Provided services
Product Development, Backend Development, Test Automation Services, Manual Testing Services, Early-Stage Innovation, R&D Services, Software Integration Services
Client
Established international full-service provider of premium IT solutions and services, specializing in software and application development, infrastructure management, and information security.
Product
A platform that searches for popular sites with client reviews of hotels, such as booking.com, expedia, hotels.com, tripadvisor, zoover.de, hrs.com, and others, as well as for comments in the social networks Facebook and Twitter.
The system is integrated into a SaaS solution that enables hotel owners to manage their brand presence on Social Media.
Challenge
A very dynamic startup team needed reinforcement. There were quite a lot of unpredictable tasks and a lot of R&D tasks. The existing team already consisted of top-tier engineers. Our main target was to strengthen the existing team with our engineers and maintain the same level of innovation, and fully keep up with the engineering pace. Under these conditions, it was crucial to minimize the time management spent on the new team, ensure the team was self-organized and seamlessly integrated into the core team, and that all deliveries were made consistently.
The main challenge was to fit our team into the client’s team as harmoniously as possible and to take responsibility for research and development.
Solution
The initial focus was on establishing best engineering practices and processes.
At the very beginning, we introduced the Scrum approach to the project. Agile processes were clearly defined, and their execution was strictly monitored. In parallel with it, we focused on technical implementation.
For this purpose, we implemented search robots (crawlers). Reviews’ texts are analyzed with the help of a neural network (we applied the Apache OpenNLP project) from different perspectives: negative or positive, comments about Wi-Fi, garage, or room service, and so on.
The system composes a hotel’s rating on the basis of the obtained information and allows the owners to review feedback collected from various sources and compare the ratings.
Additionally, JazzTeam introduced QA Automation. We implemented an automated UI testing using WebDriver and created an architectural framework for auto tests using the Page Object pattern.
Also, it was decided to let JazzTeam engineers work on the client side (in Germany) to establish better communication and speed up the entire development process. All these helped our client to come up with new ideas for service quality improvements.
Testimonial
"JazzTeam participated in an innovative project I was supervising.
A team showed a high professional level in a matter of architectural design, Agile processes, unit testing, and involvement in the project.
You can trust JazzTeam’s engineers, rely on them, and can expect high quality provided by Java experts."
Result
Information gathering was implemented for more than 25 sites with client reviews of hotels.
The project team developed many architectural improvements for the crawlers’ implementation, such as data gathering on different language versions of a site. A system for regressive crawlers testing was implemented, which uses the data collected by the crawlers.
UI was covered by autotests, including the design of the test framework from scratch.
The client was completely satisfied with the results of all the iterations our team was involved in
Technologies
Java, IceFaces, Vaadin, MongoDB, Twitter/Facebook API, Spring (IoC, AoP, Batch), JUnit, Mockito, Apache Tomcat, Eclipse, Git, Maven, Ant, Gerrit (system for code review), Jenkins, Nexus, Apache OpenNLP, shell scripts, Web Driver (UI-tests), Quartz, RegExp.
