Few quick observations from VR's new online shop

The Finnish railway company VR launched their new online shop for tickets, and it didn't go too well. As a part of lazy sunday morning, I did a quick sweep through the process of purchasing ticket using Google Chromes developer tools. I didn't actually finish the process, though.

First thing I noticed was tremendous amount of requests that the initial load generates, as it was more than 50. For comparison, loading the front page of google and executing a search generates around 20 requests. A lot of these requests were different css -files and small images. At least those images would have been easy to combine into css -sprites, and some of those css files could have been combined, too.

Second simple thing missing is compression of responses. Again, simple explanation.

Third low hanging fruit would be usage of CDN for JQuery. There might be one problem, as they are using pretty old version of JQuery (I spotted 1.4.2 in one place and 1.3.2 in another, release date of previous was February 19th, 2010) and it might not be available on public CDNs (I didn't check this, lazy sunday as it is).

The backend seems to be implemented in Java and Apache Struts. It is hard to say anything else about the backend without using a lot more time.

Launching a web service as big as this is always a challenge, and I don't know if implementing these small things would have prevented the problems. It seems that most of the page loading time is spent at the backend, so the improvement on the frontend might not have any impact at all. If the application is partitioned into front- and backend, that is.

By the way, at the moment, the online shop is in maintenance mode.

8th Annual VTT SOFTWARE ENGINEERING SEMINAR - New Thinking - Better Software Engineering - Great Experience

Originally published at http://www.sysart.fi/news/64/58/8th-Annual-VTT-software-engineer-seminar/d,devblogi, please comment there.

Lean, transparency, global software development.... in the cloud.

VTT and leading companies challenge you to learn and discuss about productive ways of doing things in changing environment. Topics include innovation, security, Cloud technologies, lean approach towards efficiency and other software development methods and tools.

The general theme seemed to be transparency and openness in development and innovation. In the keynote, Elektrobits Jari Partanen talked a lot about transparency in the context of process improvement, saying that transparency is key enabler to identify what are the opportunities for improvement for lean and agile approaches - "Transparency attracts". He also emphasized that having a wiki is not enough for information sharing, there must be some activities like workshops and so on.

Another good point in the opening keynote, at least from my point of view, was the comment about how Elektrobit doesn't want to stress word Lean, they wan't to emphasize their "Way of Working", because it more attractive to all of the organizational entities. It is true that Lean, just like agile, is being considered as a thing that development does. But this leads easily into situation where process optimization is on the local level, when you should optimize the whole.

Transparency theme continued in the sessions which talked about innovation. Innovation should be open and transparent on all organizational levels and it should be customer oriented, but usually there isn't any communication channels between different organization levels and then the innovations from customers tend to disappear. So there should be an open, social system supporting innovation. Even though social is hype at the moment, in this context it is interesting. As lean methods say, the improvement ideas should come from the actual workers, and here they mean the support persons, developers and marketing people who will see what the customer wants and how the customer uses the product.

Rest of the sessions were about lean, distributed development, security and user experience. Some of these suffered a little bit from hype, as there was few times when the presenter said when talking about some basic software develepoment, almost as an afterthought, "in the cloud". That term is seriously overused and overloaded. It is funny when some people use cloud to describe how application can interact with each other and form mashups, and some people talk about technical characteristics, like provisioning, scaling, availability etc. But that seems to be how it works.

One session caught my interest just because it had a great name, "Flow-based software development on epic level". But the session was somewhat a disappointment, the main idea can be said in one sentence, "Global development queue of prioritized cross-product epics are assigned to teams eliminating product silos". The problem with this is the lack of domain knowledge; when every team works with every product, no one understands the domains. It might work if all products are on same domain, like in F-Secure, where the presenter, Arto Saari, was working, but I have my doubts. And F-Secure hasn't implemented this at full scale, yet.

Few one liners from different sessions:

• "EB doesn't want to stress word Lean they want to emphasize their "Way of working" - it is more and more attracting all the organizational entities" - Jari Partanen, Elektrobit
• "Transparency is key enabler to identify what are the opportunities for improvement for lean and agile approaches - "Transparency attracts"" -Jari Partanen, Elektrobut "
• Success is increasingly determined by the ability to embrace the potential of innovation ecosystems" - Timo Koivumäki, VTT