Yesterday we took the wraps off ShoppingAdvisor, a product that allows retail marketers full control over their comparison shopping business.

ShoppingAdvisor is designed, from the ground up, to put your marketing team back in control of marketing your products. Day after day we talk to companies who are literally held hostage by their technical team as far as their comparison shopping business is concerned. We set out to develop a product that would change that. The result is ShoppingAdvisor, a fully self-managed comparison shopping engine management solution that gives the control back to marketing, for good.

So we’ve been working on this release for a while, and I thought it might be fun to tell a quick anecdote from the release.

Late one night in the midst of software development, one of our developers, Jon, was feeling a little down. One of the stories I relayed at the time, was that the only releases you really remember are ones where you are building something very ambitious, at least 10 things could go wrong, and there is a tight timeline. The point is no one remembers version 3.1.12 from early 2003. You remember the release where everyone was sleeping on the floor and the last bug was fixed at 6am the second before the code rolled out to production.
His question was classic, of course: “Are you trying to make this hard so we’ll remember it? A note in my cube might accomplish the same thing.”

Silence in the room.

Of course the release ships and everything’s OK, but I thought that was pretty funny at the time. I won’t relay the joke I told at launch time internally about the difference between a death march and a death sprint. I really prefer the term rapid development - isn’t it more positive?

If you want to meet Jon, he’ll be out at Internet Retailer with us and can tell you all about it if you like :-) We’ll be at booth 1015.

One more note, if you buy before June 30, we are offering a full money-back guarantee. For any reason. Get more information here.

From around the web:
- Shout out to Brian @ ComparisonEngines.com for picking up the release.
- Internet Retailer Coverage
- VentureDeal mention

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Not one, but TWO 5p listing days coming up this weekend on eBay UK. Unfortunately, only CD and DVD categories are eligible - but still a great opportunity to boost your listings if you’re a media seller. And you get a free Gallery picture as well!

During all of Saturday 10th & Sunday 11th of February 2007 (local UK time), sellers who list an item using the Auction-style, Auction-with-Buy It Now or Buy It Now Only (Fixed Price) formats in the eligible categories (see below), will pay a reduced 5 pence (£0.05) Insertion Fee per item they list, and will be able to use the Gallery Listing Upgrade feature for free.

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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).

(more…)

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