How we work
Your code may travel.
Your data stays.
Senva works with its team in Berlin and a partner team in Hanoi. Who is allowed to see which data is not renegotiated for every project. It is fixed in the model.
The model
Two zones, one clear boundary
Zone 1
Berlin
- Architecture, security review, core development and project management.
- Your named contacts are here.
- If a project needs access to production systems or personal data, that access sits here, within the scope agreed in the contract.
Zone 2
Hanoi (partner team)
- A partner company that works for Senva as a subcontractor. Its staff are not employed by Senva GmbH.
- Additional development capacity for clearly defined tasks.
- The partner team works only with synthetic or anonymised test data.
- No access to production systems and no access to personal data of any kind.
Hosting: per project in an EU region, for example on AWS or Azure, or in your own environment. The region is written into the contract. Personal data from your project stays in the EU.
To be precise
What we mean by “anonymised”
For us, anonymised means that the link to a person cannot be restored with reasonable effort, not even by combining the data with other data. Pseudonymised data, where a key or a mapping table exists, is still personal data under the GDPR. We treat it that way, which means the partner team in Hanoi does not receive it.
How the test data for your project is produced, we agree with you at the start of the project. Copies of your production data that contain personal data never go to the partner team in Hanoi.
Quality assurance
Checks happen before code is merged
- Code review
- A second person reviews changes before they are merged. Security reviews are the responsibility of the Berlin team.
- CI
- Merge requests run through a pipeline with build, automated tests and static analysis. Anything that fails there is not merged.
- Tests
- Unit and integration tests in the repository, end-to-end tests for the core workflows. Larger projects have a dedicated QA role; on the security products portal, for example, that is one of seven people.
- Dependencies
- Libraries are checked automatically for known vulnerabilities.
Which checks are binding in your project is set out in our proposal.
Communication
One named contact, honest hours
You have a named project lead in Berlin who is also responsible for the work of the partner team in Hanoi, so you never have to deal with two teams. We work with you in German or English.
Hanoi is six hours ahead of Berlin, and five during Central European Summer Time. When the working day starts in Berlin, the partner team in Hanoi is already half a day in. The two teams overlap during the Berlin morning.
We call this an extended working day. A question raised on a Berlin afternoon is usually dealt with by the next morning. We don't work around the clock, and we don't claim to.
Rhythm
- Status meetings with your project lead, at an interval we agree at the start of the project
- Demo at the end of every sprint
- Visibility of progress through a ticketing system we choose together
- Step 1
- Intro call: 30 minutes with Kim Pham or Holger Spickmann. NDA beforehand if you wish.
- Step 2
- Fixed-scope first step: architecture review, AI use-case check or discovery sprint.
- Step 3
- Proposal and contract. Where personal data is involved, this includes a data processing agreement (AVV) and our technical and organisational measures (TOMs).
- Step 4
- Build in sprints, with a demo at the end of every sprint.
- Step 5
- Acceptance and go-live, planned together with your operations team.
- Step 6
- Operations by Senva, or handover to your team.
Handover
What you hold at the end of the project
- Source code, including build and deployment scripts
- Architecture and operations documentation
- All access to repositories, cloud accounts and pipelines
- Test data and test sets
The exact scope of the handover and the usage and ownership rights to the code are set out in the contract. If you wish, the repositories sit in your environment from day one.
Intro call
Test the model against your project
In the intro call we go through which data in your project belongs where. 30 minutes, with a reply within one working day.
- info@senva.de
- Phone
- +49 30 5268 7541
- Address
- Bundesallee 32, 10717 Berlin, Germany