NexLab: Our Innovation Laboratory
You are probably familiar with the concept of a community of practice-groups of individuals who interact regularly to share common concerns, build expertise, and develop new knowledge.
A software development community of practice had been in place at Nexus for some time, but the team faced several challenges, including the number of concurrent participants, lengthy theoretical discussions that rarely led to decisions, and the limited success of the initiative.
Our software engineering team decided to revisit the concept and create NexLab.
NexLab is the brainchild of Alexandre Paolitto and Alexandre Tardif, Solution Architect and Tech Leader at Nexus Innovations. It is an activity in which our experts participate in part-time research projects with the aim of experimenting with everything related to new technologies and software development. The goal is to add value and enable continuous improvement through the results obtained.
In the NexLab, we follow a somewhat scientific approach with basic requirements in our research projects:
- We outline a research plan that specifies the scope of the research and the hypothesis, defining what is beyond the scope of the research.
- We explain how we plan to validate the hypothesis and under what circumstances the results hold or do not hold. We also detail how the research findings can concretely contribute to changing practices at Nexus (and beyond!).
As knowledge sharing is in our DNA at Nexus, it is important to disseminate the knowledge gained from NexLab research. Therefore, we are pleased to share the results of our experts' research through blog articles and by making all code repositories open source under the MIT license.
Stay tuned!