omio.com Ruby on Rails mobile comparison site

Who? What?

ThoughtWorks were engaged to help TrafficBroker, an online marketing organisation, build an ambitious mobile phone comparison website in just 50 working days. The site, omio.com went live, on schedule, in November 2007 to take advantage of the surge in mobile phone demand pre Christmas.

Why?

TrafficBrokers' strategic projects group identified a gap in the market for a mobile site which was user-centric and could very accurately direct qualified traffic to merchants. With their background in search marketing and ability to generate vast volumes of traffic, TrafficBroker were confident in the concept but needed help with the technical challenges it posed. A multidisciplinary team from ThoughtWorks was engaged to devise, build and test a core site, working with the TrafficBroker in-house team.

How?

ThoughtWorks and TrafficBroker worked together to define the core functionality using agile analysis techniques including visualisation, personas, scenarios and stories. A model of expected team capacity and probability of outcome drove negotiations on scope verses risk which were critical to success in such as short project. Coding began with only 50 days to go live.

Within four weeks a basic site had been deployed to what would become the production environment, with 100 people accessing and testing it.

Feeds from vendors are a critical part of the site and the design of the feed handlers was created through refactoring and emergent design. The site also had to handle a large load and this was tested from an early stage on the skeleton deployment using ThoughtWorks QA expertise. The single threaded nature of the Rails libraries drove a horizontally scalable, stateless, architecture. Iteration Management plays a key part in the success of Agile projects and particularly so in this project where scope was reviewed weekly. Even on such a short project scope changes were necessary and possible using ThoughtWorks iteration management techniques.

The Results?

See the live site at omio.com

The system collates the huge amount of data from online mobile phone merchants into a single, simple user-interface. Intuitive Ajax controls enable the user to see real-time the results of their selected criteria - narrowing down the options with multiple 'sliders' and menus from over ten thousand to 1 in moments.

• Live, revenue-generating web 2.0 application in 50 days
• Flexible, scalable Ruby on Rails platform
• Incredibly low defect rate
• 120% of agreed functionality delivered by project deadline*
• In-house team enabled to support and develop the site
• Successful knowledge transfer and take up-of Agile and Lean practices.

"I've been bowled over by the success of ThoughtWorks' approach - incredibly simple, incredibly effective." Neil Hutchinson, Founder, TrafficBroker

*based on agreed story points in scope

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