From business idea to ready-for-release product
Auction software and marketplace of events
How the Wise team offered a roadmap for the MVP development and repurposed old legacy code to match new business requirements.
Industry
Location
Time frame
Project Scope
The client had an idea of how to turn the acquired legacy code into a new business and delegated the Wise team its MVP development. After six months, Granted has become a live marketplace where you can buy tickets for concerts or sports events at a fixed price, bid for items owned by celebrities taking part in the auctions, and more.
The project continues to grow and its tech support is now fully entrusted to the WE team.
Technology stack
Web Development: Python/Django, React/Next.js, GraphQL, PHP, MySQL
DevOps: AWS, Kubernetes, Jenkins
AWS: AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service, AWS RDS Aurora cluster, S3 bucket, Lambda, API Gateway, Auto Scaling, ElastiCache, CloudWatch, IAM, Certificate Manager, ALB, Route53
Service line
Dedicated development team
Technology consulting
Website wireframing
End-to-end solution development
DevOps support
Quality Assurance
Background
People get bored fast and always look for exclusive entertainment opportunities. Visiting concerts of your favorite group is fun but rarely turns into a lifetime memory. Having lunch with a person you admire, on the contrary, is something you’d never forget.
This is the key idea behind Granted — a marketplace of exclusive entertainment experiences and auction software for fans that at this step existed only as a stakeholder’s idea.
This is the key idea behind Granted — a marketplace of exclusive entertainment experiences and auction software for fans that at this step existed only as a stakeholder’s idea.
Business & Tech Challenges
The stakeholders planned to base the development of the new product on the existing old legacy code and had a feature set for the MVP development.
01 An idea with no tech team to implement
02 Outdated technologies and deprecated libraries
03 Lack of tech documentation
04 Tech debt on front-end
Research & Project Assessment
To ensure the scope of the project was aligned with business strategy and to approach the defined feature set, we created a product roadmap, estimated all resources needed for its implementation, and allocated a dedicated development team.
Defined project vision and scope
First, we explained what parts of the legacy code should be utilized and documented improving proposals. Each of our suggestions or realization approaches included several variants with both pros and cons described in detail.
Set estimates
Then, we discussed the options and opted for the most efficient variants. We agreed upon the deadlines and our client knew what functionality to expect and when.
Allocated dedicated team
The initial team for the project included four software engineers and a project manager. To ensure communication was efficient, we agreed upon weekly sync meetings with the Granted product owner and investors. Plus, our client could contact anyone from the Wise team directly to discuss ideas or inquire about the progress of any feature.
Development in Progress
Back-end & front-end development
Because reworking the given front-end code to meet new requirements and design was time-consuming, we offered to start a new Next.js project. It allowed us to implement new design concepts and add features faster.
We also transferred the auth and auction components from the old application to the new project.
Reshaping auction flow
Buy it now feature
Reshaping ordering functionality
Stars/Venues entity
Front-end migration to NextJS
After migration to the modern React framework, the front-end performance, development experience, and state of the codebase were significantly improved.
Key benefits of the used Next.js technology:
Code splitting
SSR & Static Generation
Structure standardization
Code refactoring & documentation
As the codebase increased and new functionality was added, Confluence was used to properly organize project documentation. The documentation process was established and the Wise team kept the documentation up-to-date to speed up the development process for everyone involved. All the new features added were documented accordingly.
All log processes were set up and we configured the incident management system for troubleshooting. Important events were captured instantly and it helped to ensure high application performance and monitor its stability.
Besides, switching to the SendGrid dynamic templates allowed our client to make changes to the email templates faster.
All log processes were set up and we configured the incident management system for troubleshooting. Important events were captured instantly and it helped to ensure high application performance and monitor its stability.
Besides, switching to the SendGrid dynamic templates allowed our client to make changes to the email templates faster.
Besides, switching to the SendGrid dynamic templates allowed our client to make changes to the email templates faster.
Website activity tracking
To help our client accumulate important data on users' interaction with the new product and base future business decisions on real-time data, we configured the following tools:
- Google Analytics
- Hotjar
- Google Tag Manager
- Facebook Pixel
DevOps Consultancy & Services
Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as Code was applied as the best practice for automating the provisioning of infrastructure services. Terraform, an open-source provisioning tool from HashiCorp, was used to build, change, and version infrastructure and ensure its safety, efficiency, and easy reproducibility. Terraform managed the state of our environment on AWS. In other words, if something was not in conformity, it would be fixed and kept as close as possible to the desired state.
Infrastructure setup at AWS
To ensure high availability, high scalability, security, and fault tolerance production environment, the core project infrastructure components were designed and built on the Amazon Web Services (AWS).
For the setup, the following services were used:
- AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service
- AWS RDS Aurora cluster
- S3 bucket, Lambda
- API Gateway
- Auto Scaling
- ElastiCache
- CloudWatch
- IAM
- Certificate Manager
- ALB
- Route53
Migration to Kubernetes
Kubernetes was chosen as an orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management. It helped to make deployment stable and the production environment part scalable.
App Performance monitoring and alerting
From the beginning, our team defined key metrics that allowed us to monitor app performance and set up tools to collect this data. We configured:
- NewRelic to collect metrics and logs, manage alert rules
- Sentry as an error tracking system
- PagerDuty as an incident management system
As a result, we received notifications about errors and could respond promptly.
Continuous integration & delivery setup
To automate the CI/CD and run MySQL migration, the Jenkins pipeline was utilized. This provided a simple interface for deploying the application to the development Kubernetes cluster from any GitHub branch. It also could be deployed to the production Kubernetes cluster from the master branch with a rollback function if needed.
With the configured Slack integration, our team and anyone from the client-side were able to track the deployment process and commit history. So that everyone could be on the same page about what's happening with the development process in the environment.
With the configured Slack integration, our team and anyone from the client-side were able to track the deployment process and commit history. So that everyone could be on the same page about what's happening with the development process in the environment.
App Testing & Delivery
The quality assurance was applied during the auction system and marketplace development process, still, after the main development phase was over, the Wise team prepared a detailed plan for the software testing, created test cases, and extensive automated tests to ensure that the developed solution is stable, bug-free, and ready for the launch.
results
- Outsourcing software development to the tech partner allowed our client to accelerate MVP development.
- User experience was reorganized and adapted to the new product vision and functionality.
- Project management was done on the WE side and the predefined scope of work was delivered in time.
- All the necessary analytics tools were connected right away to help track product performance in real-time.
- MVP product was launched for early adopters in February 2021 and the product successfully passed the evaluation step.
Marcus Garceau
Product Consultant at Granted
The Wise team was hired to repurpose a previously acquired auction platform and develop new functionality to empower our experiential marketplace. They did a fantastic job building out the product MVP on time and within estimates, helped to implement into life investors' vision. It was a joy to work with Wise Engineering. All team members are self-starters, highly competent, and work with consistent velocity. Keep doing what you're doing!
Latest News on the Project
Today, Granted is a live marketplace and online auction software available for a global audience and has already a new roadmap for its development.
The tech part is fully delegated to our team and WE are happy to contribute to this success story.
