Iterative Development Model

Twistage uses an iterative, "agile" development model, in which features are added incrementally, updating the live product every two weeks. This makes new functionality available on a constant basis, and means that features will start out small and grow over time. This has a number of positive ramifications on the business and customer experience. For one, the iterative methodology means that Twistage customers always have access to the latest and greatest features. Furthermore, specific customer requests can be slotted into the release cycle and released in weeks, an impossible task when using conventional development processes. Secondly, since new functionality is not released in monolithic chunks every few months, but rather in small incremental changes every two weeks, it is much easier to identify and correct regressions in the code base.

To support this constant upgrade approach, Twistage uses both a human QA staff, that tests the product throughout the two-week cycle, and an automated suite of thousands of tests. These automated tests run against every change to the product as it is committed to the code base, and confirm that the change matches its specification and that existing functionality remains stable. These tests run literally thousands of times per day and the development team is immediately notified if any test fails as the result of a change. Code that fails a test can be immediately corrected and by the end of each two-week cycle, any given change has been tested hundreds of times.

Alongside the automated test suite, the QA staff tests the product throughout the two-week cycle, working with the developers to ensure that all released functionality is solid and matches the original request. To manage and coordinate all this activity, all development is managed through a central ticketing system – developers submit finished tickets to QA for testing, and QA then verifies the behavior before the ticket is considered complete. The iterative model, the automated suite of tests, the QA staff, and the central ticketing system allow the Twistage team to improve the product very quickly while maintaining flexibly and stability.