SysAid Seeks & Destroys in Week-Long Hackathon

Perhaps even more than our customers (like you) — our SysAid R&D and Product divisions despise bugs. We aim to continuously improve our software so when bugs creep up, we often shriek louder than a kid who sees a roach crawling across the kitchen floor.

When we become aware of programming issues we normally take deep breaths and prioritize how we handle them. A week during September 2017 was totally different. This time we teamed up and competed to proactively search and destroy bugs in a first-time, week-long SysAid hackathon event.

Our posse of IT exterminators didn’t waste any time. Nope, this time — armed with only our brains and a common purpose — we awoke at sunrise and began hunting and debugging as has never been done before. In total, we managed to fix, close, and verify 135 bugs!

Rafi Rainshtein, SysAid’s VP R&D said, “It was really important for us, as a team, to dive into the details and work to resolve new, as well as long-standing, bugs. It was an opportunity to not only think and work outside the box, but also test our potential and help direct us for future hackathons in our continuous strive to improve the SysAid product.”

Bug Fixes & Unexpected Results

This hackathon was a smashing success (no pun intended)! Our teams managed to discover and squash key bugs, including:

• User experience fixes
• Support issues
• Restoring archives
• Fixing API bugs
• Adding dynamic browser tab title for service requests
• Identifying important new and regression bugs on mobile & cloud
• Identifying problems with our RDS install
• Fixing regression bugs on the self-service portal
• Advancing mobile projects that were blocked by bugs

We also found some unexpected bugs that we managed to resolve such as fixing sort order in columns so they won’t be alphabetical (eleven comes after 1 or 2 but because of the alphabet it was ordered incorrectly). More importantly, going through these bugs we were able to add more key bugs and feature requests to our lineup and we’re super excited to get to work on them, in our day-to-day activity.

Thank You!

In conclusion, this Hackathon was a touchdown across the board (any Ravens fans out there?). We had lots of fun and fixed many bugs (I hope you’ll see this in the product itself).

I do want to take a minute to thank all of our patient customers and my SysAid colleagues for helping us consolidate many of the bugs and providing us the support and encouragement to trudge through them.