Assistant Developer Review

As an Asistant Developer you are an active part of one of the two Agile teams. You work in 3-week long sprints (2 weeks of development, 1 week of QA Testing). During the development part, you develop features or implement bug fixes that have been previously refined in a deparment-wide meeting, and during the QA Testing week, you test features that have been developed as part of the previous development weeks, to ensure they are release-ready. There are regular per-sprint Scrum meetings. The best part is that your responsibilities are largely the same as the permanently employed developers, and you can get involved in all the different processes.

Yes. As previously mentioned, responsibilities are largely the same as the permanent development staff. You work on features that within a month of coding, users of the software are already making use of. Every sprint there is a meeting where other departments go over the features that were developed as part of the previous sprint. It is a real pleasure when you see them show off something that you have built or fixed and see how it will impact the end users of the software.

We recieved excellent product training in the start of the placement year which included an introduction to the industry in which the product operates, as well as the product itself. However, there was also department specific training, where we were introduced to the technologies that are used during the development cycle as well as the general processes and our responsibilities.
I can safely say that I have developed not only technical skills but also knowledge on how a SaaS business operates and grows.

You are assigned a mentor, who you have weekly one-to-one meetings with to go over work that you have completed, or you are in the middle of completing. Talk through any challenges you've faced or outline goals for the upcoming sprints. It does not stop there however, there is constant flow of communication either within your team or the whole department where you can ask any question you have regarding things that you are working on and get a pretty much instant response from someone.

The best way to describe it is a good balance between friendliness and professionalism. There are regular socials both department specific as well as company-wide. The company also takes active part in charities.

I would say it exceeded my expectations. I was given responsibility in all the different parts of the software development cycle. I also got the chance to get involved in the recruitment of the next Development placements, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I got to go over their CVs and Cover Letters, hold telephone interviews and take part in organising and holding an assessment centre.

Yes