EzRez
EzRez, 2008
Challenge
Instability and inability to innovate
EzRez provides hosted packaged booking services to leading companies in the travel industry. In early 2007 they were poised to grow their business with new investment capital and customers waiting in line to use their services.
However they were concerned about their platform's ability to handle pending business growth and increased volume. They were just getting by with a large, brittle legacy code base and development practices focused on fighting fires instead of quality and innovation. Just rolling out a new production release took over one week and was followed by weeks of fire drills to fix regression bugs reported by customers using the software.
Solution
Best practices through co-development
EzRez made the decision to temporarily slow growth and reinvest in the quality of their platform and process. Carbon Five and EzRez worked together over the next year to dramatically improve their technology platform and software development practices.
Through close collaboration with the EzRez technical team Carbon Five shared our deep expertise in enterprise Java and Agile software development. We worked to introduce developer best practices and the cultural change to support them.
We brought to EzRez product management a focus on Agile process including priority-based planning and short development iterations. We brought to the development team a host of practices including test-driven development, continuous integration, pair programming and code review, and a priority on continually improving the quality of the existing system while adding functionality.
For the software platform itself, we dramatically simplified its configuration, build and deployment. We removed overly complex technologies and strategies and replaced home grown components with industry standard open source solutions.
All this we accomplished while working on the production system making regular releases to their customers.
Value
Driving above the speed limit
By engaging Carbon Five, EzRez was able to get their business back on track for growth and innovation.Product management has a process for planning product development that engages their developers. Their platform shows markedly improved stability and reliability. Releases are no longer painful and risky. Developers are more productive and committed to the long term health of their software.