Iterative development
The product is built in short, focused one-week sprints, so value ships quickly.
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How we work
How the BORA team plans, builds, tests and ships — the process behind a platform that runs live ferry operations every day.
BORA Systems is built by a single team of twenty-five in Tallinn, working in short agile cycles. One-week sprints, continuous delivery and a fixed engineering process keep changes small, tested and reversible — which is what a system carrying real passengers and payments needs.
Work process
An agile way of working, tuned for frequent, low-risk releases.
Cross-functional team
Developers, QA, design and product managers collaborate closely.
Customer-centric approach
Features are prioritised on real user feedback and needs.
Regular releases
Continuous delivery means frequent updates and improvements.
Daily stand-ups
The team aligns on goals, progress and blockers every day.
Transparency & visibility
Stakeholders track progress through shared dashboards and sprint reviews.
Quick response to change
Agile workflows adapt fast to shifting priorities or market demands.
Continuous improvement
The team reflects and refines its process through retrospectives.
Development process
The ten steps an engineer follows from a requirement to a shipped, documented feature.
Understand product requirements
Review user stories, acceptance criteria and technical specs with the PM and leads.
Develop in local & shared dev environments
Use Docker or cloud development environments.
Define and implement APIs & services
Build REST endpoints to OpenAPI specs, with business logic, a MongoDB layer and Kafka messaging in a modular design.
Write clean, testable code
Follow team conventions (SOLID, DRY); write unit and integration tests.
Use feature branching & Git workflows
Work within a structured Git strategy (Git Flow).
Participate in agile sprints
Join daily stand-ups, deliver tickets within sprints, and contribute during planning and retros.
Automate via CI/CD pipelines
Every commit triggers build, test and deployment pipelines (Bitbucket Pipelines).
Monitor & debug in staging/production
Use logs, metrics and tracing to investigate issues.
Handle errors gracefully
Implement error boundaries, retries, fallbacks and clear logging.
Document everything
Add inline comments, update the README, and contribute to internal docs (API references, release and setup guides).
Testing
Quality assurance runs alongside development — automated, logged, and repeatable.
What we test
End-to-end and UI testing with Selenium and Pytest; API tests based on Postman.
Methodologies
Functional testing; automated UI testing of the interface; API tests as part of test cases, to keep test time down.
Technologies
Python & Pytest to write and run tests; Jenkins for automated execution; Allure for reports with scenario steps and server responses.
Step by step
Run manually or on a schedule via a Jenkins pipeline; automated runs after deployment; runs logged for historical tracking and trend analysis; Allure reports generated. Plus continuous performance testing.
Project plan
How a new operator goes from first conversation to a running pilot.
Timeline. A pilot runs up to about four months, to the point of the system working on the client side for a selected single vessel on a single line.
Phase 1 — Project start
- Specify final customer requirements together with the customer — a customer interview and requirements engineering, including full use-case exploration and completing the BORA Data Configuration Sheet.
- Capture the customer identity (logos, colours and so on).
- Start preparing the payment gateway for online payments.
- Open the initial discussions on check-in requirements, on the documents to be generated, and on the integrations needed with other modules or third-party software.
Later phases cover configuration, integration, testing and go-live for the pilot vessel — then the same pattern rolls out across the rest of the fleet and routes.
See it on live data
A 30-minute walkthrough, from a web booking to the ramp closing.
Head office
Akadeemia tee 15a, 12618 Tallinn, Estonia
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