Trafft is a next-generation software for appointment and event scheduling and booking. Inside the application business owners can manage their business locations, employees, their services, vacations and days they perform their services at a schedule different from ordinary. Employees themselves can manage working schedules, customers and services. This is an all-in-one tool for multiple service and event industries - such as salons, healthcare centres, gyms and fitness studios, personal services such as photographers and many more. Furthermore, Trafft provides a booking website or a booking form that can be customized to fit any branding and can be integrated where it is convenient, where customers can book appointments. 

Trafft has been officially released in November 2020, but the idea and the initial development phase started much earlier - around 2018. The primary goal was to offer an outstanding booking solution for anyone who needed it. Based on the experience from Amelia - the WordPress booking plugin, after collecting data on the market needs and understanding the users who require a booking solution and their pain points. The team envisioned a premium booking software that will not be limited to WordPress CMS users, and that would have the simplicity and fastness of a modern app. In 2018 the idea started to get its shape. The initial brainstorming, impact mapping and feature planning started back then. With the help of creative and experienced UX/UI designers, the first screens were ready. Many changes were still performed on those first screens to ensure the best possible user experience for Trafft's future users. The development of the first features started in 2019.

For the November 2020 release, the MVP features were ready. There’s still a lot to do, but the app is already fully functional and has all the essential segments needed for a business to perform the scheduling and automate bookings - such as Booking form on the front-end with a beautiful and straightforward service catalogue, employees and service management, a back-end calendar for a nice and smooth tracking of appointments. Monthly updates with new features are in progress and scheduled to surprise users regularly.

For Trafft, the critical challenge was to make the application flexible and leave the possibility for the user's ability to choose as much as possible. For example, users will customize almost everything from the design, fonts, and colors to the steps and their order in the booking forms. Later, the end-user will have the possibilities to choose the booking duration and all other parts of the booking. The code and logic need to be flexible enough to accept new features and cover a broad range of use-cases.

Technically, the main challenges were: DevOps infrastructure setup, organizing multiple tenants, code, file and database management for them in a way so that the customers’ database and each app instance would be independent and not interfere with each other, at the same time to be resource-optimized, and allow smooth and fast releases of the new versions. To resolve that, we created multiple environments, and custom automated deployment pipelines with Git/BitBucket, Jenkins, and containerization techniques.

Also, one of the challenges was the automation of scheduled tasks, such as sending multiple reminders for all of the tenants in an independent and reliable way; as it is not a single-tenant app, we had to make sure that all schedules are processed as necessary without interfering with each other. To achieve this, we applied Amazon SQS Queueing Service, which allows smooth scalability and works reliably for any number of queues and tenants.

• A fully-featured SaaS, able to provide trial access, a variety of subscription plans

• Fast application able to return available time slots for a long period of time in seconds

• Flexible structure easily adaptable to new needs that offer endless possibilities to end-user

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