Setting new standards for collaborative offshore Agile development, ThoughtWorks helped the UK’s leading independent retailer of online train tickets – thetrainline.com – rebuild its core processing and website platform. In what has now become one of the largest known Agile projects, a distributed team of approximately 200 people delivered a Web 2.0 solution supporting millions of registered users, with speed that was fundamental to thetrainline.com’s success in a rapidly evolving market.

thetrainline.com was established in 1997 and is the UK’s leading independent retailer of train tickets online. Since its inception, thetrainline.com has made millions of transactions and the company’s websites and call-centers account for the sale of approximately 18% of the UK’s train tickets in terms of value.

In addition to its own website it operates retail websites for a number of Train Operating Companies which sell rail tickets online, as well as providing a rail business travel service direct to a number of blue chip corporations and travel agents.

The situation

During its first 8 years in the market, thetrainline.com enjoyed a first mover advantage and expanded significantly, acquiring its main online competitor Qjump in February 2004. thetrainline.com developed a powerful range of ticketing systems, which includes a core customer management and booking engine, a range of ticket collection kiosks and printers for corporate customers.

It introduced many innovative product and service ideas including ticketing at home and on mobile phones. The recent acquisition of Advanced Smartcard Technologies and ECEBS Ltd signaled its desire to drive the adoption of the smartcard technology throughout the travel industry.

In a highly competitive environment, thetrainline.com also felt the need to take advantage of new market opportunities and system operational cost savings for which a whole new platform was required.

The new platform was designed for low maintenance costs, short delivery time of new features and opportunities for significantly consolidating the hardware platform with the services.

“We undertook a complex, technically challenging and business critical program of work with ThoughtWorks. We trusted them with the success of our future business and they delivered.”

David Jack – CIO, thetrainline.com

The challenge

The challenge thetrainline.com faced at the beginning of the year, was the need to move away from a huge monolithic system and legacy codebase to enable it to deliver value to their customers in much shorter timescales, with reduced cost and increased scale.

The key challenges included:

• Scaling a team from 50 people to approximately 200 people.
  

• Fundamentally re-architecting a huge legacy code-base that had been developed over many years, to enable running multiple tracks of development at the same time.
  

• Keeping key business customers happy while the new platform was developed.
  

Working towards a solution

ThoughtWorks’ approach to the challenge ahead lay in a phased architectural re-factoring approach. The system evolved over a period of time, in a way that ensured maximum productivity and scalability.

• The first step was to build a shared understanding of the problem and required solution. Interactive exercises, discussions and quick prototype development fed into the project roadmap, identifying areas of technical risk and developing mitigation plans.
  

• A well-defined governance model, clearly identifying sponsors and owners on either side enabled collaborative decision-making and prioritization by key stakeholders.
  

• Dedicated video-conferencing, use of WebEx and Instant Messenger and regular visits by ThoughtWorks and thetrainline.com staff between Bangalore, Pune and the UK ensured open and frequent communication.
  

• Production environments were simulated to enable real-time integration and testing of software modules under development. Virtualization was used extensively, while hosting the application and development infrastructure on close to 300 servers.
  

• Software build and deployment processes were automated so that the team could manage several versions of the software efficiently.
  

• An automated regression test framework created a safeguard around the software, rapidly identifying faults and ensuring the highest levels of quality across the application. This also allowed the application to scale rapidly and handle massive increases in traffic.
  

• Software development was completed in small iterations, tackling the most important, high risk or troublesome areas first. Every two weeks, functionality was “showcased” to the customer to review and re-prioritize work for the next iteration.
  

• ThoughtWorks also planned for six-week “Release” cycles, each cycle comprising three iterations, until production.
  

Client benefits

• Quality at speed: ThoughtWorks produced a production-ready, live, scalable and functionally rich application in less than nine months. At the same time, ThoughtWorks continued to deliver and deploy new features and functionality every six weeks into production.
  

• Shorter, simpler booking process: Users now have to navigate fewer pages to make a booking, saving valuable time. The average visit to the site now contains 46% less page views than the old site, and the average duration to make a purchase is around 60% of the time previously required.
  

• Supporting innovation: ThoughtWorks architected and developed a proprietary portal platform enabling the rapid roll out of multiple customer portals with significantly improved functional brand and product differences.
  

• Safe: The application now has a full set of automated tests, which ensure that the highest levels of quality are maintained, and allows new features to be added rapidly without breaking the production system.
  

• Total collaboration: Despite the distance, thetrainline.com and ThoughtWorks worked in a highly collaborative way, building close relationships and understanding, setting new standards for offshore software development teams.
  

“thetrainline.com has extensive offshore software development experience with a number of different vendors. If you have a business critical, technically complex development project you want to offshore, in my view, ThoughtWorks is the safest option. They are redefining offshore software development and I wholeheartedly endorse their approach.”

Rob Parkinson – IT Director, thetrainline.com

The future:

thetrainline.com had a business critical, technically complex problem that was threatening to restrain them in a highly competitive market. After working with ThoughtWorks, thetrainline.com now has a stable, scalable system that provides the rich user functionality it wanted to offer.

Nine of the Train Operating Companies’ portals powered by thetrainline.com are live on the new system. Roll out to the other Train Operating Companies is continuing. In addition, the platform will be extended to portals for businesses, travel management companies and call centers.

thetrainline.com is well on track to be able to decommission its existing platform, and so make cost savings as well as go after new business opportunities. More importantly, it now has a platform which can underpin the constant innovation that thetrainline.com is committed to deliver to its current and future customers.