Development Phases Explained
We take the on-going development of the LiquidShop ecommerce platform very seriously. Our focus on this means that you receive the best level of support and have an ecommerce website that is stable, flexible and powerful. Ecommerce software is complex and no solution is totally bug-free, however we have adopted a structured approach to development that ensures bugs are kept to an absolute minimum, allowing you to focus on running your business.
The alternative, developing LiquidShop on a constant day-to-day basis would lead to an unstable and hard-to-support system. Our development structure allows us to take a considered approach and to focus on what is important, properly planning new features with sufficient research being carried out. It also means that we can take full account of our clients' input via the Uservoice forum.
We develop LiquidShop in three development phases each year, and we have created a diagram to explain this. You will see that we research, develop and maintain LiquidShop in turn during each 4-month period. During a typical development phase, we start out by discussing the changes put forward by our clients via the Uservoice forum along with our own plans and ideas, some of which would have been researched during non development periods. We then agree which features will be built during this phase, and then work is started.
Throughout the following 2 months, features are added, tested and rolled out to all LiquidShops. Some of these will be visual and you will notice the change instantly, whilst others are more functional or may require configuration changes to your site in order to work. At the end of this period we stop development to allow the system to settle down, to iron out any bugs, and to start researching ready for the next development phase.