We needed to become familiar with the basics of genetics, oncology, and scientific evidence databases in order to communicate effectively with the team of scientists supporting the development process. Lack of documentation made it difficult to understand and improve the complex computational algorithms of core functions.

Understanding complex domain and computations

Unlike the monolithic application, whose components communicate via internal synchronous method calls, the event-driven microservices communicate via a message broker (Apache Kafka), which required new approaches to transaction and error handling. Another migration challenge was that physicians and scientists used the system during the migration process.

Migrating a monolithic system to microservices

Due to the obvious drawbacks of the old AngularJS framework, we had to sacrifice our usual development flow, which resulted in a software that did not work the way we expected. We knew from the beginning that we needed a flexible and powerful tool that came with great developer experience to build a sustainable product. For these reasons, React and Next.js were a clear choice for us.

Migrating to a modern UI framework

Oncompass is a health information company, which helps oncologists and cancer patients to find and access the best cancer therapies. Uniquely in the world, the Oncompass's Realtime Oncology Treatment Calculator is able, based on available scientific evidence, to rank personalised, targeted therapeutic options within 20 milliseconds for 405 cancer types, in 52,000 mutations, based on 26,838 medico-biological norms, and from among 1,417 medicinal active agents.

We have leveraged the network infrastructure automation capabilities of Consul and Nomad to ensure high availability (99.9999%) of the application and the ability to recover from errors independently. This allows the users of the system to work productively without being interrupted and having to wait for the system to be repaired.

Improved availability and resilience

Thanks to the new technology stack and architecture, we were able to reduce development time while code quality increased and fewer errors occurred during development. Although deploying and operating a microservices-based application is more challenging, leveraging Nomad's deployment capabilities resulted in significant improvements that contributed to a shorter time to market.

Reduced time to market

By improving unnecessarily complex elements of the user interface, we were able to significantly improve the overall user experience, which helps scientists and physicians reach important functions much more easily. Moving to the new architecture significantly improved  the overall development experience, and the time required to deploy features was reduced by several days per sprint in most cases.

Improved UX and DX

Oncompass is a health information company, which helps oncologists and cancer patients to find and access the best cancer therapies.

Recognizing the problems and limitations of the old architecture, we sat down with the technical team of Oncompass Medicine to discuss how we could create a more resilient system. We followed the principles of Domain Driven Design to thoroughly analyze the structure and relationships of the components so we could define the bounded contexts that formed the basis for the microservice architecture.

Redesigned architecture

The new technology stack consisting of Next.js, Java 11, Apache Kafka, Nomad, and Kong, made it possible to build a scalable and resilient system with reduced time to market and improved developer experience (DX).

Modern technologies

Since users were actively using the previous system, so we had to thoroughly investigate the biggest dependencies and tried to start our migration process with those functionalities. During this time, we provided the usual maintenance support to the scientists and physicians.

Feature migration

Oncompass Medicine

Because of Medipredict's vision, we have to deal with rapidly changing requirements. We need to create a software solution that meets the needs of experts in a rapidly evolving medical field while adhering to strict requirements of storing medical data. Client management involves several steps, all of which require user-friendly, customized software support.

Supporting the needs of medical experts

Since this is a greenfield project, we had to build our architecture from the bottom up. Our vision was to implement both the architecture and the software code base in a way that supported code maintainability, scalability, testability, simple and separate feature implementations with high availability, fast response times and excellent code quality.

Supporting rapid and versatile growth

Understanding complex medical data can be challenging, especially when you combine multiple medical specialties with large sample sizes. Our team has taken on the challenge of creating a platform that presents medical data in a meaningful and easy-to-understand way, while allowing you to dig deeper into your medical results and the health of your body if you are curious.

Presenting complex medical data to clients

Medipredict is a digital health company providing a comprehensive evaluation of your health status by combining information from multiple sources, such as detailed medical examinations, medical imaging, microbiome analysis, metabolomics, genomics and processing medical history.

With the help of this system, operators and experts can serve ten times more customers than before. By using data validation and multi-level automatic and manual monitoring, customer service became error-free. Workflow automation made processes more efficient, resulting in greater employee confidence and more satisfied customers.

Fully customized admin portal

By leveraging the infrastructural advantages of AWS, we are able to provide a service with 99.99% uptime while maintaining speed at a maximum through dynamic load balancing. Having created an easily extendable architecture, we are able to quickly deliver new functionality to the customer as requirements increase, without compromising code quality.

Fast and resilient architecture

With separate medical, metabolomics, genomics, and microbiome  science modules, codebases are more maintainable and features can be delivered faster. This architecture allows us to create specialized development teams for each module, leading to a deeper understanding of the domain and a closer relationship between the software engineers and the domain experts.

Separated domain modules

Medipredict is a digital health company providing a comprehensive evaluation of your health status by combining information from multiple sources.

Through this portal, doctors, experts and operators can manage the client journey. During this journey, operators organize events, doctors and experts upload medical results and evaluations on this portal. The scientific modules are able to perform automatic analysis and data processing. This solution creates a system where the knowledge of the experts and the speed and precision of the computers complement each other. By combining Java and Python modules, we are able to perform scientific calculations while maintaining the highest coding standards.

Admin portal and scientific modules

State-of-the-art AWS cloud solutions help us provide the highest availability and scalability possible. Every piece of code we implement is reviewed. In addition, each feature has automated tests such as end-to-end, integration, and unit tests supported by test containers to further ensure code quality. In addition, our codebase is separated in a package by feature basis, making it easy to add new aspects of the project or remove existing ones to support flexibility.

Cloud solutions with high quality standards

To help people without medical expertise understand their health condition, we have created the Client Portal. This portal is designed to give you an overview of your overall health and organ system in a simple but meaningful way, while allowing you to drill down into the details and take a closer look at your metabolomic biomarkers. You can also request a detailed PDF report to read at your leisure.

Client portal and reports

Medipredict

International environment can always be challenging. Dealing with language barriers and different time zones can lead to communication problems, but these can be overcome through proactive and transparent communication.

International team

As our partner’s customer base grows, it has become difficult to manage everything individually. Therefore to achieve maximum efficiency and deliver quickly, it was necessary to structure our code and components so that they can be reused by many customers.

Reusability

Manually managing thousands of lines of content could be difficult and time consuming. We needed to think outside the box and create a visual content editor tool that would save both content managers and developers a lot of time in the long run.

Manual content management

Tracking user progress is a must for an enterprise-ready e-learning system. Our goal was to provide a reporting module that would meet the rigorous requirements of an enterprise system while providing flexibility with detailed search and query capabilities.

Analytics and reporting

An enterprise system must also be elastic and highly available. With thousands of employees accessing the service every day, our development team needed to find a solution that met these requirements.

Product for large companies

To shorten development cycles, we had to start thinking about high-level scenarios that a user might face when using a particular piece of software, to ensure that even the smallest changes to our codebase would be stable and compatible with existing code.

Quality assurance

Moovs Digital is a digital agency with a mission to create the best learning and buying experience in the online world. By providing creative and innovative solutions with effective integration, Moovs Digital is able to help its partners increase the commercial success of their business as well as expand and strengthen their brand presence with tangible results.

Through the use of service workers and streamlined bundling of training materials, we have been able to allow students to download long courses to their local computers in a SCORM-compatible format.

System with offline mode

Thanks to our interactive content management solution, creating, editing or translating content without supervision could not be easier. By leveraging our design system and React’s component-based approach, users can create modules and courses in their browser without any coding knowledge.

Significantly faster content management

Due to the in-house developed reusable component library, our development team does not have to rely on many outside dependencies which  increases confidence in the product. This also means new applications can be developed in significantly less time. 

Design system for multiple clients

To provide a flexible reporting system, we needed to integrate several Google-provided services, such as Google BigQuery and Google Data Studio, to make the reports visually appealing while providing advanced query capabilities on the data.

Detailed reports about student progress

Moovs Digital is a digital agency with a mission to create the best learning and buying experience in the online world.

In order to provide our customers with the same look and feel across multiple platforms, we have developed a library that allows us to import and use various components with proven functionality and accessibility features to quickly build React apps for multiple brands.

Reusable component library

E-learning content is managed in JSON format. So we needed to find a solution that would allow users to create and edit content without having any development skills. Therefore, we created a no-code interface through which the user can interact with the content's code and visualize it on the fly.

Interactive content management

The optimal choice was AWS and the Elastic Container Service. It provides us with an easy-to-configure infrastructure that simplifies communication between services in a cluster, while providing resiliency and durability when services are under heavy load.

AWS and ECS

Processing a data store with millions of user activities is a challenging task. We have integrated features from Google Big Query and Google Data Studio to provide a powerful way to search for data while providing a flexible and user friendly interface for viewing data.

Learning Record Store (LRS) integration with Google Data Studio

Moovs Digital

Before our company took over the development in 2019, there were two native SZIN apps, both built with older technologies. They also functioned erratically and with errors. The Android version sometimes even crashed immediately after launch.

The two native codebases used Java and Objective-C - two languages that were replaced years ago in the mobile development world - followed no industry standards and had no architectural design. A third codebase - the backend - was handed over in an incomplete form - whole chunks of code were missing, which meant that some functionality simply did not work. Also, there was no documentation and/or knowledge transfer in any form.

Explore the inherited codebase

After considering the possibility of fixing the native app bugs, we decided to do a full rewrite in Flutter. By then Flutter had reached a level of maturity that we felt was satisfactory to try. As it turned out, the Flutter components work pretty well on both platforms, not to mention the various packages available out there solving the most common mobile development problems. Supplementing that with the growing community and support behind Flutter, it was quite obvious to us that this was the way to go.

Ensure high code- and product quality

An app that crashes immediately does not please its users or serve them in any way - it just produces tons of one-star ratings and negative feedback. That was the Android app before 2019, and the verdict on the iOS version was not much better. So our second goal - besides the rewrite - was to raise user satisfaction to the highest possible level.

Restore reputation of the apps

Hungary's longest running festival in Szeged, attended by tens of thousands each year. We have developed iOS and Android apps to support participants during the festival. 

After the release of the new version of the apps, we continuously monitored the statistics on their usage. We noticed a big difference compared to the previous version: The number of app deletions dropped drastically, and the number of returning users increased significantly. In fact, the new Android and iOS apps performed much better in terms of user acquisition across all relevant metrics.

Enormous growth in the number of returning users

Maintaining a common codebase takes significantly less time than maintaining separate Android and iOS codebases. The design team created a unified user interface for the SZIN app across the two platforms, so we can manage not only the business logic, but also the UI code in one place. 
Now everything only needs to be developed once.With Flutter's hot reload, changes to the code are immediately visible in the application while maintaining the current state, further increasing development efficiency. 
Thanks to the rich repository of third-party packages that, like the components of the Flutter framework, provide well-maintained, thoroughly tested solutions, we can release bug-free applications from our hands with great confidence.

Increased productivity and confidence

The most important measure of an application's success is user feedback. There is a significant shift between application reviews received before 2019 and those received since. The former were almost invariably 1-star ratings accompanied by negative criticism and complaints, while the latter were mostly 5-star ratings with absolutely positive feedback and words of praise. 
Of course, it's not easy to translate such a bad review and it does not happen overnight, but we will continue to do our best to provide an even better user experience for SZIN app users in the future.

Way better user feedback

Hungary's longest running festival in Szeged, attended by tens of thousands each year.

The natural choice for applications like SZIN is Flutter, which can provide a cross-platform and uniform experience. With a powerful language like Dart behind it, development is easier, more efficient, and faster. The machine-optimized code generated by ahead-of-time compilation leads to better performance on both Android and iOS devices, while just-in-time compilation results in immediate reflection of changes to the source code, while also providing stateful hot reload, where changes can be reflected in the running app without losing any state of the app.

Native apps rewritten in Flutter and Dart

We worked with a design studio to thoroughly redesign the app's user interface. The new design they created was well thought out, consistent, and visually appealing from the start. The consistent design also made our job easier, allowing us to create reusable components that look exactly the same out-of-the-box on both platforms - again, thanks to Flutter.

Complete User Interface redesign

To ensure code quality and consistency, perform testing, and automate code signing and publishing to app stores, using a continuous integration/delivery and deployment tool can be a solution. In the case of SZIN we chose Codemagic which is capable of doing all of the above. It also manages different product flavours (dev and prod in our case), environment variables (like Firebase configuration files), and manages the secrets associated with app signing.

Introduction of a CI/CD tool

SZIN

When the client reached us for the first time, there was already a deadline set, but the full scope fortunately wasn't. After walking us through the exact requirements, it became clear that all of the functionality won’t fit into the set deadline. We had to figure out something together with Rockhome to deliver the application in time with the most required features. They were very helpful during the whole process, this phase established the basis of our cooperation for the entire project.

Tight deadlines

In most cases, by the time of the actual application development, there are already some UI designs created by designers and which were already validated through a lot of iterations of discussing their usability and correctness with the customer. For this project, it was not the case. We were given some very high-level design guidelines with only a handful of actual screen designs for the most common types of screens.

Lack of UI design

The initial idea was to develop the application for both Android and iOS platforms. At that time, there was no cross-platform technology that was mature enough to develop such an application. We had some knowledge of Flutter, but Flutter had not yet reached its first stable (1.0) version. So we had to find a solution that would allow us to be ready on time and at the same time allow the application to be used by as many users as possible.

Support the most users

Rockhome is a real estate company with the vision to improve the market, the economy, and people's life. Their mobile apps support the real estate agents' daily work, maximizing their productivity in an easy-to-use way. 

In the end, it turned out to be the most effective solution if we develop the application only for Android and optimize the UI for a specific type of tablet, and then provide the service to the end users together with the tablet. Since the first edition, the range of users has been constantly expanding, and since then we have been making minor changes to the application based on their valuable feedback.

Successful app publishing

We planned for the scenario, that we might have to make the application available for phones one day. When the client asked us for this, we were able to make the application work and look good on this form factor with just a few changes and rearrangement of UI elements. The phone version also has an extra function that is only available in this version.

Support phone version besides the tablet

Again, thanks to planning ahead, it was easy for us when Rockhome asked us to create the Bulgarian version of the application as well. At first, we tried to further develop the two apps under a common codebase, introducing conditions where the functionality of the two apps differed. Over time, however, so many differences came to light that justified the fork of the repository, and since then the two applications have lived separate lives.

Two native Android apps

Rockhome is a real estate company with the vision to improve the market, the economy, and people's life.

Since the deadline was tight and we needed additional development resources to deliver on time, we decided to ask for the help of another IT company and outsource part of the development to them. This also meant that we had to work closely with them on a daily basis, as well as a serious estimation and ramp-up period at the beginning of the cooperation. Things worked out well, the cooperation proved to be fruitful during the project.

Co-operation with another IT company

Since we weren’t given a full design guide, we had to design the look of each screen as part of the development. We did a lot of brainstorming in front of the whiteboard figuring out the most optimal arrangement of UI elements, taking into account all the data to be displayed, often running several rounds with the client, until we arrived at the most satisfactory version for them.

Own UI design

During the development, we used the latest best practices in order to make it easier to expand the application in the future. We followed the application architecture recommended by Google, utilizing a lot of Android Jetpack libraries, thus making our application concise and robust. We kept in mind that in the future the app could be easily ported to other form factors besides tablets, as well as easily translated into other languages.

Case Studies

Oncompass Medicine

Medipredict

Moovs Digital

SZIN

Rockhome

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