A focus on Quality & Stability

Posted by Wes Hooper on 23rd March 2010 in Features

The past 6 months have been a busy time at Moobiz HQ!

We moved the hosting of Moobiz to Rackspace to ensure we're somewhere safe, secure and scalable. Then we worked through way too much paperwork (real paper!) to get Moobiz Ltd. all shiny and legal.

There have also been one or two changes to your Moobiz account you may have noticed. We've been moving things around and, more often than anyone would like, breaking things occasionally too. We're sorry about that. This blog post explains why there has been so much disruption and, even better, why your Moobiz account should be much more stable from here on.

But first...

A brief history

Moobiz started life as software we built to run our web design business and we used it every day, slowly improving it over time. Sometimes we'd break things, but it didn't matter - because we used it daily, we spotted problems quickly, and because we built it, we fixed them quickly too.

Quickly enough for us.

We knew when we decided to launch Moobiz as a self-service web application, we'd soon reach a point that wouldn't be good enough. There'd be a point when a problem would affect too many of you while we fixed it.

We've reached that point

We knew it was coming, so we took the decision to deal with a few things that would only get harder & more painful the longer we left them. In a short space of time we re-designed the whole interface & re-worked a lot of the business / project management functionality.

Our re-working of Credit Notes and Remittances (due to go live within the next day or so - blog posts to follow) is the last such change we needed to do.

While we have a (crazy!) list of ideas for Moobiz, they're now all either new features, improvements to existing ones, or better ways of displaying information.

Thanks for the feedback

We couldn't have done it without you! For example, re-working Cost Proposals in particular meant a lot of changes over quite a few weeks and involved some great suggestions and feedback. Thanks to Annette, Jeff and Gordon.

Smarter communication

During this time, we also realised the need to better communicate the changes we've made. This blog is now updated with a quick summary of changes every time we push a new version of Moobiz live.

New features or important updates which affect using your account get their own more detailed blog post & these are also displayed on your dashboard.

We've also made it easier for you to communicate with us. We re-built our support ticket system (all tickets are responded to by our developers!) and made updates to your account automatic.

What's next?

We'll be using the remainder of this week to put live and keep a close eye on the Credit Note and Remittance updates, along with letting our new Billing & Account management systems settle down. After that, we're switching to a new way of working with a focus on Quality and Stability.

Currently, all our developers work on a mixture of bug fixes, new features and support tickets. We're changing that to have 2 dedicated teams - one for support & bugs, one for new feature development.

Stability

Instead of working on several new features simultaneously, we'll now be concentrating either on a single new feature or a group of improvements to a specific area of Moobiz together as a whole.

We'll then try it out on our new Testing server (more below) & hopefully reduce the impact of an update.

Quality

To ensure we're constantly improving the quality of Moobiz, we'll always have a developer dedicated to fixing bugs, running through checklists, testing & deploying Moobiz updates, responding to support tickets & monitoring error logs.

By concentrating on these related areas as a whole, bugs not only get fixed but any side effects are spotted more easily, are likely better understood and can be dealt with quicker.

Dedicated Moobiz test server

We're in the process of setting up an additional server for testing Moobiz updates as close to our live environment as possible. The test server uses identical hardware & software to that powering live Moobiz accounts and is on the same network in the Rackspace data-center.

To start with, this'll allow us to better test any updates manually with the aim of reducing surprises when we push the new version live.

Long term, we're aiming to catch problems sooner with the server running automated tests continuously against changes as completed by our development team.

This will mean most changes to Moobiz have to pass through 3 stages (Development, Testing, Staging) before a Live deployment.

Going distributed

Lastly, on an even techier note, we'll be moving to a "distributed code versioning system" to better manage the changes we make to Moobiz. We've not decided on the details just yet (SVN to either Git or Mercurial!) but are looking forward to the time it should save us with code reviews & merging.

Comments are open

If you've got any questions, comments are open (but moderated so not immediate) or feel free to create a support ticket.