What It’s Like to Work in Engineering at Accuris

When it comes to guiding supply chains, launching rockets into space or building medical devices, finding the answers to complex questions quickly is critical — which is why companies turn to software made by Accuris. 

Accuris is a software and generative AI company that builds tools to help engineering teams communicate, navigate complex data and workflows, and adhere to their industry-specific compliance requirements. So, it comes as no surprise that the engineering team culture at Accuris revolves around communication, too.   

Ying Zhu, the director of agile delivery management, sees the engineering team’s daily scrum as a key element of the engineering culture at Accuris.

“Even in the advent of fast-paced, AI-driven product development, software engineering still carries a human element,” Zhu said. 

To that end, her team uses the daily scrum to maintain accountability, identify blockers and decide what conversations need to be had to move a project forward. 

When Zhu’s team does use AI, it’s to optimize the tedious, administrative portions of engineers’ jobs, such as ensuring work-item hygiene.

“We rely on Claude (Cowork) to surface gaps and problems in work item organization, thereby freeing up significant time for us to be more attentive to delivery risk,” she explained.

Read our interview with Zhu to learn more about how Accuris engineers help steer the product roadmap, choose and evolve the tech stack and shape company culture. 

What an Agile Delivery Manager Does at Accuris

I lead a team of agile delivery managers — hybrid scrum master and delivery managers — based across the world (APAC, EMEA, Americas). We support the product and development scrum teams in the Engineering Solutions business at Accuris. As agile delivery managers, not only are we charged with supporting teams in operating within a Scrum framework, but we are also charged with protecting deliveries by doing the work of identifying and mitigating risks, illuminating and sequencing dependencies and addressing any emerging gaps that could put deliveries at risk.

How Engineers Influence the Product Roadmap at Accuris

The creation of a quarterly roadmap is always a dialogue and conversation between product and engineering. While the product team owns the vision for what should be built, the engineering team brings the technical expertise needed to determine how it can be built. So, as we plan for deliverables on a quarterly basis, the foundation of the planning is the negotiation between priorities and engineering capacity and also a negotiation between vision and technical feasibility.

How Accuris Teams Balance Speed and Quality in Product Development

In product development, speed and quality often exist in tension, whereby speed can signal a sacrifice in quality and vice versa. However, AI-driven software development can reduce the need to choose between speed and quality. At Accuris, I am working with engineers orchestrating AI scrum teams, as informed and supported by a strong architecture foundation. As such, I am witnessing deliveries made at an exceptionally fast pace without sacrifice for quality. This in turn also changes how delivery managers support scrum teams. This can mean a shift towards feature-driven development, where teams are developing and delivering multiple features in a sprint instead of multiple user stories, which in turn changes the tenor and dynamic of the conversations unfolding in our scrum ceremonies, as well as how we plan at the sprint and program-increment levels.

How Daily Scrums Support Communication at Accuris

Even in the advent of fast-paced, AI-driven product development, software engineering still carries a human element. As such, dynamic and high-quality communication continues to serve as an epicenter of successful software development. As such, I see the daily scrum as a persistently important part of our daily actions and practice in the realm of software engineering. I see this very short ceremony as not only an opportunity to maintain accountability, but more importantly, an opportunity for me to ascertain the necessary conversations that need to be had. What are the blockers the team is suggesting, but not explicitly articulating? Who is struggling and needs a little push to seek help? 

How Accuris Uses AI to Improve Engineering Delivery

Artificial intelligence has not only reimagined how product managers and software engineers conduct their work, but it has also altered the landscape of scrum master and delivery management work. My team has adopted Claude Cowork to optimize the tedious, administrative portions of our jobs such as ensuring work item hygiene. We rely on Claude to surface gaps and problems in work item organization, thereby freeing up significant time for us to be more attentive to delivery risk. 

“Artificial intelligence has not only reimagined how product managers and software engineers conduct their work, but it has also altered the landscape of scrum master and delivery management work.”

We harness the power of Claude Cowork, hooked up to an Azure DevOps Model Context Protocol server, which connects the AI tool to development data and workflows, to help us maintain team performance metrics and capacity metrics so we can successfully plan quarterly program increments. We can now help with work item decomposition, alleviating some of the product and engineering burden, by harnessing Claude to create workable drafts of user stories or even features with the aid of AI. 

AI has reclaimed time that the scrum master and delivery management team previously devoted to manual project administration.

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