch

1. Describe the challenge goals precisely

This is an essential topic to increase the engagement of your initiative. This should be described and communicated precisely, so, try to publish regular updates when an important update needs to be announced.

2. Choose the Participant Target Audience

Define the participants' required skills to match the challenge goals. Is the challenge only open for IT profiles or students? Is the participation open to everyone? Are Data Scientists, Designers, Deep Scientists, Product Designers skills required?

3. Create comprehensive rules and terms

Yes, it is time to define the registration rules, the evaluation process, participation eligibility, prize distribution, cancellation policy, and code of conduct for the participants. Be concise and don’t try to create long policies that are difficult to read in more than 10 minutes.

An important topic to address is: who is the owner of the intellectual property rights relating to the projects that are created during the challenge?

4. Define tangible deliverables

Enumerate all the materials that the team members have to deliver in order to achieve challenge goals. What are the deliverables that are evaluated by the juries and the weight of each?

5. Create a plan to support participants

Doubts and questions from the participants are going to be around. Have a list of prepared FAQs and a support chat for quick responses.

6. Select a panel of juries that have expertise in the field

Recognition is a huge incentive for participant engagement. Selecting a set of experts on a field will raise the awareness of the challenge and help participants to take a step forward to register as a participant.

7. Provide the right incentives and benefits for the winner and the other participants

Cash Prizes are not the only way to incentivize people to join a challenge. Social recognition and social exposure or customized prizes like event swag can make them proud of their participation.

In most hackathons, only the top three projects get a cash reward, notwithstanding you must design incentives to reward all the participants that dedicated their time and effort to create amazing projects.

Within our platform, we use rewarding mechanisms to feed our social rankings and increase the participant recognition on a field.

8. Prepare a marketing campaign to attract the right talent and maximize participation

The marketing plan is crucial to bring the right talent to the table. You should use your social media presence, promote the initiative on universities, accelerators or incubators. When possible physical events are the perfect way for you to find your target profile and get your initiative a significant exposure.

Challenge Timeline

It is crucial to define a clear and timeboxed schedule to guide the participants through the challenge's journey. Proper scheduling should be defined based on the type of problem that the participants are trying to solve.

_Short timelines might decrease the quality of the submissions proposed and long timelines could also decrease the innovator initiative engagement.

As an example, in the next image, we have a schedule-timeline for a 32-hour challenge:_

On TAIKAI, we typically split a challenge into the following stages:

Registration — This is the period required to promote the hackathon on distribution channels and acquire the right set of innovators. A proper registration period should allow the promoter to

Ideation — The ideation period is the stage where innovators gather in teams and start brainstorming about their submission. Some mentoring from the promoter could also be helpful to steer the participants in the right direction. At the end of this stage, the participants should have a high-level overview and a plan to work on their team submission.

Incubation — This is where the magic happens. The innovators work as a team to create the deliverables defined by the challenge rules. Detailed business plans/descriptions, Proof Of Concept, UI Mockups, and PowerPoint presentations are usually the output of this stage.

Pitch — At this stage, the innovators should present their submission to the challenge juries as a presentation form.

Note: This is only applicable to offline challenges, although we are seeking ways to also do it online.

Evaluation — The Juries should evaluate the innovator's submissions using the criteria defined by the challenge’s promoter. It is important to have a broader set of skilled experts with experience. It is recommended to mix people with business skills & background, a scientific board, and a set of experts on the challenge topic.

Winners Announced — This is the period where the promoters announce the winners and distribute the prizes to the best submissions.

After the challenge

This is the final stage of your open innovation initiative and must be used to measure the results of your challenge. You should use this period to measure the quality of the innovator submissions, performance of the best teams, track some interesting participant profiles, measure the participant engagement and contact the participants to fill a feedback survey.

In some cases, the promoter company could invest resources and cash to finance the productization of some cool projects created.

There is a public record of some fresh new business services, ideas, and new startups that emerged from this kind of challenge.

It is brilliant how new perspectives and approaches can blossom when you merge people from different backgrounds, skills, and cultures.

The open innovation model might be the answer to transform quickly organizations into the digital economy and embrace a completely global and cross-cultural product fit.

How TAIKAI as an open innovation social network can help you on this journey?

The TAIKAI platform provides a digital web platform and content management system to publish your hackathon to a wider global audience.

Main benefits for Challenge Promoters:

Create and curate customized content for the challenge
Manage the challenge submission and participation
Use a token-based voting system to select the best projects
Communicate online with the participants
Smooth onboard for challenge juries
Outreach targeted talent profiles
Transparent transfer of value between challenge stakeholders

Apart from the platform, we might help our partners to identify innovation areas that are a priority for them.

Do you need help to set up a challenge? Drop us an email to hello@taikai.network

Thank you for reading!
Want to learn more about us? About what we do? Check our website or ping us on Twitter

The Cost of Running a DApp on a EOS Blockchain

Hélder Vasconcelos — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 14:43:12 +0000

Before you think about deploying your EOS decentralized application (DApp) to a blockchain network, as a developer and system planner you should study in detail the cost to run your infrastructure on a public shared network with a limited amount of resources to be consumed. The storage cost and execution cost on a public blockchain network are higher than in any cloud provider like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure.

This article assumes that you have basic knowledge about EOS Governance scheme, its resource allocation model, EOS Staking mechanisms and Block Producers.

On any EOS public network, there is no pay per use pricing model unlike other blockchains such as Ethereum(GAS fees) or Bitcoin (Transaction fee). The access to the limited blockchain resources is controlled by a mechanism named staking that allows the users with higher ownership on the network, so a higher number of SYS tokens frozen on the system contract, to have higher priority accessing the limited resources.
On an EOS blockchain network the limited resources are:

RAM — Resource required to store the in-memory database that supports your smart contract. This resource is consumed when a new data row is added to your smart contract database table. EOS uses the Bancor Protocol algorithm to adjust the RAM price based on supply and demand. Example: RAM to store the User Token Balances Database.
CPU — Shared CPU time to execute your DApp business logic. This CPU is consumed every time you execute a transaction on the network and depend on the code complexity defined by your smart contract, so the longer your transaction runs more CPU time it will consume. Example: Transfer Balance from User A to User B.
Network Bandwidth — the amount of data submitted to your smart contract. This resource is consumed when you send a transaction to the EOS network and depends on the size of data transported by your DApp transactions.

To use the public resources, the DApp developer should acquire access to CPU and Network Bandwidth by staking the network native token (SYS) or by buying RAM with the SYS token in a dynamic market that follows demand/supply forces. The CPU and Network Bandwidth consumption tables are accumulated in 3 days periods, so the dAPP developer should stake SYS tokens for that period in proportion to the amount of data statically stored, and the number of transactions for that period and the amount of data transmitted.

To reduce these considerable costs, the EOS main network, with the REX market, allows a DApp developer to lease EOS (SYS) resources for a 30 day period to accommodate DApp demand peaks affordably.
More information about REX market: https://eosrex.io/. There are also similar alternatives like chintai.io, but the mechanisms are quite similar.

Right now, there are multiple public EOS based networks that you can use to run your DApp, notwithstanding we will limit our analysis to the following public networks:

EOS — is the original main net launched by Block.One on June 2, 2018. EOS was the first and fastest decentralized self-governed blockchain which encourages its token holders, investors, and developers to share their voice through proposals and voting as a means for consensus. EOS coin is the network SYS currency.

WAX — WAX is an EOSIO based side chain that allows anyone to trade digital or even physical items instantly and securely, to anyone, anywhere. WAX is the public network SYS currency.

TELOS — is an EOS side-chain managed by the TELOS foundation that wants to empower decentralized autonomous communities, fairly compensate the main block producers and standby block producers and provide an affordable public network for DAPP developers. TLOS is the public network SYS currency.

Network Bandwidth Costs per EOS.IO Network

The table below estimated the network bandwidth cost to run 100 transactions per day with a size of 200 bytes per transaction. Your CPU and Network Bandwidth consumption is measured on a 3 day period, so every time you run a transaction your consumption is accumulated over the period and after the 3 days is reconstituted. It is essential to stake CPU and bandwidth for the 3 days period.

As revealed in the table above, if your application does not require a huge amount of data to be transmitted over the network, the SYS stake required is not going to be considered to your overall cost.

CPU Costs per EOS.IO Network

The CPU congestion on the EOS main network has been a hot topic over the last months since the amount of CPU available to run your DApp transactions fluctuated a lot with a huge CPU demand increase imposed by EIDOS Airdrop. It is fundamental to make sure that at any time you have the required resources to make your blockchain network submissions to go through and don’t have any denial of service for your users.
On the following table, we estimated the amount of SYS balance staked to run a dAPP that requires 100 Transactions per day on each network. We estimated the minimum amount of SYS on the 9th of March 2020 prices.

Additionally, for the EOS Main Network, we estimated the loan cost (REX) to lend the same amount of EOS/SYS for 30 days.

The CPU cost per millisecond was estimated based on the following formula and we used some block producers to estimate the price.

CPU Price = (CPU Staked / CPU Available) / 3

For dAPPs with very irregular CPU bandwidth shapes, we recommend you to deal with CPU demand spikes by lending SYS on REX market. This approach will dramatically reduce the SYS self-owned staked balances required to accommodate your application load with no service disruptions.

RAM Costs per EOS.IO Network

The RAM costs are the DApp resource that mostly contributes to your DApp budget. Every time you run a transaction that stores new data information on your smart contract database, the amount of RAM consumed will increase and your budget will be eaten.

We recommend you to optimize the store of information about your smart contract to occupy the minimum space possible.
Aside from that, find out mechanisms and services like IPFS or decentralized storage solutions to offload the storage to a cheaper service. As soon as your DApp scales up, you can assume that the amount of RAM required to run your service will scale up.

At TAIKAI, based on our operation metrics, we estimated RAM demand and the RAM acquisition cost for the EOS main based on the current prices.

Account Acquisition Cost per EOS.IO Network

The DApp users will want to use your DApp as quickly as possible. In fact, 95% will not know they’re about to interact with any blockchain at all.
For that to happen, DApp developers might need to pay for the network accounts required to onboard new users. In the following table, we estimated the costs required to set up an EOS account with 4KB of RAM.

Some DApps use a different scheme to avoid this cost, like supporting virtual accounts, using hierarchical account schemes, etc. We encourage you to find out an approach that suits your DApp and avoids software integration headaches.

Summing-Up

It is essential to calculate the network tokens (EOS, TLOS, WAX) staked required to run your DApp. Your smart contract will require database space to save user data and CPU Bandwidth that accommodates your traffic demand.
Meanwhile, start also to enumerate the advantages to run on each network listed on this analysis and weight your decision. It is not easy to migrate from one network to another, so take your time to make this decision.

If you choose an EOS sidechain, the actual cost is significantly lower 10–50x, but as soon as these networks get more demand, the difference between the EOS networks and the sidechains costs will decrease. The Bancor Algorithm used to calculate RAM prices will have an impact on account acquisition cost and operation RAM required to store information.

The storage pricing, CPU and EOS account acquisition can dramatically increase your infrastructure cost once your dAPP starts to onboard and scale a higher number of users. Some dAPPs offload certain transaction costs to the final users, however, this mechanism needs to be implemented with caution because the casual consumer might not understand it.

Just do your math and plan carefully, otherwise, you could end up in a situation where your users could not use your service because you run out of EOS resources.

On TAIKAI, we are trying to estimate the cost based on metrics retrieved from our operation on a public EOS testnet. We also used some sigmoid demand curves to forecast the demand evolution over time and estimate the resources required to scale up our business. If you want to know more about us:

Our Home
TAIKAI

References

“EOS New York Resource Planner” — https://www.eosrp.io/
“How we Calculate EOS Resource Usage” — https://medium.com/shyft-network-media/eos-resource-usage-f0a8098827d7
“Bancor Protocol“ — https://blog.bancor.network/how-liquid-tokens-work-a4ba30f2482b
EOS White Paper — https://github.com/EOSIO/Documentation/blob/master/TechnicalWhitePaper.md