In the mobile Internet development and Practice Forum of Cloud Computing Conference this year, Chen Xiaohui, a senior technical expert of Hello Travel, shared the dry goods of "Mobile research and development and Improvement in Hello Practice", and introduced how to achieve the improvement and performance guarantee for various business lines through the attack of "people" and "technology".
Founded in 2016, Hallo Travel started from the well-known bike-sharing business, and has launched such competitive businesses as Hallo Hitch, Hallo electric vehicle, small car for electric change, Hallo taxi, etc., evolving into a diversified travel and life service platform covering two-wheel travel, four-wheel travel, wine travel and store service.
The rapid expansion of the business also poses higher challenges to the technology development team. For example, R&D resources are allocated, personnel on different ends are not balanced, and communication links are too long.
"At present, the whole field of technology development changes greatly. Specifically, in addition to the traditional front end and back end, data, algorithms, etc., gradually go into the research and development process, so that the whole research and development link becomes very long. In addition, product, business, and city operations people are also involved in the R&D system, making the development team not only need to communicate internally, but also need to communicate with the business team, resulting in a longer communication link." Chen Xiaohui explained.
01 Process series, demand improvement to "people" as the device to get through the crux
In order to solve the above problems, Hello Travel actively fights from the three aspects of process series, demand improvement and technology upgrade, to solve difficulties and improve effects for mobile application research and development.
The first is process series. For most enterprises, this section is mainly done by architects and technical experts. Hello, however, takes a different approach, by enhancing the value of technical PMS to achieve process alignment.
"Strengthen the value of the role of technology PM, focusing on business, architecture and technology." Chen Xiaohui explains that developers should not just focus on the technology itself, but need to get into the business. By becoming a technical PM, developers are able to move beyond single technical requirements, understand business links and future business planning, and create a pathway between technology and business.
Whenever there is a technical development requirement, the technical PM is connected to the front and back ends, so the technical PM plays a half-architect role on the team and must have some knowledge of the architectural domain. In addition, for each end of the technology field, the technical PM must be in-depth and have high self-drive, to find and solve problems.
Take Hallo as an example. In order to further optimize relevant processes and improve information flow efficiency, Hallo Travel classifies technical PMS into different stages, and lays out workbooks and round-table discussions to build the growth path of technical PMS, while making technical PMS play an increasingly important role in the business itself.
In addition to the technical PM tandem process, focusing on requirement value is also part of the "Hello" strategy.
Most product business teams tell the development team what they need, but not what they value. As a result, many technology developers have a problem with "what is the value of the requirement I'm solving?"
In this regard, Hallo Travel has optimized its research and development process, emphasizing value in the aspects of demand, expected effect and program evaluation, and strengthening the voice of research and development in products.
There is sometimes an anomaly in traditional R&D processes, where product managers may not have as much experience as technical specialists, which can lead to inefficient R&D. Therefore, we finally enhanced the voice of developers by distributing authority and repeatedly embedding requirement value into the process.
However, as Chen Xiaohui said, both process series and demand efficiency improvement are highly related to "people", while cost reduction and efficiency improvement only rely on "people" to drive, obviously not, technical means are indispensable.
02 Internal and external technology upgrading to mobile applications to reduce costs and improve efficiency
With the external obstacles removed, Hello Travel focused on upgrading the entire technical architecture. In this regard, Chen Xiaohui pointed out that the technical architecture upgrade idea of Hallo mainly focuses on modularization, containerization and standardization.
The first is modularity. In Chen Xiaohui's eyes, modularity is an old issue, many enterprises have their own modular architecture solutions. The modular upgrade of Hello Travel is based on servitization abstraction, which is similar to the service autonomy idea of micro-service module. The ability is provided around the service, and through interface isolation, to achieve higher flexibility and cost effectiveness.
The second is containerization. In the past few years, product iterations have been so frequent that if you just put your business on a technology, the cost of future upgrades will cover all the cost of past improvements. In the case of Flutter, the substitution of two ends for one end is the basic enhancement logic, but for older applications, which involve multiple communication chains, there is actually a large efficiency loss. Therefore, a new application or full Flutter may achieve good results. It is also early in the ecology, requiring more technical resources and more careful assessment before starting.
In addition, multi-end and cross-end improvement is also an important means to improve the efficiency of Hello travel application. Chen Xiaohui shared that Hello travel business lines are numerous, multi-end demand is great. Based on this ability, the development team only needs to develop and adapt one end, which can realize multi-end reuse including independent APP, Alipay small program and so on, and improve the efficiency of business.
Again, standardization. In the next few years, the number of terminals will increase, and so will the technology stack or technology heterogeneous approach. In this context, the importance of standardization of underlying capabilities will become apparent.
Regarding standardization, Hello Travel is to explore multiple aspects. One is the stratification of basic capabilities, clustering of isolated network library, log library and other relatively independent parts that have no sense of the upper layer, and covering each library with unit testing and automated testing. For the part of middle-level capability and business capability, it is realized by service dependency and interface dependency. For the business layer, in addition to the interface isolation and routing isolation, we also establish a standard specification for this, to standardize and promote the corresponding library to a better direction.
