Guaranteeing Scalability in a Healthcare Web Platform
Although iterative and incremental development methods can be traced back as early as 1957, ever since the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was published in 2001, Agile methodologies have become an industry standard. However, only recently have these same methods reached operations through site reliability engineering and DevOps practices.
Today, we have a greater set of tools to automate testing, deployment, and infrastructure, where constant monitoring helps to discover the root causes of production issues that previously required vast amounts of craft and skill to unravel.
More than ever, we have reached a state in which technology and development skills have made it possible to improve site reliability and reduce downtime. Still, many companies today struggle to come by the right talent to solve them.
About Gennev
According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, nearly half of all U.S. counties lack a single OB-GYN provider. Part of Gennev’s mission is to address this shortage by helping women understand and manage their health in a personalized way through their online community and telemedicine services.
That is why when Gennev — a Seattle based telemedicine company striving to help women in their journey through menopause — started to experience these same issues, at BairesDev we quickly put together a healthy DevOps pipeline to ensure website failure was a thing of the past.
BairesDev’s expert engineers developed custom solutions to enhance the full-stack development of Gennev’s web platform.
Their Needs
Right from the start, our team made sure that staging and disaster recovery environments were correctly set in place. This ensured that separate production equivalents could be used to conduct smoke tests prior to production deployments, as well as set up an appropriate backup/failover alternative respectively.
This freed Gennev from its prior burdens and allowed them to focus on planning additional features that could contribute to enhancing their brand. With the majority of their webpage traffic originating from mobile devices, having a responsive design that could merge existing functionality with ease of use while sustaining increased demand over time, was key to improving their overall customer experience.
While their current presence operates in 23 states, a crucial milestone involves expanding to all 50 states by the end of 2020. This, in turn, made scalability a major aspect moving forward. For this reason, a plan was made to maintain their legacy webpage while a new one that could better address their goals was put into place.
Our Expert Solutions
In this way, BairesDev has become an integral partner for Gennev in providing highly skilled engineering capacity in the areas of modern, front-end interface design, site reliability, scalability, and maintenance. Using Adobe XD as a design collaboration tool, visual specifications for new components are implemented in React while backend business logic is done using Node.js.
Incremental development enhances flexibility by effectively accommodating user needs, helping designers and developers build new products and thus, constantly improving over time. As in all projects related to the healthcare industry, security measures are prioritized as they are critical due to confidentiality issues and because of the need to comply with industry data standards such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability).