Horizon Newsletter • June 30, 2022
Amazing Results From the 2022 Summer Jugaad

XBE hosted its first bi-annual Jugaad last week. The event was a friendly internal team-based competition to build the most popular feature release in a single day. You can read more about the purpose of the event (and it's name!) in the pre-event press release.

We split into three teams:

  1. Team Mavericks
  2. The Copy Pasters
  3. The Chachas

All teams had at least one server-side engineer and one client-side engineer. Non-engineering team members were added from other areas of XBE, and there were even some special guest customer team members. There was plenty of work to go around including release note writing, design, server-side programming, client-side programming, testing, cheerleading, trash talking, and tea brewing.

The event began at sunrise in Delhi, India and concluded 25.5 hours later at sunset in Kansas City, MO. All programming had to occur during that window.

Somehow, the teams kept their features secret throughout the process. That made the big reveal even more exciting when the release notes were published at the conclusion:

Feature 1. Tender Rate Match Debugging Tools (aka "Why Doesn't This Rate Match?!") by Team Mavericks

This amazing feature provides a suite of debugging tools that make it much easier to figure out unexpected rating outcomes. The feature was designed to automate answers to the three most common rating-related questions:

  • Why is this rate not matching this tender?
  • Why was this rate not applied on this tender even though it's matching?
  • Which tenders does this rate match?

This is one of those features that you'll either never know about, or wonder how you lived without.

Amazing work by Milind Alvares, Benjamin Fleischer, Colenso Castellino, Matt Lerner, and Katie Austin.

Feature 2. Driver Incident Requests by The Copy Pasters

This long-time-coming feature enables drivers to initiate the incident creation process for their shift. For example, imagine that a driver broke down and is waiting for a tow truck to fix a blown tire. Instead of calling or txting to describe the problem, the driver can now create an incident request that will communicate the same information and also be convertible into an incident.

Fantastic team effort by Juliana Thayil, Shirish Parsekar, Chandramohan Naik, Kayla Devine, and Grant Wollenhaupt.

Feature 3. Rachel, Your Multi-Plan Editing Assistant by The Chachas

Sometimes, planners need to make the same edit to multiple plans at once. This has always been true, but is now more common since most XBE customers manage some portion of their backlog in the platform. Supported change types include job number, planner, material site, material type, status, or cost code. This feature takes care of tricky bulk edits accurately, quickly, and safely. It can preview changes, is built to perform well on large operations, and performs change sets as transactions (either all changes are successfully made, or none are made).

The feature was inspired by Rachel Sullivan from Gallagher Asphalt (a special guest team member) who had plenty of first hand experience with the manual approach to solving this problem.

Great job by Sean Devine, Hassan Shaikh, Pankaj Kataria (in spirit - it was his wedding week!), Jessica Paes, and Rachel Sullivan.


The Summer 2022 Jugaad stuffed an absurd amount of work into 1 day. The teams deployed 8,000 lines of code across the client and server. Release notes were drafted before programming started and were published by the time sun set. Work was frantic and focused and around-the-clock.

It was so fun! While similar to the work that XBE does every day, the different team structure, time constraints, competition, and vibe was a welcome break. Plus, it was incredibly rewarding to see what we're capable of in such a short period given the talents of our team and our solid infrastructure.

The next Jugaad will be in 6 months in Goa, India. We'll be rested and ready! If any member of the community is interested in getting involved, let us know! The more participation, the better.