Ticketmaster

Ticketmaster Presence wins “Best in Sports Technology” at Sports Business Awards

Exciting news. Ticketmaster Presence was just awarded “Best in Sports Technology” at Sports Business Journal’s 11th Annual Sports Business Awards! Ticketmaster Presence is the next generation venue access control and fan engagement platform that replaces paper tickets with digital passes. Presence streamlines live event venue operations, provides real-time insights and analytics to venues and teams, enhances security, protects…

Ticketmaster Launches an Action on Google Assistant

  At Google I/O 2017, Google announced that third-party Actions with transactional capabilities would become available via Google Assistant on both Android and iOS devices. The day has arrived. What is Google Assistant? Google Assistant is a virtual personal assistant that can engage users in a two-way conversation to help them get things done. An…

Ticketmaster Presence: When tickets go digital, event going gets better

Live entertainment has enamored fans for thousands of years. Iconic events, that captured the imagination, shaped cultures, defined eras and won hearts. But throughout all this time, one thing has remained the same. The ticket. But that’s now a thing of the past, because with new tools and approaches, the future of ticketing is here…

Interview with our Test Manager of the Year

Isabelle Magnusson leads the Quality Assurance team in Ticketmaster’s Gothenburg office in Sweden, and recently won Test Manager of the Year at the 2016 European Software Testing Awards. We caught up with her to find out a bit more about her success:       How does winning this award make you feel? I feel very…

Getting to Innovation Faster

📌 UPDATE: Tech Maturity is now available on GitHub!  Original post below: Dealing with growing pains is a good problem to have! Over the years, Ticketmaster has evolved from a closed ticketing website to a technology company with an open platform powering products offered by major brands like Facebook and Costco. It has been an enormous challenge…

5 Reasons Why You’ll Love Our Devjams

Devjams are our way to, in the parlance of Steve Blanks, get out of the building and engage our customers. Since my team's mission is to create APIs developers love to make our platform accessible, our customers are the developers using those APIs, and devjams are a great and fun way to engage with them.

How Agile Inceptions Are Changing Ticketmaster’s Team Culture

The Ticketmaster Way An agile inception is a collaborative discovery workshop to visually get all stakeholders and team members to a common understanding prior to the start of a project.  The first time I observed my first agile inception I watched 3 transformations occur.  API developers’ eyes widened as they realized for the first time…

Our journey to shorter release cycles

The team that is responsible for the development of the ticketing websites of Ticketmaster International has been around for many years. Where we came from When we started we had a rather undefined project based process where we released new versions of the site when a project was ready. It was generally many months between…

What Ticketmaster is doing about professionalising software careers

“My wife is doing her accountancy exams so is busy tonight, so I’m staying in to look after the kids” is something you expect to hear in every day conversation. But what about “My partner is doing his software engineering training tonight so I’m unable to come out for a beer?” Why is this still…

Ticketmaster win big at the Techworld Techie awards

A huge night for Ticketmaster last night taking four prizes at the Techworld Techie awards! The Ticketmaster tech team were a very happy bunch taking the award for Most Innovative Team, Rockstar Developer of the Year, Best Place for Developers to Work, and the big one…the Techies 2016 Grand Prix award. “This is great recognition…

Black Friday – Celebrating savings through Kaizen

Whilst the internet whipped itself up into a frenzy about discounted televisions, here at Ticketmaster International we were celebrating savings of a different nature. For a few years, we have been using Kaizen techniques to improve efficiency and quality. “Kaizen”, a term borrowed from lean manufacturing, can be translated from Japanese to mean “good change”:…

Third-Party Components – Hidden Technical Debt

I was recently reminded of something I learned many years ago before coming to Ticketmaster from people much smarter and more experienced than myself. Back then I was pushing to introduce a set of third-party libraries to help lay the groundwork for a replacement for our flagship product, a mainframe based mail and groupware system. The…

Implementing a DevOps Strategy across multiple locations & product teams

Over the last 18 months, a change has begun within the Ticketmaster International Team. Barriers are being broken down between the engineering and operational teams, our different product delivery teams are being aligned and knowledge sharing across teams is happening more and more. What’s changed? We developed a strategy based around DevOps to create a…

Sold-out Event Kicks Off Developer Outreach at Ticketmaster

As we prepare to roll out a ton of new technology and deliver APIs that developers love this year, we've started to engage the developer community to get their feedback on our redesigned developer portal and the updates to our APIs before we launch them. Last Saturday, we held our very first event in Scottsdale, AZ, to a sold-out audience…

Tests and Comic Strips: How Dilbert Explains a Philosophy of Testing

At Ticketmaster, we’re committed to testing. Automated tests improve our stability, helping us sell tickets to more fans and add new features. As a developer, I have an additional motivation to write tests well: tests illustrate the intended behavior of my code. Besides achieving good code coverage, an articulate test quickly teaches another person what…

Using Multiple Languages in Your Development Environment

Many modern software engineers now work on multiple projects over the course of their career, each with different requirements.  These requirements often cause us to consider different tools and even languages to get our work done faster and more efficiently.  The Commerce Order Processing and Order Details team decided to take a different approach and…

2015 London tmTechEvent – Ticketmaster’s in-house tech conference

"Welcome to the tmTechEvent 2015," John McIntyre, head of PMO at Ticketmaster International announced as he scanned my badge. The scanner beeped appreciatively as it recognised my credentials and I was granted entry - just like going to the O2! Apart from the fact that this was our annual Ticketmaster technology summit meeting in a…

In Search of a Reactive Framework (or: How we select new technologies)

About seven or eight months ago we started looking at new and improved ways of creating services instead of our tried and tested Spring framework based approaches. The Spring framework certainly has its merits and we have used it with much success, however, the service we were about to write, called Gateway, was to route…