Developing a communication system between public services and external companies

Our customer

A large company in the public sector with a diverse set of services for German citizens.

A comprehensive data directory should be created for the care of underage citizens, through which various employees of internal teams and external companies can communicate with one another. The directory is intended to offer additional functions.

The challenge

We should develop an internal application for our customer, which his employees can use within the company. At the same time, the partner companies should receive an external application with the same data basis. In addition, everyone involved want to use the information in their own existing applications. That means: many stakeholders, each with their own needs, frequently changing requirements – everything under great time pressure.

Challenge accepted!

Since we have a lot of experience with different technologies and their strengths for different layers of applications, we were able to quickly determine the optimal technologies: the AngularJS-framework is used for a barrier-free frontend; in the backend, we decided with the customer in favor of JavaEE. We chose Apache Kafka for data stream communication and RESTful design for the APIs to other apps.

The Implementation

With several parties involved, close, regular and transparent agreements are crucial. It is important to question existing processes and improve them together if necessary. Our big advantage: We mainly work with full stack developers – i.e. generalists who on the one hand have a lot of experience in individual script- and programming languages and the requirements of microservices, but at the same time have knowledge of the entire platform. This enables a performant, high quality including clean code and high test coverage. Our developers also prefer to work agile. This helps them enormously with dynamic requirements and a tight time frame. In addition, there is profound knowledge of Kanban and Scrum, a lot of experience and a high level of motivation – including everything that a versatile project needs. Together we also cleared the last, unforeseen hurdle: shortly before the launch on the Weblogic, the platform for the app was to be converted to a container platform with Docker containers.

Goal achieved, happy customer!

We delivered our MVP, i.e. a version with all the important core functions, on time. All those involved were very satisfied after the first use, and the required accessibility was also fully met. We are proud of that too: Despite the tight timeframe, our MVP had neither category A or B bugs!

What’s next?

We can build perfectly on this solid software basis. The next step is to improve the user experience – the frontend should become even more intuitive, clearer and easier to understand. New, exciting functions are already in development, and the move from Marathon to the more flexible Kubernetes is pending. We look forward to continuing to work with our customer.