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How BookingLive Builds Products
In this article, CEO Vinnie Morgan explains how we build products.
At BookingLive we are experienced in scaling a product building team. By sharing the development processes for our evolving booking software, our clients can understand how we strive for discipline and other software companies will have the opportunity to learn & improve on how they build.
Why Agile?
Firstly, all software has bugs, and whilst BookingLive strive for the best possible standards, no software developers can 100% avoid bugs.
Agile is a structured and iterative approach to product development which is why it is commonly used by software developers. Agile also gives flexibility in how to respond to change as opposed to the traditional waterfall method. Requirements (new features or software bugs) are prioritised based on importance. At BookingLive, we prioritise requirements based on:
- How severe is the bug / how beneficial is the new feature?
How many customers does it affect?
Nothing prevents bugs more efficiently than automated testing and continuous integration. BookingLive’s development team follow a disciplined software development structure which allows for better roadmap planning and an avoidance of technical debt. Working with a number of tools including JIRA, GIT and Codeception, this structure has allowed us to:
- Continuously develop new features
- Release well timed and tested software
- Implement an automated test framework
Scrum
Scrum is the most popular framework for implementing agile. By following Scrum, our booking software is built in a series of iterations called sprints. Each sprint has a set structure:
- Sprint planning: A team planning meeting that determines what to complete in the coming sprint.
- Daily stand-up: Also known as a daily scrum, a 15-minute mini-meeting for the software team to sync.
- Sprint demo: A sharing meeting where the team shows what they’ve shipped in that sprint.
- Sprint retrospective: A review of what did and didn’t go well with actions to make the next sprint better.
A changelog is a record of all notable changes made to a project, specifically new features and bug fixes. BookingLive are proud to share our changelog for all major releases.
Product Roadmap vs. Product Backlog
BookingLive always has demand to build more features. This forces our product team to make strategic decisions on what to build and what not to build, based on both available resources and priority of the feature. The product roadmap and the product backlog are two important methods to achieve this.
Product Roadmap
Our product roadmap is a living document for how our booking software will evolve over time. It is a strategy that shows how the product will grow across several future releases. Our roadmap is planned ahead 3 – 6 months at all times. Our selection criteria is a careful balance of:
- Most Common Requests to solve customer problems that meet their needs
- New Ideas to become a disruptive force and add value as a market leader
Product Backlog
As our product roadmap evolves with new items, we also keep a product backlog of everything else. These are periodically reviewed and re-estimated to ensure that we develop BookingLive as efficiently as possible.
Do you want to work in tech and join our team? Check out available positions and apply today. We’d love to hear from you.
