Online payment solution

 

2006-2007 For a leading online payment provider (German bank) we play a major role in the development and implementation of a new, full featured internet payment product. Within an extremely short time frame we have to develop this innovative product. The time to market plays a cruisal role for the business value of the project.

In a development team of 8 to 12 persons, we sucessfully go live in 4.5 months after starting the project from scratch, developing a complete new system and software architecture.

On the develepment process site we introduce:

• agile development practices
• automatic software builds
• fully automatic testing
  • from unit
  • through integration
  • to acceptance level

A comprehensive set of tools (most of them on open source base) support the development team to fullfill their tasks. Its performance increases on daily base, while improving the product quality and continously spreading the knowhow among the team members (cross functional teams).

We design an entirely new system architecture. It allows lounching of new releases without any impact for the customer (he works further with the older version and notices the changes after a re-login). A linear scalability also has to be concidered from the beginning. It must be ensured that the global usage increase of the application can be handled by just adding new hardware to the existing clusters while the initial hardware and license costs stay on an acceptable level.

A completely new software architecture is needed as well. Besides the common high guarantee that comes along with an application that handles financial transactions, additional 3rd party non transactional systems must be seemlessly integrated into the base trasactional system. The system must also act as a single accounting repository for a couple of other services. The integration effort must be kept on a very low level.

In total, 23 new frameworks and tools are being introduced and used by the team during its fast development iterations.

At the end of the first phase of the project the developed software and system architecture is declared as a reference platform for all enterprise developments whithin the company. The agile development process becomes a corporate standard and mandatory for all other development teams.