Welcome to the development blog

At first, I would like to introduce myself and my team. My name is Martin Hejtmanek and I am the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of Kentico. I am in the company for about 3 years. I basically take all the requirements from our Sales, Support, PR and Marketing teams and make them happen so that you can get all the interesting features of our solution. I am also responsible for many things which are closely related to the development and technical stuff of our solution so I also happen to be the architect, designer, and project manager. I am kind of hands-on person so I closely cooperate with the developers and as one of them, I take care about the programming of the most important part of the system to ensure it works the best way it can work. There are many more things I do but I do not want you to be bored already so I just skip them and go straight to introduce you to our development team ...

The teams standing behind each version of Kentico CMS are following:

The development team:

• CTO (me)
• 4 Technical leaders - who are also senior developers and lead the smaller teams to develop the modules and given features
• 8 Junior developers - who are all currently under training process to become senior developers
• 2 Web developers

The documentation team:

• 2 Technical writers

The QA (testing) team:

• QA manager
• 7 Testers

The teams and the company are constantly growing to be able to fulfill all your needs.

I must also mention our great Support team which helps you will all your issues and closely cooperates with us when the questions need to be resolved by the developer and also our Sales team which helps you with your purchase process. Again, I do not want to go to the details, I am pretty sure the team leaders will introduce themselves and their teams in their own blogs, we better continue ...

The development process

I must say that our development process is pretty standard, there is nothing suprising there. We take the requirements, create the plan for next version and choose the features which can be done in the given time.

We release new minor version every 3 or 4 months and new major version every year so the timing is pretty tight for all the new requirements. This is why we always have a long-term vision of what we want to achieve in a long time horizont.

After the version plan is ready, we analyze and implement the features and the code is reviewed. Then the QA team is ready to test all the features as well as check all the previous functionality. When the module is ready, technical writers write the documentation so that everything is covered for the end customer. In between, we fix all the found bugs and again, testers verify that they are fixed. Unlike some of other companies, we always fix the bugs in the nearest version.

When everything is ready, the release candidate is built and QA team completely tests the solution. We usually have about 3-4 release candidates before the version is ready for release. Then, we can release it for you.

As you can see, there is nothing special in our development process.

What is this blog about?

This blog is and will be basically about all the development information I can provide you in my spare time. You will find here the information about current development process, about interesting features you might want to know about and also about the architecture of our system. If you are interested in some topics, just request it in the post comments and I will try to cover it in some of the next posts. I will try to write a post once or twice a week to keep you informed if I will have enough time to do that.

What next?

I do not want to take too much from your time so I will probably end this post already and continue with the technical information in some other, separated posts.

At the end, I would like to apologize for all the grammar mistakes in my current and future english you may find, I am not a native speaker.

I also want to keep my blog as friendly and informal as possible so please apologize me if I don't call you Mr., Mrs. etc., we are all developers so I consider you all as my coleagues in an IT industry.

One more thing: Please do not request technical support directly from me or the developers. We are very busy with the development and answering your questions would consume the time we need for developing new features. If you just need anything, contact our Support team through Forums section, they are completely eligible to anwer all your questions. We do not use any external call center full of people without knowledge with predefined answers, our support team is in the house, full of professionals. Thanks

So much for now, see you in my next post ...

M.H.