Improvements and new features

We have a very comprehensive process for the ongoing development of the Zeald Website Manager, which is a software used by all our clients to manage and update their online business. This area of Zeald is not something we take lightly - we are dedicated to making your experience of managing a website as easy and as smooth as possible, so we have a process in place for the development and a system to decide which features we improve.

In addition to this, every week our R&D team spend a fair amount of time working on fixing bugs and issues with the core product, which takes up a lot more time that you'd expect. That's mainly because as the number of people that use our software continues to grow, people seem to find creative and obscure ways to break it! To isolate and fix a single bug can sometimes take days or weeks of work but we always aim to fix these as quickly as possible.

How we decide which features to build

We are continually receiving feature requests from clients, and we have a few ideas of our own as well. Unfortunately the R&D resource we have available will always be more limited that the ideas we have so we are very careful in deciding what new features to build.

We also prefer to not to allocate a lot of time just to new functionality (since the functionality of the Zeald Website Manager is already considerable and covers most needs), but instead focus on making improvements to the usability, performance and user experience of what we already have.

Adding new features can also make things more complicated and could dilute the focus of what we do - for example some features, like accounting/CRM/logistics are outside the focus of our product.

Please do understand that there are no guarantees of how long it will take to implement your ideas or if they will be implemented but it can't hurt to ask -  if it is along the lines of what we are trying to achieve with the Website Manager, we will certainly take your feedback on board.

The Products & Infrastructure committee

Every month Zeald holds a Products & Infrastructure (P&I) committee meeting. The committee is made up of representatives from each department within Zeald - Hamish who represents support, design and production makes sure that these parts of the company have a voice. Brent from sales & marketing department has a great insight on what features can really add value to the Website Manager. Our CEO David joins in to give the team an overall strategic perspective and Jono from the P&I department runs the meetings.

The P&I Committee meeting

At the P&I committee meetings we review the last month's priorities and discuss the progress to see where they are at - we mainly identify whether we have completed the development of the projects we said that we would. If not, we look at what happened to cause the delay. We also list any other features we have added or bugs that have come up which have been fixed.

The R&D To do list

During the committee meetings we have create an R&D to-do list which consists of a board with lots of post-it notes. Each post-it has a feature that we think or you think should be added to our Website Manager. Next to the feature we have a grade to say how important this feature is - grades go from 1 -10 with 10 being very important and 1 not so important.

The importance grade is judged by all the members of the committee in the form of a discussion. First we discuss exactly what the feature is (so everyone's on board) and what is involved in the implementation of it. We discuss the impact this feature will potentially have or what we call the 'Business Value' in regard to:

• Customer perspective
• Internal perspective
• Financial perspective
• Strategic value

Once the feature has been given the importance grade, Jono (who leads the team that would implement this change) applies a 'size' grade. The size grade is anything between S, M, L or sometimes XL, which tells us just how much work, time and resource is involved to develop, test and roll out this change.

Once we have these grades we then prioritise the feature based on the importance and the size. A small development with an importance grade of 9 will instantly make it to the month's to-do list. We also like to add a healthy list of features that we think will be achievable for the R&D team to complete in a month.

Each month we review and rank new features that get added to the list and any features that are still on the list are re-reviewed and some might end up with a different importance grade or even the size grade if new technology or ideas provide a simpler solution to achieve the feature.

Release of changes and the impact to all websites

New releases are included in your website very frequently, sometime as much as several times a day. Most of our product releases are very small - containing a few small changes at most or bug fixes, as we are always looking to reduce the chance that we might break something on your website.

We have thousands of sites and many of them are customised so don't use our standard software and it's impossible for us to test a new release on every website. Instead we test our changes on all our standard configurations and have a large number of automated tests that check that major sub-systems are operating as expected but this does not cover every customised bit of software.

The only way to guarantee that nothing will break is to not make any changes at all, and this is how most software development happens in other places - customers are not automatically upgraded to new features, instead they only receive urgent security fixes automatically and have to pay to receive the next release. But at Zeald, we don't believe that it's a good way to do things because technology in the internet area is always evolving and evolving very fast so we need to upgrade all our customers regularly. We ensure that everyone benefits from the bug fixes and other improvements. 

Published

Once a new feature has been developed and rolled out, we tell all our clients about it by publishing it in our 'What's New' blog in the Zeald Learning Centre. In this area we list all the important changes and features we have added to our products over the month - we don't include every single little update but we mention the ones that are very important and stand out. We will give you a monthly update of one or two of the important changes in our client newsletter and for an extended list, please bookmark the What's New page and check back to see what we've been up to.