Case Study. PayPal s Sparkline Case Study. About Sparkline

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1 Our People. Your Solution. PayPal s Sparkline Case Study Case Study PayPal, an ebay subsidiary, is a digital payment provider offering flexible payment methods with more than 81 million active accounts in 190 markets worldwide. PayPal is the faster, safer way to pay and get paid online, via mobile devices and in store. The service allows people to send money without sharing financial information, with the flexibility to pay using their account balances, bank accounts, credit cards or promotional financing. With more than 123 million active accounts in 190 markets and 25 currencies around the world, PayPal enables global commerce. Sparkline is a social software solution designed by PayPal s Data Management team for PayPal s internal use. It leverages PayPal s existing collection of enterprise data with the power of social networks to dramatically improve the accessibility and sharing of business intelligence and information throughout the company. Unlike other enterprise social software, Sparkline provides immediate access to information that is of interest to PayPal s data consumers. As data consumers find and use information, Sparkline builds a powerful, collaborative network that gives access to the latest insights and information that is most relevant to users. Client: PayPal Industry: Finance Services: Software Development Web Development Database Development Software Integration UI/UX Creative Design Enterprise Software About Sparkline Sparkline is a hybrid data-visualization and social networking tool. The visualization part of the tool displays datasets from the corporate business intelligence reporting system. These visual reports are called cards. Cards are defined by analysts and collected by data consumers, such as managers, product managers, business and financial analysts, and other business stakeholders. These data consumers can collect cards, suggest cards to other users, comment and start threaded conversations. Sparkline is constantly pulling in new data sets, which also updates associated cards, keeping reports in real-time. Cards allow data consumers to begin building an information ecosystem at PayPal. Users can easily click on any card, chart or title and see the detailed view that contains meta-data for the card and the original report, as well as a link to the larger, more in-depth report. Based on the user community, the comments widget may contain insight and links to additional information. Sparkline believes that information and insights are found through social networking. A valuable feature of cards is their ability to be easily shared and discussed. Sparkline also examines users interests and runs a social algorithm to create a graph of similar users, helping to find relevant information based on users of similar interest. P (858) F (858) fairwaytech.com 1

2 Challenge Bring PayPal s new internal data analytics tool, called Sparkline, from a rough beta to a production quality application. PayPal s Data Management team is a global organization that helps PayPal deliver products and services driven by the massive amounts of data that PayPal creates both internally and externally. Data Management is responsible for managing and delivering PayPal s business data to its user community. It is the data warehousing and business intelligence group at PayPal. The Sparkline dashboard provides scrolling lists of data visualization collections, or cards. Millions of transactions take place through PayPal s services every day. Over 100 data analysts study data points about the PayPal product and provide real-time insight into operations. Their activities include tracking sales trends, evaluating new product performance, analyzing general usage metrics, and more. Data Management accesses information from sources located around the globe. The need arose for an internal data analytics tool that would import data sets from sources within PayPal s vast network. Using this vision to guide them, Data Management designed Sparkline, a report gathering, data visualization and collaboration tool. Data Management was ready to take Sparkline from its beta form to a usable application. However, PayPal did not have staff readily available to fill all of the roles necessary for the project. In order to meet their goal of releasing Sparkline to its internal data analyst community in four months, Pay Pal needed to quickly add quality people to the development team who could make immediate contributions to the project. P (858) F (858) fairwaytech.com 2

3 Solution Combine the expertise of Fairway s developers with PayPal s in-house talents to successfully deliver Sparkline. Fairway is considered a preferred provider for ebay, having delivered many successful projects for them in the past. As a result, PayPal turned to Fairway to provide the additional experts needed to complete Sparkline on-time and within budget. Fairway joined PayPal mid-way through the Alpha phase of Sparkline s development cycle. Having lost Sparkline s front-end engineer, PayPal s in-house team for the project included one technical lead / developer and one user interface (UI) designer. The UI designer had just completed a new UI design that needed to be implemented to meet the initial Beta phase, with plans to fine tune it in time for the first production release. Fairway provided one back-end developer a Senior Java Development Engineer, and one front-end developer a Senior UI Engineer, and helped successfully implement the new UI design in two one-week sprints. Users can scroll through cards using the filmstrip at the top of the screen. Once selected, a card is displayed in detail below the filmstrip. The charts within each card are interactive and support rollover for additional details. Users can comment or start a threaded conversation on any card. After the initial production release, several new features were requested. One of these requests was to make the core features of the web application function as a single page web app. To accomplish this, Fairway s back-end and front-end developers created a set of restful JSON API s with Spring MVC. Next, they refactored the UI to display a new thumbnail carousel of visualizations. Upon completion, users could navigate the filmstrip and change the selected chart in a single page web app. PayPal also wanted improved global search capabilities for Sparkline s new single page web application. Fairway implemented this feature by integrating Hibernate Search, which indexes the data model using Apache Lucene. P (858) F (858) fairwaytech.com 3

4 Fairway created a new search box for the single page web app, enabling a keyword search to be performed against all visualization meta data in the data model and return search results. This element was fully implemented in two one-week sprints. In addition to importing data from PayPal s data warehouses, PayPal wanted Sparkline to be able to import data from Excel. Fairway researched options, proposed a solution, and implemented a visual Excel data import feature to the web application. The resulting feature provides users with the ability to import a spreadsheet, see it displayed in a grid developed by Fairway, and then select worksheets to import. Using Apache POI, SlickGrid.js, jquery and a new set of restful API s, Fairway s developers implemented this feature in four sprints. Creating a visualization card is fully dynamic. As a user selects dataset metrics, attributes and layouts of the visualization are dynamically updated. Technology Tools and technology used: Back End: Java Spring Core Spring MVC Spring MVC with Restful API s JSON Apache POI Hibernate JPA Oracle Hibernate Search Apache Lucene MongoDB ActiveMQ and JMS Front End: HTML / CSS / Javascript Underscore JQuery SlickGrid JCarousel Build: Git Maven Jenkins Continuous Integration Test: JUnit Spring integration testing JMeter P (858) F (858) fairwaytech.com 4

5 Benefits Fairway was a key contributor to bringing Sparkline from a rough beta to a production quality application, while meeting PayPal s tight deadline of four months. Fairway s front-end and back-end developers integrated seamlessly into PayPal s remote Sparkline team, and worked closely with them to develop requirements that were realistic given time and budget constraints. The information Sparkline provides has become a key part of PayPal s internal decision-making process. Using Sparkline, PayPal is able to accomplish mission critical tasks, including: Open the channels of communication within the company Decrease the time to communicate new data reports Expose internal data consumers to information they were not aware of prior to Sparkline Increase the accessibility of data, enhance data discovery, and improve clarity of data Help analysts identify and focus on PayPal s most important data Illustrate a products popularity, functionality and opportunities for improvement Working with Fairway Technologies on the Sparkline project was an enjoyable process. Fairway s team members are talented, produce results, and are torchbearers for innovation. I look forward to working with Fairway again. Kyle Forbes Senior Manager: Data Platform Product Management P (858) F (858) fairwaytech.com 5