Hostie

The Client (Anthony) came to us via our partners. He is a founder of Airpads, a vacation rental management company that takes the work out of vacation rentals for hosts and homeowners on Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, HomeAway and many other popular channels. The company based in Los Angeles, USA. 

They used another property management software before, and after a while they wanted to get independent and build their own solution. Thus WP Rentals theme provided by Rentals Club was bought, customized, integrated with powerful Channel Manager for Vacation Rentals - Rentals United (RU).

Before us, WordPress theme customization was started by another team of WP developers. They didn’t have any requirements specification documentation, just some high level features formulation, based on which they made an estimation which eventually appeared to be inaccurate.

So the first team extremely needed to:

• organize a development process, 
• take over calls with Client, 
• perform business analysis,
• put additional resources for development of integration with RU, frontend development, and software testing.

Therefore Client has decided to join forces and unite 2 teams into the one, so we started to work together in order to achieve a common aim. Once system released, we keep working on developing new challenging features and integrations.

After uniting 2 teams and getting the one distributed team of developers in 2 different cities of Ukraine and the Client in different time zone in USA (10 hours difference with Ukraine), it was decided to work by Kanban methodology. We decided not to plan/commit/execute two week iterations but rather work in a continuous flow, pulling issues from the top of our to do list. Fully described by business analyst issues fell into the JIRA board twice a week after the call with the Client. Next day after the late call team could keep the work on raised tasks, business analyst could sleep till late, work keeps going smoothly. For work the Time and Material pricing model was chosen.