COVER STORY
was ready. It is better to deliver small chunks more easily, which in turn gives us an increased ability to be more responsive to the market,” he added. “It means we can get out there with new offers or functionality within hours now, as opposed to weeks or months.” From starting its development engagement early
transformation that drove speed to market. So I was comfortable that we shared the same vision and that they had the right leading-ledge tech skills we were looking for at Lastminute.” Reflecting on his remit, which perhaps unusually
gives him a view across both of the business and IT strategies, Crosby said that engaging software development firm Thoughtworks (as seen in the picture above) also offered another opportunity. “Given that I am also responsible for products,” he said, “I saw a great opportunity to also combine the work on the new mobile platform with changes to how we introduced new products into the business.” Lastminute wanted to increase the speed at which
it was able to iteratively develop and launch new products into the business. So Thoughtworks was engaged to build out the new mobile technology platform using Agile software development methodologies. But it was also tasked with helping to initiate more lean product development practices. In the initial planning and requirements analysis
phase, the software company initially worked with key Lastminute business and IT stakeholders to build a development roadmap and conduct a technology evaluation, which helped define the feasibility stage of the project. “This was key to making certain we were releasing value on the project early and constantly,” Crosby said. He also said it was important that the project
was quick to start delivering on its promise so that, “stakeholders could see that they were going to get results from it quickly”. “Key deliverables were putting in the content delivery pipeline in place, from developing the code, building it into the app, testing, staging and then to going live, which all had to be automated,” he continued. “The ethos was that every bit of work should go live to the end customer as soon as possible and it
12 Spring/Summer 2014
in 2012, Crosby said a true joint effort between the Lastminute and Thoughtworks teams saw the first code dropped into production by May of that year, whole the fully functioning mobile platform was live by October 2012. “It was out there with customers by August,” he said. “But we’d met all of the goals we set to achieve by October and were gaining value from the elements we’d rolled out early in the meantime.” The company’s legacy technology platforms also
had a role to play in the rapid development of its brand new mobile platform. “While the front end was a true greenfield build, we wanted to specify a high level of guidance on the use of Java, which allowed us to re-use some aspects of our existing technology investments,” Crosby explained. The technologies Lastminute and Thoughtworks
used in developing the new mobile platform included the open source web application framework Grails, the object-oriented Java programming language Groovy and HTML5 web markup and CSS style sheet languages. They also used open source configuration
management utility Puppet and the behaviour- driven development JavaScript code testing framework Jasmine, as well as the open source Java- based integration tool Jenkins and the Apache Maven software project management tool. The ongoing work with Thoughtworks to speed
the roll out of new developments to both its front and back-end technology platforms now means that Lastminute can act quickly to respond to any trend that may emerge. “We noticed, for example, that a lot of people in London would look for nearby hotels in the late afternoon,” said Crosby. “We already had the ability to serve up which
hotels a customer sees based on their location, so they would see rates for the Ritz if they were standing, browsing for a hotel for the night outside of Green Park tube station, which is near to the Ritz, for instance. “But we realised that, if you’re searching for a
hotel room for that night late in the afternoon, you’re unlikely to want to book the most expensive one if you’re only going to be there long enough to sleep,” continued Crosby. “So we decided to find a way to
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