Industrial risk management software support
For 3+ years, Itransition’s dedicated team has been supporting an industrial risk management SaaS platform while also automating internal project reporting and delivery cycles.
Context
Our customer is a Netherlands-based global provider of industrial risk management software for high-risk industries such as Oil & Gas, Chemicals, and Pharmaceuticals. The customer boasts 5K+ clients globally, 200+ employees, and 10+ years of experience in implementing their solutions.
The customer turned to Itransition to set up a dedicated development center for a range of software engineering and support tasks regarding their flagship product, an enterprise SaaS application for maintenance planning and execution, accident prevention, and safety assurance. This industrial application comes in packages that can be extended upon business subscribers’ requests and enables the following:
- Risk management, isolation management, and workflow control integrated within one system
- Legal compliance with applicable industry regulations
- Next-level information management with real-time visualized overviews and configurable printouts
Itransition’s team joined the project when 8 versions of the SaaS platform had already been developed, with versions 7 and 8 both available to the subscribers. The overall goals were to update the platform’s tech stack and move from the monolithic architecture to a microservices-based one to ensure improved performance and provide for different hosting opportunities. The customer also planned to build some new features for version 8 and continue providing their risk management software support and maintenance for end users still running version 7.
Solution
A custom module
For version 8, Itransition’s team implemented Work Packs—the new module for preventative maintenance management that:
- Increases visibility of preventative operations
- Ensures the maintenance steps follow a specific order
- Improves safety with role-based access and built-in business rules (e.g., for document authorization)
- Allows custom configurations, such as adjusting workflows, setting up statuses, adding dependencies, etc. for each specific client
Frontend refactoring
The customer also involved our team for the frontend refactoring of version 8. For improved UI/UX, they decided to convert their solution from Reflux Store to Redux Store. Our frontend engineers made changes to the solution, ensuring that its performance was not affected.
A custom data migration tool
Some of the platform’s end business users opted to move to version 8 due to its better performance, updated tech stack, improved UI, and new hosting opportunities.
This move required migrating these users’ existing data, such as history of previous risk assessment results, maintenance backlog, etc.; however, the events and event sourcing in version 7 radically differed from those in version 8. For this reason, our team developed a custom data migration tool, which allows the customer to map events from one product version to another, ensuring seamless migration.
Integrations
Our team helped integrate version 8 with the customer’s internal systems for barrier management, which monitors the barrier health of end client’s assets, and for shift management, which offers optimal shift control and process. We also integrated the platform with end users’ SAP systems storing their work orders, queue points, etc.
Support and continuous improvement
Itransition’s dedicated team also delivers the risk management software support and enhancements for version 7 still in use by some clients who don’t plan to migrate to the newer version till their current subscription expires.
Within the scope of this service, we fix bugs and occurring issues while also delivering new features. For instance, we changed the map provider for one of the clients upon their request. We also implemented performance tests for TeamCity, allowing the customer to track performance issues as early as possible.
Project reporting automation
Itransition also helped the customer to automate internal project reporting through Power BI implementation and developed a custom Quality Report template, bringing down the time required for product managers to create the report from one week to 15 seconds.
The report can be embedded into any project management system, for example, Jira or TeamCity. It comprises multiple sections and provides information about:
- The number of features delivered in the current release, compared to the previous release
- The number of defects/bugs found
- Resolution rate
- Test cases created, and more
The Quality Report helps the customer quickly get actionable insights into team performance and improve on it as necessary.
For the customer’s tech leads, our team also created a real-time graphical dashboard with the project’s technical health information (e.g., the number of issues violated, stabilization plan execution, GitHub security alerts). The dashboard automatically pulls data from Jira, SonarQube, GitHub, and TestRail for the tech leads to quickly get actionable data regarding the code quality, issues to be fixed, and more.
Delivery cycle improvements
To help the customer streamline delivery cycles on the project, Itransition’s engineers set up automated deployment in AWS. It allows automatically creating new testing environments in AWS where product changes and updates are deployed, as well as environments for product demos, performance testing, penetration testing, and more.
We integrated TeamCity and Jira with TestRail to automate software testing, create test cases easily, and manage test runs. Previously, the customer’s QA engineers had to manually map test results with 600+ automated test cases in TestRail, which could take up to 3 days during each release, as the application updates were rolled out weekly. Thanks to integration with TestRail, test cases are now triggered and executed in TeamCity, with their results submitted back to TestRail. It greatly improved the QA team’s productivity, reducing the room for possible errors as well as significantly streamlining release testing, which now takes less than an hour.
Process
Knowledge transfer
Before the active development phase, Itransition’s team studied the customer’s dedicated Confluence space with the project documentation, passed their SaaS platform-related learning course and a range of test tasks associated with the risk management software support. This onboarding process is retained for all newcomers to our dedicated development team.
Team composition and practices
Itransition’s dedicated team comprises frontend and backend developers as well as QA engineers. During 3+ years of the collaboration, our team has grown from 4 to 20 members.
We practice cross-team assessment by reviewing each other’s code and sharing best practices. It helps improve not only code quality but also collaboration between the project teams on Itransition’s and the customer’s sides. Together with the customer, we also participate in weekly backlog planning.
Project methodology
We apply a combination of Scrum and Kanban on the project, following the customer’s accepted two-week sprints. Kanban gives us more planning flexibility and allows our team to quickly switch to a new task when necessary (for example, to fix a critical bug).
Compliance fixes
The customer hires third-party companies for regulatory compliance audits. Based on the results of such audits, our team fixes identified issues, if any.
Data protection
For personal data protection, all user data is encrypted by default, so we don’t have access to the customer’s production database. If the customer finds certain errors or bugs, they provide us with the access to application logs instead. In each specific case, we analyze the logs, detect possible problem root causes, and eliminate them.
Results
For more than 3 years, Itransition’s dedicated team has been an integral part of the Dutch company’s risk management software support project with an international business audience. We were responsible for delivering new features, maintenance and support of version 7 as well as contributed to the development of version 8.
Our involvement has brought the following major results:
- Seamless migration of business users’ data to the latest version of the product.
- Automation of software testing and deployment, which completely eliminated bugs associated with human factor and reduced release testing from 3 days to 1 hour.
- Next-level project reporting automation with Power BI, which allowed the customer to reduce the time necessary to create quality reports from 7 days to 15 seconds.
