Company: Alfresco Software Inc.
Website: https://www.alfresco.com/
Period of work: 3 years

Alfresco is a collection of information management software products for Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems developed by Alfresco Software Inc. using Java technology.
Their primary software offering, branded as a Digital Business Platform is proprietary & a commercially licensed open source platform, supports open standards, and provides enterprise scale.
Alfresco Software Inc. also provides open source Community Editions as free, LGPLv3 licensed open source software. These have some default restrictions in terms of scalability and availability, e.g. there is no built-in clustering support. Quality assurance by Alfresco is limited and bug fixes are only issued for the current versions.

Sease is working with Alfresco with the focus of improving the search capabilities of their content management system.
The collaboration is based on an agile approach with a structure in Sprints lasting 3 weeks each.
Each sprint is composed by:
– Periodic backlog refinement
– Sprint Planning
– Set of tasks to be carried over during the sprint
– Sprint review and retrospective

// Activities Covered
Agile
  • Proposal of various agile practices and integration of Sease agile with already existing Alfresco agile infrastructure
  • Mentor Agile ceremonies in a sprint based approach ( Backlog grooming, Sprint planning, Stand Up meeting, Sprint Retrospective) encouraging best practices and curating a productive Jira workflow
Business Analysis
  • Supervise the business analysis tasks with direct collaboration with Senior Stakeholders to gather requirements and elaborate appropriate solutions
Training
Software Engineering
  • Review the search implementations and configurations across the entire ecosystem, including a deep analysis of all the customisations in place for Apache Lucene/Solr
  • Resolve a multitude of bugs, all over the search ecosystem, involving distributed search, text analysis and advanced Lucene/ Solr usageDesign and development of advanced search functionalities
  • Apache Solr upgrade analysis, design and roadmap proposal.
  • Architectural studies, investigations and designs
  • Analyse and review the usage of Apache Lucene/Solr
  • Refactor various components introducing unit and integration tests
  • Help the search team through all the processes
// feedback
I had the pleasure to work with Alessandro and Sease team for over a year and a half. His team was contracted to the Search and Discovery team at Alfresco. As a team lead, I was very lucky to get such support. Without their input, we would not be able to achieve the business goals in the time limits. Their diligent and highly professional work helped not only to make the Search project successful, but also to grow the skills and expertise inside the team. They were able to coach and mentor the developers, provide internal training. Their deep knowledge of Solr and Elasticsearch helped to overcome a lot of complexity and deliver the necessary features and improvements to our customers in a timely manner.
Alex Mukha
Alfresco