Home / Case studies / Trainplanet: Improving Scalability and User Experience by Combining Multiple Services into One
Transforming One of Sweden's Largest Online Train Ticket
E-commerce Platforms
Discover how Agile helped us to develop a portal that enables booking trains across the whole Europe.
01.
Customer
Customer background
One of the biggest train ticket providers in Sweden, Trainplanet was founded in 2002. Since then they have been gaining experience in train travel. They built several systems that were offering their customers different travel services.
However, the decision was made to redesign services and build them on a single platform for a better user experience. The goal was to gather all their products and services in the same place, and to offer their customers the best experience possible.
Client
Industries
- Ecommerce
Services
Technology
- ActiveMQ, Akita, Angular, Ansible, AWS, Cucumber, Docker, ElasticSearch, Github, Gradle, Java, Java Spring, Jenkins, JPA, JSON RESTful WebServices, Liquibase, Pact, PHP, PostgreSQL, React, RxJS, SASS, Sonar, Spock, Spring Boot, TypeScript
02.
The challenges
It was hugely challenging to fulfil Trainplanet’s needs because they used multiple applications and systems. Although their customers wouldn’t know it, it would suppress the growth and scalability of Trainplanet’. Moreover, such a situation affected User Experience.
So, together we decided to gather all their products and services in one place. And this goal required building a single platform that would handle all business processes.
Another issue was we had to use a very complex third-party API with limited documentation. It wasn’t possible to get all the knowledge upfront. This challenge was overcome by extensive project analysis and workshops but added another layer of complexity to the project.
03.
The solution
Inspeerity’s team built an online booking system for the Trainplanet portal, that enables booking trains across the whole of Europe. As a result, developers were involved from the very beginning and throughout the project lifecycle. To sum up our role included:
+ Requirements gathering & analysis
+ Design of the system architecture
+ Preparation of UX/UI
+ Implementation & tests
+ Environment preparation & deployment
+ After deployment support
Our tasks included building a system which would give the possibility of booking both domestic and international train tickets directly via the web as well as buy Interrail Passes.
04.
The Agile deployment plan
Because of many unknowns in the early stage of the project and time pressure on delivery, we decided that it would be best to apply the Agile approach. This would give us the best chance of delivering on time.
Here is how our deployment plan looked like in practice.
+ Automatic end-to-end tests and performance tests
We determined test scenarios covering the most vital (ideally even all) business cases and created automated tests for each.
+ Infrastructure monitoring
All crucial infrastructure metrics was collected (the amount of memory consumption, disk space availability, CPU usage, network traffic, etc.) to ensure smooth deployment and application functioning.
+ Application monitoring
During the development phase, we created metrics and used tools to automatically detect the infrastructure, all frameworks, and engines, discover application dependencies, track transactions across all tiers, and collect potential culprits.
+ Log rotation policy and log storage
Even before the production rollout, we reviewed log levels to reduce the amount of information stored in the log file and created the log rotation policy.
+ Confidential data policy
We reviewed logs and checked if the crucial data was protected, anonymized, or even deleted from the log file.
+ User and conversion rate tracking
We tracked application usage to know where the user spends the time and how long it takes. Moreover, we helped our client to measure the conversion rate to support their marketing.
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05.
This is how our client benefited
An Agile Development Process was implemented to offer a structured framework for efficient software creation and project management. This approach enabled the client to swiftly adapt to evolving market demands and requirements, guaranteeing the on-time launch.
But how else did they benefit?
Enhanced User Experience
The creation of a single, comprehensive system simplified the ticket purchasing process. This makes it easier and more intuitive for customers to buy train tickets for any journey across Europe.
Increased Accessibility
The new platform provided customers across Europe with the opportunity to easily access and purchase train tickets online, catering to a wider audience and enhancing convenience.
Agile Flexibility
Adopting an Agile approach enabled rapid adjustments to the project scope and requirements, ensuring timely delivery despite initial uncertainties and time constraints.
Scalability and Integration
Our tailor-made software solution effectively consolidated multiple services and applications into a single platform. This significantly improved scalability and system integration for Trainplanet.
Quality and Innovation
Through best practices in coding, automated quality assurance, and continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), the project achieved high-quality outputs that could easily adapt to changing requirements, providing Trainplanet with a competitive edge in the e-commerce space.
Full article
Find out how our team prepared for the rollout day in our blog article: 7 Steps to Avoid Nightmares After Go-live.
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