Case of Marketplace Development for Industrial Equipment
Hi all, we are the OSSystems team! Are you planning to become a development expert?
If yes, then at the very least you need to have a few successful projects under your belt.?And since we all are growing and improving in order to one day appear on the IT Olympus, today we want to slightly lift the veil of our way, share our experience and tell you about our successful development case, the challenges we faced and methods of solving them.
Here we go!
About the Customer
Our client is the representative of a trading platform for medium-sized businesses, a platform (aggregator / marketplace) for the sale of technology and related services, where every user (individuals and legal entities) can place an ad for the sale of technology or services.
The client came to OSSystem on the recommendation of friends (the wonders of word-of-mouth and previous fruitful work) with a desire to get a modern marketplace for launching their business.?
The client did not work well with the previous development teams.?
The large number of uncorrected bugs and the breakup of the previous team, as well as the threat of choosing a sub-optimal technology, architecture or team, prompted the client to look for other specialists.?
Our customer had concerns that the project could be derailed, as with his previous team, so there were high demands on the reports to monitor.?
That is, the key to making the decision in our favor was the availability of appropriate knowledge and experience, a clearly established development process.
Who made the decision to cooperate??
On the client side, the decisions were made by the owner and the project manager, on our side by the CEO
About the Project
So, the stage of negotiations, discussions, agreements, which took us six weeks, is over, which means that the project development stage has started.?
The team was tasked with developing a web application from scratch, namely to develop the frontend and backend parts of the application.
For this purpose, we divided the project into such stages:
1. Clarification of the order of interaction and requirements
2. Laying out the architecture
3. design study, planning of the first sprints
4. Design by sprints
5. Deployment on the Customer's servers
The design was developed on the Customer's side, but in spite of this we worked closely with the best practices we know. Since from the very beginning we noticed that there were no design-guidelines.
Given the scale of the project, integration and functional testing was carried out. The basic components of the Base web design system were used to optimize speed.
We prepared a good technical task, in connection with which the project had a clear structure of tasks and subtasks.Weekly demos allowed the client to clearly see the result and to try with their own hands, to make timely adjustments in the process of building the system.
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Difficulties we encountered
Rarely does a project come without challenges.
The success of a project depends not on how many obstacles you encounter, but on their successful overcoming and the team's ability to see in these obstacles new opportunities to meet client needs and their personal development as professionals.
Our "difficulty" on this project was the initial lack of design-guidelines, which led to deviations from the Base web system, until we asked the client-side designer to standardize the components.
During development, the designer did not always display the actual state of the screen, which took extra time to discuss differences in application logic.
Our challenges didn't stop there. The client-side code reviewer broke his leg (we're all human, aren't we?), which caused pauses in decision-making, until we were given carte blanche to do the review ourselves.
We also had to urgently do the Admin Office, as it was budgeted for the remaining amount.
To solve these problems, we relied on best practices, held additional talks with the designer. Requested permission for an independent review and assembled the admin panel, taking into account the most critical functionality - in particular, moderation.
Result and Delivered Value
Thanks to a clearly structured development process and the well-coordinated work of the Scrum team, a full-fledged client web application was built that took into account the three levels of nesting of directories for selling and buying goods and services. It implemented a system of filters depending on which level of the catalog the user was on. The user's web account also allowed for uploading images and video files for advertising.
What we were able to achieve was the transparency of the development, by getting all the necessary reports on the time spent. The transparency of reports allowed us to save time on unnecessary clarifications. The client had access to our redmine, and anyone on the client side could see who was doing what and how much. Bugs that were detected were presented to the customer in a clear form with the ability to set the priority, which increased the productivity of the team as a whole.
As a result, we were able to solve such problems of the client:
1. Closed tasks grouped and the time spent on them by employees
2. Current open tasks and time spent on them, grouped by employees (including the time on Permanent tasks - testing, general issues and project management)
3. Tasks that were transferred to the requester pool within a given period
4. The indefinite tasks in the "Permanent" status for a given period
And also to create an optimal admin panel for the marketplace in a short period of time.?
At the finish line we got a well tested product that meets the requirements of the client, written using modern frameworks, which allows for flexible changes to the product, if necessary, and also distinguishes it from the mass of major competitors' products.
This means that we have achieved an increase in the competitiveness of our client.
At the moment the client is considering building a new marketplace for the Arab Emirates market on the basis of the created one.
Conclusion
The story of our case, like the story of every case, is a "before/after" story. We are sure that for our client "after" is a development of his business, new interesting orders and customers.?
And for us, “after” is another story of cooperation included in the treasury of our experience, which brought us an interesting project, new acquaintances and improvement of ourselves as specialists.
OSSystems team