Hotels.com Speeds App Development with Agile

Hotels.com has said it has significantly sped up its software development lifecycle by adopting Agile principles, reducing the lifecycle from 26 weeks to just a fortnight. As a result, a new release of the hotel booking website now goes live every two weeks, and the company can better pinpoint the effects of new features on the website's performance.

The company instructed managed services provider DSP to create a UK-based Agile development team and help it re-architect the web application into logical parts so that upgrades could be made to each part independently, without needing to re-test the whole application.

Examples of apps that have been developed using the Agile principles include Hotels.com's mobile apps for iPhone, iPad and Android. Hotels.com shares partner Expedia's data centers, where it uses around 30 to 40 servers, which are based on a standard open source stack of Tomcat, Apache and Java, using a SQL database.

Adopting agile has enabled Hotels.com to improve efficiency by between 20 to 25 percent, and decreased the company's reliance on offshore software developers based in Eastern Europe, from 90 percent to 50 percent. Hotels.com has several hundred technologists working across development, quality assurance (QA) and operations.