Reconciling International Shipping Obstacles

Building applications using Technical Excellence

THE BRIEF

A third-party logistics provider, who offers organizations a simplified platform to manage, track, and ship products and goods, needed to integrate their platform and add new applications and features to improve their international shipping capabilities. A large sect of their clientele frequently shipped international, and needed a solution to mitigate the complications that can arise when dealing with multiple time zones and complex shipping needs.

THE CHALLENGE

The client began the process of enhancing their current platform in an effort to streamline international shipping for their customers. The goal was to retire some of their outdated legacy systems and update the rest. Overwhelmed, and behind schedule, the client partnered with Apexon to complete this modernization effort.

THE SOLUTION

The solution was to create a centralized process to simplify shipping for the client’s customers. Apexon developed an application to provide a single platform for easy international booking and freight management. During the development phase, the process of Technical Excellence was implemented to ensure quality and consistency. Technical Excellence is a delivery method that utilizes Agile and Scrum Methods, Test-Driven Development (TTD) and SOLID principles, and implementing Lean UX practice.

In traditional software development, the code is written first; resulting in a large amount of complex and unnecessary code. The process is also extremely time consuming. As a result, Apexon’s experts employed the process of Test-Driven Development (TDD). TDD is a development process in which behavior tests are written prior to the code. Resulting in code that is more malleable and simplified. When creating the behavior tests, Gherkin approach was used, which follows the specific syntax GIVEN > WHEN > THEN. This helps determine the user acceptance criteria and eliminates excess coding.

In the end, Apexon was able to quickly deliver a quality solution to the client, easily retired multiple legacy systems, and eliminated the scaling issues and shortcomings of their previous system. The application streamlined and simplified international shipping and tracking for the client’s customers, and also provided quicker updates.

Test Driven Development (TTD) is a process in which you write your user tests prior to writing the code. By doing so, you are able to create the most simplified code, which is more flexible, maintainable, and cleaner.

SOLID is an acronym for five essential software development principles. These principles aim to make the software more flexible and maintainable, and easier to understand. The end result will be cleaner code, which reduces the cost of maintaining and updating software.

PARTNER TECHNOLOGIES

Microsoft Azure DevOPs automates and speeds software delivery, and integrates software security and monitoring. It provides a collaborative environment for architects, developers, and testers to design and develop software.

Selenium is a framework for testing web application. It provides authoring capabilities of creating functional tests without needing to learn a test language.

Specflow is a tool which can be added onto Selenium that isolates the designated tests from the code and transforms it into a more readable format.

Want to learn more about Apexon? Consult with an expert here.