The worldwide e-commerce landscape is quickly moving and hundreds of new online stores are deployed every day. An online shop owner needs to keep a close eye on his competitors and constantly improve user experience. This usually involves adding new features to an online store, as fast as possible and in a continuous manner.
In E-commerce, software modifications and new features need to be delivered very quickly. To achieve short release cycles, even in the case of last minute changes in requirements, Agile software development has been proven very valuable.
The basic principle of Agile Software Development is to ensure customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software, which is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months), regardless of changing requirements, even in late development.
Agile software development involves:
DevOps
A software development process which is known to emphasize communication and collaboration between involved departments such as product management, software development, and operations. DevOps does also the automation of the process of software integration, testing, deployment and infrastructure changes
Continuous Integration
The practice of merging all developer committed copies to a shared artifact multiple times a day and test it automatically to increase software quality at an early stage
Continuous Delivery
A software engineering method where teams produce software in short cycles, and make sure that the software can be reliably released at any time. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software faster and more frequently. This approach reduces the cost, time, and risk during delivery changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications in production. In continuous delivery new releases are moved from Dev, over to QA and Staging environment. Those releases can then be deployed “at the push of a button” to production. This path from the dev environment to the production server is called a delivery pipeline.
Test Automation
The use of software (other than the software being tested) to process the the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes with the expected outcomes. Using Test automation some repetitive but necessary tests can be conducted, or even additional testing that would be difficult to do manually. Test automation is very important for continuous delivery.
Implementing an agile software development process with the above components allows every online store to quickly introduce new features which are successfully tested.
To introduce successfully agile software development, delivery pipelines and quality management through Manual Testing and Test Automation, planning is crucial and needs to be conducted by an experienced partner such as Comquent.
Wrong design and implementation can cost money and, in the long term, loss of market share for an e-commerce business.
