One of the great traditions at TelcoBridges is an annual all-hands meeting at the start of the year, with each of the department heads reflecting on the year past and plans for the year ahead. The software development team shared some of their milestones, which you might find interesting.
COVID significantly changes the way the team work, suddenly forcing a team that was used to working close together in a lab environment, to work from home. The 2019 investment in implementing Microsoft Teams paid off handsomely, allowing the team to continue their work remotely. Remote desktop tools were pressed into service to access shared servers in the lab, allowing work to continue on many product improvements, including:
Open Robocall Detection – enabling external detection systems to provide a risk score on each call, allowing the risk score to be used in routing decisions. Interfaces to the external detection system include an open REST API, SIP 302 REDIRECT, or RADIUS protocols.
1+1 HA Enhancements – at the request of a major customer, significant investments were made in further enhancing and simplifying the high availability performance of the TMG media gateway systems.
Ethernet bonding – allowing fully redundant physical links between systems.
SIP Emergency Calling – allowing service providers to allocate some number of sessions for emergency use only, allowing public service traffic to be completed in high-volume situations.
Custom SIP Header Manipulation – allowing greater control over the fields found in SIP messages, broadening the compatibility for TelcoBridges’ media gateways and SBC products.
Custom CDR formats – allowing custom format call detail records, making integration with billing systems easier.
ENUM support – used by service providers, ENUM encoding is a popular means communicating source and destination telephone numbers.
With new leadership, the team has completely reworked their agile work planning process, giving greater visibility to the progress being made and a voice in prioritization going forward. Additions to the development staff, brought some new skills, expertise, and energy to the team.
Just to make things more interesting, the team had to plan for a move into the new facility just after the New Year. Development servers, test systems, and personal items needed to be boxed up, ready for the move.
Despite the disruptions of COVID and other factors, 2020 was a very good year for TelcoBridges’ development team, with 2021 looking brighter yet!