Development of the Europe's largest restaurant booking system
Keywords: Scrum +XP, sprint management, tour, restaurant, SaaS/SOA products, asp.net, MVC, WCF, Silverlight, Google Maps, 15-person team, UK
Visitors to Shinetech are sometimes surprised to see that we have successfully established tens of separate teams working dedicatedly for clients in Europe and America; most of them consist of 3~9 developers. One of the biggest Shinetech teams managed by Deshui Wang, comprises 15 developers so far, and is providing services for a UK ISV.
Deshui has over 5 years experience in .Net development; under his leadership, the Shinetech team has successfully completed delivery of two products (SaaS, SOA) which have been available for sale. Now, the team is working on the Europe's largest online restaurant booking system.
I have played around with it this morning and find it mega cool - restaurants will love this!
I'm really proud of being part of such a cool team with such a top dollar product."
Client's situation
Livebookings is a UK based online restaurant reservations and marketing company committed to helping restaurants to become more profitable. They have a team of 50 in house developers and outsource the non-core products offshore to reduce the development cost.
At the outset of the collaboration, the client had a development plan for several SaaS products. They decided to start the cooperation on a small scale to evaluate Shinetech team's capability.
Cooperation method
On the client's side, the available roles Include Business Analyst, QA Manager, and a technical expert.
After careful research of client's development schedule, available roles and construction methods, Deshui configured a special Shinetech service delivery model to match the project size and time line.
- Scrum and XP methodologies have been blended together and tailored to fit the client's expectation to Include smoke testing & unit testing, pair programming.
- Deshui assumes the role of project leader and has incorporated lead developers, developers and testers into the team as required over the years.
The client side Business Analyst gathers business requirement, and documents them for the offshore Shintech team. Deshui and lead developers assess requirements and prioritize the top 20% to establish the main software framework. Work products are then allocated and the whole team collaborates at optimizing the solution architecture and constructing modules against user stories / function points.
Quality & efficiency
- Continuous integration, unit testing, iteration prioritization, frequent delivery, defect correction, correction integration; all activities are professionally implemented against service level agreements to maintain agreed quality.
- In accordance with Agile practice, each developer is expected to have a clear understanding of overall system objectives - everyone is involved in requirements discussions; everyone knows the whole project status and the current task board status - everyone is a project quality stakeholder.
- Problems are quickly identified at daily stand-up meetings in which everyone shares “what I did yesterday, what I will do today, what questions I have.”
- All tests are driven by test tasks, but not test roles, this allows quick response to requirements, and earlier defect fixing.
- The successful team culture encourages developers to pick up on any opportunity to share with others the chat records, codes, ideas, issues; thereby ensuring that individual weaknesses are identified early and improvements implemented speedily.
- A variety of ongoing group learning and training opportunities are encouraged as part of the cooperation to continuously improve working standards, spoken and written English and technical capabilities.
Projects completed
Systems below are all SaaS products.
- System for agencies: restaurant search/booking, booking analysis
- System for diners: restaurant search on name/location/discounts, map search, restaurant booking
- System for restaurant owners: base information management, sales promotion management, campaign management, reports management
Benefits for client
The client has realised highly reduced development costs and the expected high quality deliverables supplied on-time.
Our accomplishment
- It is of immense satisfaction that we have learnt as a group to achieve and maintain the client's 100% trust throughout the three years of cooperation.
- As a result our responsibility has changed from development of non-core products to production of the core modules which is the largest product in client's company.
