Over the past years we have created a re-usable Drupal application with a full Commercetools shop integration for a large pan European B2B food retailer. The application is deployed on more than 20 websites and the shops connect with different ERP systems ranging from SAP to custom solutions. In total our applications serve more than 250.000 unique visitors per month, and the shops generate more than 1 billion € annual revenue.

The core of all customer facing UIs is a design system built with Storybook and web components. These components of the design system are used in Drupal based frontends, React applications, and Vue applications that are running on the same websites as micro frontends.

Besides using the same library for display the frontend applications communicate via APIs with one another.

We have more than 5 teams with over 60 people from two different agencies collaborating on the project. The teams include Design System, Design, CMS, Shop, Native App and Product Teams. On the client side more than 20 stakeholders from more than 10 companies and departments work with the development teams.
Over the past years we have established a robust workflow for all teams and stakeholders to collaborate.

In this session we will show the alignment process between development teams consisting of how to work with the design system, how APIs are defined, how collaborative specification works, and what standardized meetings we use.

We also show how the alignment between the stakeholders is done. Here we show how roadmaps are created, shared features are specified, and how custom functionality for specific stakeholders is created.

Finally we show how quality assurance is done and how deployments and release cycles are organized. For quality assurance we use a mixture between automated testing and manual testing. We have fixed release cycles and deployment is done using Azure CI.

Attendees will:

- Learn how to organize work with different development teams.
- Learn how the collaboration between different stakeholders can be organized.
- See real examples of a large on-going software project that can serve as inspiration to improve.

Session (45 minutes)

Experience level of the audience

Intermediate