A project support and constant improvisation is always a delicate job. You have to keep in mind existing features mustn’t get affected by the continuous changes. Most of the cases the new features remain tied to the existing system functionalities and you have to do automation testing, black-box testing and smoke testing each time a related area changes.
This the the story was no different, but the requirement was sudden, from government regulatory organization amidst of few feature enhancements which was in progress. Our excellent software design and development team handled the situation with proper planning and did able to pass the TFL compliance and here is how we did it.
The Client
The client was one of the top chauffeur company in London.
The Requirement
The requirement was to make the system adaptable for TFL(Transport for London) . TFL wanted all information stored in the system displayed in totally new way for their new compliance update, some of which involves -
- Keeping very detailed tab on the document management, which includes records for bookings, complaints and lost property, as well as driver and vehicle records.
- Detailed information to passengers of a booking
- Based on the operating model, custom compliance requirements
- Making the process of uploading driver and vehicle details to TFL easy
- Other few but detailed data related requirements for a journey/job.
Source - TFL website
The Challenge
The challenge is not about fetching the same data and display in lot nicer way. It means we have to do a lot of changes in the system in a small time window to ensure —
- Changing existing data visualization parameters and information doesn't create steep learning curve for the client.
- The high profile clients of our client find the new experiences adaptable and good.
- Ensuring the day to day work doesn’t get affected for the changes while deploying to the live environment.
The Plan
We started with the ideas for the above mentioned challenges.
- Listed out the areas database change is required.
- Listed out the areas of impact.
- Creating new environments for development and testing for this change.
- Writing the change scripts properly and also testing the scripts in another DB testing instance.
- Discussing the requirement and challenges with the UX/UI and development team more than once to ensure everybody is in the same page.
The execution
The the advantage we have was the team working on the project knew the system in and out as we are working with the client over 1.5 years. The client was very helpful, all the associates took part in the discussions as required and the expectations, strategy was made clear.
Sorting the designs
As many interfaces was about to change due to the compliance requirement and the branding upliftment, our design team set to work. As at Appradius the designers and developers works together, the design team had good understanding of how things work. As time and quality both mattered a lot, our designers approached to the problems keeping following things in mind -
- New design should be simple, reflect to their current brand guideline, can be executed in small time frame.
- How with minimum changes in the existing system components the facelifting can be done by the front-end engineers.
Preparing the system environments
Our development team started preparing the environments for this sensitive update. Apart from the current dev and test environment, another instance of dev and test environment has been created for this update. Also in the code repository we decided how we should commit the changes.
Development and quality analysis
To ensure the proper delivery of the project the milestones has been prepared keeping objectives in mind. We designed the milestones in agile software development methodology rather than a waterfall model so that keep can always keep up to the deliverables and in parallel work can be done for multiple modules.
The quality analysis team wrote the basic test cases to ensure test coverage and quality. The bugs has been reported and resolved keeping in mind the tight deadline.
The delivery
The milestone wise deployment kept happening in the test server and once our quality team gave a green flag we sat with the client to loop them in with the progress. Before a week of the TFL compliance we did able to pull the whole thing off and made the website live during non business hours from staging environment.
The ultimate satisfaction
- The client got applause from TFL officers too for pulling this off in this quick time.
- The client was satisfied and started working on the marketing planning with the new brand elements
- The Appradius team with client started collecting feedbacks and started making out the plans for the next phase.