getta!Table
Challenge
The company iQueSoft has developed the Facebook application getta!Table for the American digital agency Aericon. This agency helps startups to turn their ideas into products. The idea of the project getta!Table was to create a service, which would enable Boston restaurants to register and to offer discounts, specials on their products – restaurant daily deals. The customer wanted this service to be available in the social network Facebook as an application in order to advertise restaurants by means of Social Media Marketing (SMM) and to enable restaurants to add this application to their Facebook pages. The application was to support 2 payment modes – monthly subscriptions and certain fees taken from each deal. The customer provided us with detailed requirements for this project.
Requirements
- To develop unit tests for the project
- To create modern UI
- The application should enable the restaurants to offer their clients e-Gift Cards, loyalty e-cards, tickets to special events and other opportunities directly through the restaurant’s Facebook page
- The application should have possibility to be added to a restaurant’s Facebook page to let the restaurant’s clients see the screen with daily deals of this particular restaurant while visiting the restaurant’s Facebook page. Each restaurant must have a unique link to access their offer list
Solution
Initially, the customer got in touch with us because they were looking for high skilled .NET developers for this project, so we started to discuss the project getta!Table at once. During the discussion we agreed to divide the project work: the customer was to create the design, we were to develop the software. Three developers such as a front-end developer and two backend developers participated in the project development from our side. We also agreed to follow the Agile/Scrum methodology.
For testing difficult parts of the code in order to reduce a number of errors during the future development we have developed Unit Tests specially for this project.
We developed 3 interfaces for this application:
- Facebook application for restaurants’ clients. Different deals offered by Boston restaurants can be found there. Making choice of a deal a user can pay for it by means of a credit card. Then the client gets an e-mail with QR-code, which is produced to a restaurant’s staff while receiving the deal. Application users can also add certain restaurants to the category “My favourite”, after that these users receive notifications about new deals in the restaurants.
- An interface, which enables restaurant owners or managers to add daily deals, their descriptions, expiration dates to the application page as well as to set their repetition periods. Unlike the standard daily deals website, this tool allows entrepreneurs to check the whole process of their offers: from publishing to selling.
- An interface for admins. This interface enables admins to check if added daily deals correspond with all the rules as well as if the restaurants have paid for the subscriptions.
Additionally, we developed a program, which enables users to send gift certificates. After buying this gift certificate an indicated person receives QR-code via e-mail. Users can also buy a certificate for a dinner in a particular restaurant and send the deal via e-mail as a present by means of this program.