Building a Marketplace — Block by Block
By: Locktrip.Com, Loc Token, Official Blog
Tags: Technology, Locktrip, Ethereum, Crypto, Bitcoin

Building a Marketplace — Block by Block

A Technical History of LockTrip

Since the inception of LockTrip, our marketplace has undergone multiple phases and countless iterations. We’ve tried to reflect the pace of progress through articles, recaps, our daily communication on Telegram and milestone announcements.

However, we have always found it difficult to convey the bigger picture while at the same time communicating all the nuances that come with the development itself. Each and every component has its own difficulties and advantages, which are neglected under the uniform term of “milestone”. Today we want to add some colour to the history of LockTrip.com.

Colouring the History of LockTrip.com

To make things easier to grasp, we have prepared this very detailed infographic for our community. To view it in full size and quality, please follow the link below:

Timelines of Major Milestones

The graphic consists of two major sections, both sharing the same timeline at the horizontal axis. As time passes, you will see more and more milestones being added in the form of progress bars. Below is a small zoomed-in snippet.

Zooming in

There are 6 types of progress bars, each displayed with a different colour.

This stage marks the technical initialization of the milestone and starts after the strategical development has been concluded. It consists of tasks such as choosing a suitable technology, contacting relevant partners and analyzing the methods and standards they work with.

At the same time we ensure the technical compatibility and identify possible bottlenecks as well as challenges.

In this step we design all the details and functionality such as buttons, features, design elements, user interface and the integration into the marketplace. We also validate whether the service provided by third parties matches our expectations and work around the bottlenecks and challenges identified in the previous stage.

By this stage we have completed all preparations and can now discuss a technical roadmap with all developers involved. This is to ensure that the back-end developers can work according to the front-end requirements and to get an understanding for each developer’s tasks and responsibilities.

Third party integrations need to be considered at this stage and the relevant steps need to be communicated with all relevant parties.

Now we can finally start coding, which involves both backend and frontend. Different teams work on different branches of the code, which are then merged into a single body.

Each step also includes a series of testing in its own micro-environment. Does the API send data as expected? Does the code do what it is meant to do? Do the filters work as designed? Once each branch of the code is ready and has been tested on a micro-level, we proceed by integrating it into the marketplace and deploy on our staging server.

Once on staging, the actual testing begins on a macro-level. Here we go through countless test cycles, both scripted and manually. Since we cannot anticipate the results of these tests, it marks the most uncertain stage of all when it comes to predicting timelines.

A single issue can delay the whole milestone by 1 or 2 weeks, especially if it needs to be fixed by a third party, which we have little influence over. Once all tests have been passed, the actual deployment follows and we announce the milestone to our community.

As a final step, we gather feedback from our users and repeat the tests on the deployment server. Sometimes a bug can emerge on the deployment server, which didn’t present itself on the staging server.

Active Tasks & Average Duration

For a more detailed analysis you can refer to the second part of the graphic. There you will see the number of milestones we have actively been working on at a given time.

The growing size from left to right represents a quickening development speed as the team becomes more efficient over time. Not only do we continuously learn from previous mistakes, but we were also able to form our internal communication more efficiently. At the same time we standardized certain tasks and processes that turned out to be effective.

Working on many tasks in parallel is one thing, but does it really tell the whole story? After all, it could be that we are just taking longer for every milestone and therefore the graph is distorted.

This is why we also plotted the average coding + testing time for each of the milestones required. You can observe that metric by the black line going through the chart.

The line has fallen by roughly 20% over the past year, which means that milestones are now completed 20% quicker on average, despite working on more milestones in parallel.

We hope that you will enjoy the graphic as much as we do, and that you take the time of viewing it in full size. You will have the best experience using a big screen.

— Your LockTrip Team

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LockTrip is a blockchain-based travel marketplace that allows users to save on average 20% on their bookings by cutting out middlemen. Every booking burns LOC proportionally to its booking value, continuously reducing its total supply.