SingleFeed’s team are big users of Salesforce, which helps us stay in touch with our customers. This summer, our engineering team also got into the spirit, and integrated our feed processing system with Salesforce as well. Now, whenever any of our customers imports a new feed, when our system finishes doing its magic on a feed, and when we deliver our customers’ feeds to the shopping engines, our Salesforce integration updates our customer records. This allows our account managers to always have real-time visibility into the status of every customer in a common interface. They can also be alerted when a feed has problems, in order to proactively offer assistance to a merchant and ensure that their feed makes it out to the shopping engines promptly. We’re always on the lookout for tools to help us help our merchants, and integrating Salesforce with our own system has definitely improved our ability to quickly see what’s going on and respond.

Here at SingleFeed we’re big believers in trying to work in an agile way — taking on the work in bite-sized chunks, getting them done, and seeing what’s next, rather than attacking a huge monolithic project and not seeing results until it’s done. As part of managing that work, we use Jira to track items that need attention, as detailed in a previous post. For breaking down a project into the aforementioned bite-sized chunks and tracking progress, however, we’re looking at other tools.

Certainly, there’s the good old “task list in TextEdit” approach, or using Excel to list what needs to be done and tracking things old-school. There are better, more modern ways, however. Jira has a plugin called GreenHopper which seems interesting, but it’s fairly complex and expensive. Right now we’re interested in testing things out and keeping investment low, so we’ve been looking at tools such as Pivotal Tracker, AgileBuddy, and ScrumNinja. AgileBuddy isn’t free while the others are, but it’s not expensive either. At the moment, we’re trying out ScrumNinja on one of our current projects, and so far it’s simple but gets the job done. We’ll see what we think when we’re done with the project.

Tools are useful, but only if they aid a process that everyone buys into and that gets things done in a healthy way. Since Agile development can mean so many different things, it’s important to decide on your process first and then find the right tool, rather than allow a tool to change your process in ways that might not be right for your team. We’ll report back after our experiments, and in the meantime welcome other suggestions and descriptions of other experiences.

This summer, SingleFeed’s engineering department migrated our systems from a dedicated hosting provider. Our web application and back-end feed processing is now done on virtual servers running on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform, where we’ve joined companies such as the Washington Post, Harvard Medical School, Virgin Atlantic, and Autodesk in taking advantage of the expandability and flexibility of cloud computing.

What does this mean for our merchants? Most importantly, the ability to instantly add new resources to our system enables us to grow as needed to continue offering prompt feed processing and engine delivery. In fact, since moving to EC2 we’ve already transparently upgraded several of our servers, and in each case it took only a few minutes. Back when we were running on dedicated hardware, that process would have begun by requesting a new server, followed by days to get it installed and configured before we were even able to begin using it.

We’re also able to set up server instances for testing on demand, allowing us to explore new ways of providing better service for our customers. It’s marvelous to be able to create an exact clone of our system whenever we want to try out a new approach, and then just let the instances vanish when we’re done.

As we continue to grow, we’ll take further advantage of this flexibility to provide greater power for parsing, analyzing, and delivering our customers’ data feeds.

As with any complex system, at SingleFeed it takes some effort for us to track what’s going on, who’s working on what, and the status of things. For tracking new tasks, improvements we want to make, and, yes, bugs — it happens to the best of us — we’ve been using a web application called Jira. I’m a big fan of Jira, and have used it at several previous companies. It makes it easy to describe work that needs to be done, classify it by both type (task, bug, etc) and system component, and track what state it’s in: open, in progress, resolved, and so on. We can assign items to each other, get notifications when things change, link items together, and even vote on new features. Viewing reports of issues is easy, based on any criteria you can think of: date, state, owner, component… And then we can track releases by assigning issues to upcoming release dates, so everyone can see what’s coming up. Most importantly, Jira’s a very easy system to use, both for technical and non-technical members of the SingleFeed team.