Welcome back! Today I’m going to keep grinding through the ChannelAdvisor Product Development lifecycle I introduced earlier in my first and second posts on this topic. If you have not already read those posts, I highly recommend you take a moment to read through those as well as this other required reading.

When we last left our heroes, we finished reviewing Software as a Service, the different “environments” we utilize at CA for deploying code, as well as what is a Change Request (CR), and how CRs are classified into defects, enhancements, work orders, and architecture issues. Today I’m going to delve into our actual processes for creating and deploying software.

CRT Release
CRT stands for “Change Request Team” and is a concept originally introduced by Ralph Kasuba, our VP of Engineering ( aka “chief squire” ) way back in mid-2005 (trust me, 1.5 years is “way back” for us). The CRT process was an alternate process created to streamline deployment of “smaller” changes to our production environment in a timeline of weeks rather than months. Prior to these “CRT releases”, we found ourselves continually frustrated because even the smallest most trivial changes to the system (content changes, a new setting here or there, etc.) would sometimes have to wait 2-3 months to deploy out to our production environment since they first had to be synchronized with all of the other large code changes going on in the system for the next release. This was akin to the trap Microsoft frequently found itself in when many of their products had to wait for the new version of Windows to ship.

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Greetings! This is my second post in a series I recently started discussing the Software Development Lifecycle we use here at ChannelAdvisor. If you have not yet read my prior posting on this topic, you may want to do so now. It’s a fascinating tale of pirates, danger, monkeys, and death defying software development on the high seas!

Previously I covered the concept of Software as a Service and then delved into the different system “environments” we utilize to deploy our software. In this post I will describe the concept of a “Change Request” and how those are categorized, ticketed and tracked. In upcoming posts I’ll focus on how Change Requests are deployed (”Short Term” and “Long Term” releases), and will delve into our movement towards Agile Development.

Change Requests
Within the company, every time a defect is found in our software (ahem, never), every time someone mentions “wouldn’t it be cool if the product could do X” (ahem, always), and every time a service request is issued to the engineering group, a “Change Request” (CR) ticket is opened to record and track the request. We literally log hundreds and thousands of these requests against ourselves, no matter how large or small in scope.

With all of those tickets opened, the use of Change Management software is critical to providing us order from the chaos. Currently we use a product called Synergy Change from Telelogic. It’s a solid product and serves our needs sufficiently, but could definitely be a little cheaper (just in case someone from Telelogic is reading this heehee).

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Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a joyful and triumphant holiday season. Only 4 short weeks remain before it is no longer socially acceptable to keep those Christmas lights shining brightly in the front yard. Fight the power!

In today’s blog I wanted to start off a new series that focused on how we actually develop software here at CA. I’m not referring to specific algorithms or architectures, but rather the overall Software Development Lifecycle.

Why on earth would you care about that? Well, if you ever had a bug you wanted fixed (and of course our software has no bugs, right?) or a feature you wanted added to the product, it’s empowering to know how we approach software development to better understand what and when changes can be delivered. This is a big topic with lots of facets to cover, so I’m going to split this into 3 parts. Think of it as a trilogy if you will. Hopefully you’ll find the plot to be interesting and the acting better than that of Hayden Christensen.

I’m good…no wait I’m evil!

Software as a Service
Although this is likely blatantly obvious to many, it’s worth reviewing as it’s critical to understanding our development process: all ChannelAdvisor products, including Pro, Merchant, Search, Shopping, and more, are what the industry calls Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. SaaS products are typically web based and are expected to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year (we take leap day off, j/k), with some small exceptions for occasional early morning maintenance windows. SaaS solutions have tremendous advantages to our customers: all you need is a web browser to use our tools anywhere in the world, any time of day or night. No need to install from a CD or get the latest patch, you’re always guaranteed to be on the latest and greatest version with no effort on your side required. If there’s a bug that needs to be fixed or a new feature people are screaming for, we just push out that change to our production server environment and (Bam!) everyone gets the change. This is good stuff.

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Although by no means a comprehensive survey or scientific analysis, W3 Counters is showing the Firefox browser now with a 25% market share while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is at 65% (based on user stats reported by around 4,000 websites).

Pretty significant gain and exciting to see some competition (and innovation) back in the browser market. More importantly for merchants this means that it is absolutely critical to test the buyer’s shopping experience in both browsers to make sure your products look good and your checkout works flawless.

Here are a few Firefox extensions that you may find useful for managing and enhancing your content:

• Web Developer — Toolbar that comes in very handy for developing and validating HTML let’s say for an eBay Ad or your eCommerce site.

• IE Tab — Open a site in Internet Explorer right within a tab in Firefox. Very useful for checking that your page looks good in both Firefox and Microsoft’s browser.

• FireBug — This extension gets you really into the details of website development, enabling you to examine and fix your HTML, Javascript, CSS and more.

• PDF Download — Choose whether to download or view a PDF in your browser. Great little utility especially if you don’t want to look at a PDF but simply store it for later (yes, I know, doesn’t really have to do anything with web development, but it’s so darn handy that I had to sneak it in here).

Got other Firefox extensions you can’t live without?

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Well we’re definitely in the home stretch of the e-commerce super-bowl season right now. It’s starting to become a well known e-commerce fact that Monday’s are typically the busiest e-commerce day of the week. An interesting commentary on society I’m sure - rather than facing the doldrums of another week at work, we go to the office, log on and…start shopping! This year is especially interesting, as the last Monday of the season falls a full week away from Christmas - just enough time to get that Playstation 3 by ground shipping. It’ll be interesting to see if consumers take that risk on Monday and break some e-commerce records.

Anyway, as promised in my last post, today I thought I’d talk a little about security, specifically as it applies to our Merchant and Pro products. I’m not going to pull a CNN here and broadcast exact specifics (”as you can see here, the 3rd cavalry is going to launch their surprise attack on this position in exactly 10 minutes…”), but there is a high level discussion we can have here that doesn’t give away the secret sauce.

First of all, let me stress that security of our data is something we take very seriously here at CA. Is any system foolproof? Of course not, we’d be fools to think otherwise. We do however use well established industry practices to secure your data, and have subjected ourselves to numerous internal and external security audits to validate our practices. With that said, we are always working to get even better.

Physical Security
First and foremost, there are the servers themselves. Our servers aren’t hanging out in a garage or under Marshall Smith’s desk, they live in a dedicated data center. If you’ve never seen a datacenter, they look a lot like this. If there’s a part a part of reality that’s straight out of a sci-fi movie, it’s a data center. Walking into one you could easily convince yourself that computers have taken over the world and you are the last human on earth. Time to wakeup and feed your master.

Here’s a picture of a Google Data Center I found on, well Google:

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