Nutrisystem
Online Retailer
Kodak Gallery

Nutrisystem

The Nutrisystem project provides examples of our work as deployment specialists, Content Administration experts, performance tuning engineers, and Commerce application developers. In addition, it showcases delivery models including a single engineer working in a specialized role as well as an embedded development team working together with Nutrisystem developers to build new functionality.

We first became involved with Nutrisystem as they were approaching site launch. After conducting a launch readiness assessment, we discovered the application was not ready to run in a production environment. After guiding them through the setup and configuration of lock servers, process editor servers, fulfillment servers, content administration servers, and configurations required to run multiple instances of the application, they were ready to launch. This work required both deployment specialist and Content Administration expertise.

After site launch, some performance issues arose in the production environment. We analyzed the application code as well as the cache settings and recommended changes that brought the site up to a high level of performance and stability.

Over the following year and a half, we worked together with Nutrisystem developers on a series of small projects to implement core commerce functionality and integrations with third party systems. These projects included from 1-3 Commerce Architects engineers working together and mentoring Nutrisystem developers. Over the course of this year and a half, every one of the Nutrisystem developers worked with and learned from Commerce Architects developers.

This work was done remotely from our offices in Berkeley, CA. We used daily touchpoint meetings to track progress and almost daily desktop sharing to work collaboratively with Nutrisystem developers.

Online Retailer

Our work with this client began as a deployment engagement to address critical performance and stability issues with their recently launched ATG platform. Since launch, the site had experienced server crashes every few days due to at least one major memory leak. Following a brief period of data collection, investigation, and consultation with ATG technical support, several problem areas were identified in custom code and a previously unknown ATG bug was found. After resolving the identified problems, site performance was improved and server crashes were eliminated.

In order to move forward with developing new site functionality, it was first necessary to implement typical development environment best practices, which were missing. At that time, there was no source control, no build and deployment process, and no individual environments for developers. To remedy this, Subversion was installed, a simple build script was created, and an open source continuous integration tool was set up. Additional development and QA servers were set up and a local development environment set up process was created. During the course of this work, several repairs were made to the ATG Content Administration setup and configuration.

During the following 9 months, work involved simultaneously repairing poorly written code left behind by the initial integrator, adding new functionality required by the marketing organization, and continuous improvements to site performance. One critical business need was to further leveraging the ATG Commerce Search and Search Merchandising products. The site was modified to switch from category-product style catalog navigation to search-based navigation allowing complex selection of facets across numerous product properties. The ATG Search engine was also tuned to improve the accuracy of natural language search result to direct customers to key products.

This work was performed remotely from our offices in Berkeley, CA with occasional week-long visits to the customer's site.

Kodak Gallery

At Kodak Gallery we were recruited to help finish up development on a new ATG Commerce site, and help to get the site launched. This project required expertise in ATG Commerce, ATG Content Administration 9, ATG Fulfillment and ATG Commerce Assist.

Since January 2009, we have been engaged with Kodak Gallery with between one and three developers at a time. This engagement model was a hybrid team of developers from Commerce Architects and one additional integrator. The work was performed on-site at the Kodak Gallery office.

Prior to launch, we built the business logic for selling customizable items with ATG Commerce. In addition, we built the workflows and data loading processes for deployment of data from an ATG 9 Content Administration server to ATG 2006.3 Commerce targets. The improvements in the ATG 9 Content Administration application are truly impressive and make this product a pleasure to work with. After launch, some issues were discovered with the implementation of the ATG fulfillment system. As a result, we re-wrote the core of the fulfillment process plus utilities to assist when any fulfillment issues arose. Finally, we implemented ATG Commerce Assist for Kodak Gallery to manage orders.