Solid foundation for athletic startup.

A scan to know where we stand. That was the wish of Entreo director Bjorn Maas. “I know where we want to go, but what did we have to do in terms of development for that? Did we have to hire different people? Set up our infrastructure differently? I’m no expert when it comes to development, but had a suspicion that our foundation needed to be more solid before we could build floors on it.”

It took Rockstar Edwin Derks only half a day to draw an important conclusion: the basics did indeed need to be better. Edwin: “I found in Bjorn a very driven director, who was looking for stability in the project team that was building the application. The app that was there wasn’t quite future-proof, but they obviously didn’t want to start building all over again. I reviewed the pros and cons of starting over and continuing to build, indicated how we could help and advised on strengthening the team. Important question was: how do you go from a Proof of Concept to a Minimum Viable Product that you can present to stakeholders?”

“The nice thing about software is that you can always modify it,” Edwin continued. “With a real building you can’t just put a floor in between, but with software you can always do that. So new construction is rarely the only solution.” Therefore, this was not a necessity for Entreo. What was important, however, was getting the basics right. “It required a stable development team that understood the application well, a level infrastructure and an automated CI/CD process.”

The advice gave Bjorn argument within the organization to use resources in a different way. “The urge to continue building is very strong,” he says. “Edwin’s report allowed me to indicate that it was important to invest in the foundation first anyway. It gave us insight to make the right choices. Were we not to do that, we would be building a flat on a foundation that was not solid. Then that flat would eventually fall over one day.”

Edwin provided a roadmap with required expertise to give Entreo insight into the next steps envisioned for their goal. “The Architecture Scan is an objective, technical scan. Regardless of our target group, our product and our features. Edwin indicated that – apart from the features we already had – we needed to work on the prerequisites. That was a fair observation, which confirmed my gut feeling. Of course, you hope you hear that everything is fine and you can continue building, but if it isn’t, that’s no use. Edwin was open, honest and straightforward, without being too confrontational. He made it clear in a pleasant way that I needed to look for people to ensure quality.”

The wish list: a CTO who could be the link between business and technology, a lead developer and a development engineer. Bjorn: “We are happy that we very quickly found someone who has the qualities to fill these roles. Of course he cannot combine all three roles, but we have to be realistic as a start-up. We now have a lead developer who can work with Edwin’s recommendations and has CTO qualities. Eventually, of course, we want to have a full development team in-house that can keep up with the speed we envision. Then we might well turn to Team Rockstars IT again.”