Project objectives and challenges

Businesses utilizing PHP know Zend as the place to go for PHP expertise and sound technology solutions. Zend internationally recognized expertise lets the PHP company to continue providing important leadership for PHP and play a central role in the explosive growth of PHP.

Zend has hired our developer team for participating in the creation of Mediacenter platform. The goal of the project was to create a high performance and scalable system that could handle huge numbers of notification messages collected from various system events such as file downloads, label reporting, different music files detection and various data aggregation.

Mediacenter project was quite challenging from technical point of view as whole business logic is completely separated from different user interfaces (mobile apps, web applications, etc) using it and a single change in system core is influencing and changing a lot of different front end user interfaces that need to work without interruptions.

A lot of attention was focused on system performance as it has up to 2 million active users and very long file lists (up to 10 000 items in one page) are displayed in web pages at the same time.

Project flow

Project was managed by Zend project managers and our developers were fully integrated into project development team. Every developer was working on those parts of the project where their expertise and experience was at the highest level. Distribution of technical and functional responsibilities between development team based on their experience has brought a big advantage for development quality and speed.

Project kick off start was performed by a smaller developer team for a month, it was expanded to twice as big developer team during main development phase and got back to a much smaller number of developers at support stage for the last two months of various small improvements and fixes.

During project lifecycle there were constant running version releases for continous testing and progress monitoring.

Quality assurance procedures were set very strict too. Testing was performed in 4 levels - from local developer unit testing and development team integration deployment to staging tests at client side and live system acceptance, performance tests performed at the end.

Achieved results

During the project there were released and deployed 4 new system versions.

Final release was bug free and there were no bugs reported after all level testing was performed.

Newly released versions strongly improved system functional possibilities, user interface speed and performance, noticably improved quality and stability of the core system.