Leveraging software engineering frameworks, methods and tools to automate CRM pre-sales in real estate applications

Abstract

In this thesis, we leverage the learning from Essence, a “language and kernel“ of Software Engineering, which has resulted from the efforts of the SEMAT initiative founded to bring together industry, research and education to deal with the problem of immature practice in software engineering. We have developed a framework to address the microservices lifecycle using Domain Driven Design (DDD), and introduced three alphas along with the Work Products and Activities associated with those alphas. This is industry agnostic and can be used anywhere. Then onwards, we have focused our attention on automating real estate CRM (presales) as our industry scenario, and have stated with creating an agile approach using Scrum and Essence, intended to address the issues that many Scrum implementations face by leveraging the strengths of Essence. Our next endeavour has been to create a full-fledged software engineering method that adopts the User Story practice to address the requirements area and the microservices practice to develop and deploy the software system. This is intended to provide a comprehensive view of the software endeavor by creating a method adopting a set of practices using Essence as the common ground. This exercise, carried out for our industry scenario, can be similarly extended for other industries as well with Essence as the unifying framework. Delving deeper into CRM pre-sales functionalities, we have decided to focus on the core area of the assignment process that deals with the dynamics of scheduling/ rescheduling of site visit requests from leads in the backdrop of the availability/ unavailability of Sales Executives on the said day of site visit along with applicable constraints. This is essentially a workflow process, and we have used Petri nets to model the same, given the widespread applicability of Petri net in modelling similar application domains and workflows. We have constructed generalized Petri net models of the assignment process and verified if they satisfy the desired properties of the systems being modelled by carrying out their behavioural analysis. We would next consider those processes whose execution is necessary as prerequisites for the assignment process to function, and which are also instrumental in setting up the post-processing aspects of the assignment process. Key outcome of those processes would be the priority setting of leads (indicative of their maturity potential) and the queue adjustment of Sales Executives (indicative of their availability at that point of time). To ensure the smooth running of the automation process it is necessary to consider the operational aspects of these processes we are talking about. Accordingly we have detailed out the underlying functionalities of these processes with their operational characteristics during system go-live followed by the steady state execution. We have modelled those processes using Petri net and validated their conformance to certain verification criteria by doing behavioural analysis. The value of the Petri net based modelling exercises in terms of clarifying and improving our design understanding can also apply to other industry domains where similar Petri net based modelling and analysis can be conducted.