Application of formula system in e-commerce website

Introduction

I encountered this problem in several E-commerce projects, the site due to the frequent introduction of various business promotional activities, and as the activity nears the line, technical developers have to worry about adding new code or modify the program to meet the requirements of new activities. More "scary" is the timing of these events coinciding on Sunday in Saturday and important holidays for developers and testers to be miserable. I remember that July a few weeks in a row, 6th, the site has three consecutive promotional activities: (i) the designation of some goods full 300 minus 100; (b) on the basis of activities one more than 50 times times return; The process of promotional activities is such that the period of activity, the range of activities involved and the rules of activity are customized by the marketing and Operations department, implemented and tested by the technical department, finally accepted by the market and operation, and then deployed into the production environment. However, due to the irregular activity rules, technical departments in the design of activities is difficult to achieve scalability and reusability of the design, adjustment procedures are unavoidable, so that each activity must adjust a lot of code. After preliminary analysis, the program adjustment will involve the display of goods, shopping carts and placing orders, these adjustments almost involve the site of all the display foreground. This presents a challenge to the technical sector.

From the diagram below we can see the main phases and the manpower and time that are spent before and after the implementation of the activity.

Figure 1. The cycle signal of traditional implementation

The time spent in developing and testing the above process will be the longest in the whole process, and the pressure is undoubtedly the largest. In order to "salvage" this disadvantage to the technical sector, the technology department has proposed a new solution: to "translate" the various activity rules from the operator into a formula, the developer provides a formula "plug-in" that affects the results of the activity, and "inserts" to the place where the activity is needed.

From the following illustration we can see the main phases and the manpower and time that are spent on the new solution before and after execution. Relative to the previous pattern, the writing and testing cycle of the formula is much shorter than the technical department's development cycle, so it will not lead to excessive pressure on the market and operations, but requires a higher demand for the operator role, and they need to learn how to write the formula. But compared to the overall implementation cycle of the greatly shortened, these pay is very worthwhile.

Figure 2. A new way to implement the cycle signal

Implement a formula system