How to manage multiple clients with slightly different business rules?

Question

We have written a software package for a particular niche industry. This package has been pretty successful, to the extent that we have signed up several different clients in the industry, who use us as a hosted solution provider, and many others are knocking on our doors. If we achieve the kind of success that we're aiming for, we will have literally hundreds of clients, each with their own web site hosted on our servers.

Trouble is, each client comes in with their own little customizations and tweaks that they need for their own local circumstances and conditions, often (but not always) based on local state or even county legislation or bureaucracy. So while probably 90-95% of the system is the same across all clients, we're going to have to build and support these little customizations.

Moreover, the system is still very much a work in progress. There are enhancements and bug fixes happening continually on the core system that need to be applied across all clients.

We are writing code in .NET (ASP, C#), MS-SQL 2005 is our DB server, and we're using SourceGear Vault as our source control system. I have worked with branching in Vault before, and it's great if you only need to keep 2 or 3 branches synchronized - but we're looking at maintaining hundreds of branches, which is just unthinkable.

My question is: How do you recommend we manage all this?

I expect answers will be addressing things like object architecture, web server architecture, source control management, developer teams etc. I have a few ideas of my own, but I have no real experience in managing something like this, and I'd really appreciate hearing from people who have done this sort of thing before.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is not something that you want to solve with source control management, but within the architecture of your application.

I would come up with some sort of plugin like architecture. Which plugins to use for which website would then become a configuration issue and not a source control issue.

This allows you to use branches, etc. for the stuff that they are intended for: parallel development of code between (or maybe even over) releases. Each plugin becomes a seperate project (or subproject) within your source code system. This also allows you to combine all plugins and your main application into one visual studio solution to help with dependency analisys etc.

Loosely coupling the various components in your application is the best way to go.

Answer 2

I would recommend against maintaining separate code branches per customer. This is a nightmare to maintain working code against your Core.

I do recommend you do implement the Strategy Pattern and cover your "customer customizations" with automated tests (e.g. Unit & Functional) whenever you are changing your Core.

UPDATE:

I recommend that before you get too many customers, you need to establish a system of creating and updating each of their websites. How involved you get is going to be balanced by your current revenue stream of course, but you should have an end in mind.

For example, when you just signed up Customer X (hopefully all via the web), their website will be created in XX minutes and send the customer an email stating it's ready.

You definitely want to setup a Continuous Integration (CI) environment. TeamCity is a great tool, and free.

With this in place, you'll be able to check your updates in a staging environment and can then apply those patches across your production instances.

Bottom Line: Once you get over a handful of customers, you need to start thinking about automating your operations and your deployment as yet another application to itself.

UPDATE: This post highlights the negative effects of branching per customer.

Answer 3

Layer the application. One of those layers contains customizations and should be able to be pulled out at any time without affect on the rest of the system. Application- and DB-level "triggers" (quoted because they may or many not employ actual DB triggers) that call customer-specific code or are parametrized with customer keys) are very helpful.

Core should never be customized, but you must layer it in somewhere, even if it is simplistic web filtering.

Answer 4

As mention before, source control does not sound like a good solution for your problem. To me it sounds that is better yo have a single code base using a multi-tenant architecture. This way you get a lot of benefits in terms of managing your application, load on the service, scalability, etc.

Our product using this approach and what we have is some (a lot) of core functionality that is the same for all clients, custom modules that are used by one or more clients and at the core a the "customization" is a simple workflow engine that uses different workflows for different clients, so each clients gets the core functionality, its own workflow(s) and some extended set of modules that are either client specific or generalized for more that one client.

Here's something to get you started on multi-tenancy architecture:

Multi-Tenant Data Architecture

Answer 5

Our software has very similar requirements and I've picked up a few things over the years.

First of all, such customizations will cost you both in the short and long-term. If you have control over it, place some checks and balances such that sales & marketing do not over-zealously sell customizations.

I agree with the other posters that say NOT to use source control to manage this. It should be built into the project architecture wherever possible. When I first began working for my current employer, source control was being used for this and it quickly became a nightmare.

We use a separate database for each client, mainly because for many of our clients, the law or the client themselves require it due to privacy concerns, etc...

I would say that the business logic differences have probably been the least difficult part of the experience for us (your mileage may vary depending on the nature of the customizations required). For us, most variations in business logic can be broken down into a set of configuration values which we store in an xml file that is modified upon deployment (if machine specific) or stored in a client-specific folder and kept in source control (explained below). The business logic obtains these values at runtime and adjusts its execution appropriately. You can use this in concert with various strategy and factory patterns as well -- config fields can contain names of strategies etc... . Also, unit testing can be used to verify that you haven't broken things for other clients when you make changes. Currently, adding most new clients to the system involves simply mixing/matching the appropriate config values (as far as business logic is concerned).

More of a problem for us is managing the content of the site itself including the pages/style sheets/text strings/images, all of which our clients often want customized. The current approach that I've taken for this is to create a folder tree for each client that mirrors the main site - this tree is rooted at a folder named "custom" that is located in the main site folder and deployed with the site. Content placed in the client-specific set of folders either overrides or merges with the default content (depending on file type). At runtime the correct file is chosen based on the current context (user, language, etc...). The site can be made to serve multiple clients this way. Efficiency may also be a concern - you can use caching, etc... to make it faster (I use a custom VirtualPathProvider). The largest problem we run into is the burden of visually testing all of these pages when we need to make changes. Basically, to be 100% sure you haven't broken something in a client's custom setup when you have changed a shared stylesheet, image, etc... you would have to visually inspect every single page after any significant design change. I've developed some "feel" over time as to what changes can be comfortably made without breaking things, but it's still not a foolproof system by any means.

In my case I also have no control other than offering my opinion over which visual/code customizations are sold so MANY more of them than I would like have been sold and implemented.

Answer 6

Without more info, such as types of client specific customization, one can only guess how deep or superficial the changes are. Some simple/standard approaches to consider:

• If you can keep a central config specifying the uniqueness from client to client
• If you can centralize the business rules to one class or group of classes
• If you can store the business rules in the database and pull out based on client
• If the business rules can all be DB/SQL based (each client having their own DB

Overall hard coding differences based on client name/id is very problematic, keeping different code bases per client is costly (think of the complete testing/retesting time required for the 90% that doesn't change)...I think more info is required to properly answer (give some specifics)

Answer 7

What we have is a a core datbase that has the functionality that all clients get. Then each client has a separate database that contains the customizations for that client. This is expensive in terms of maintenance. The other problem is that when two clients ask for a simliar functionality, it is often done differnetly by the two separate teams. There is currently little done to share custiomizations between clients and make common ones become part of the core application. Each client has their own application portal, so we don't have the worry about a change to one client affecting some other client.

Right now we are looking at changing to a process using a rules engine, but there is some concern that the perfomance won't be there for the number of records we need to be able to process. However, in your circumstances, this might be a viable alternative.

Answer 8

I've used some applications that offered the following customizations:

1. Web pages were configurable - we could drag fields out of view, position them where we wanted with our own name for the field label.
2. Add our own views or stored procedures and use them in: data grids (along with an update proc) and reports. Each client would need their own database.
3. Custom mapping of Excel files to import data into system.
4. Add our own calculated fields.
5. Ability to run custom scripts on forms during various events.
6. Identify our own custom fields.

If you clients are larger companies, you're almost going to need your own SDK, API's, etc.

Answer 9

Other great resource is the series Ayende did, you search on his blog for multi-tenancy.