Problem Description

Our client is the employee benefit industry’s first and only technology-enabled PBO (pharmacy benefits optimizer). Due to their customer base growth, they needed to expand and adapt the functionality of their application. This, coupled with an increase in file processing, led the company to rethink the structure of their product. This meant adapting the organization to microservices technologies, changing the way they authenticated users, and redesigning processes for better performance.

This strategy required the incorporation of external collaborators with development knowledge, who knew the client’s technology legacy and had the skills and tools to participate in the implementation of new functionalities during the migration to microservices, and ensure secure communication throughout the team.

Solution

In order to meet the client’s needs, a team of developers from Allata joined their inhouse development team to work together on the maintenance of the existing application, the development of new functionality and the migration of a part of the application to microservices.

Among others, the tasks that the Allata carried out were:

• Collaborated in the creation of microservices using Spring Boot.
• Increased application security by adding two-step authentication through DUO and Authy (for external and internal clients respectively).
• Optimization and refactoring of code to take advantage of features introduced in new frameworks and improve application performance.
• Collaborated with the Product Owner in designing new features.
• Design and implementation of security solutions for microservices and applications for each vertical within the company, in collaboration with other inhouse teams.
• Documentation for each of the implemented solutions.
• Meticulous analysis of each incident detected in the application, determining root cause and corrective action to prevent recurrence.
• Internal peer reviews were proposed to ensure the quality of the code.

Benefits

• Allata identified ways to improve the management of the development processes (Agile) and branching model in Git.
• Increased code quality by applying best practices in the development process.
• Thanks to the help of our specialists, the client was able to define new functionality, as well as changes to existing ones, with more precision.
• Training provided by our developers enabled the client to learn about, and analyze, new technologies, such as Angular.
• An authentication system was implemented across applications in different teams.
• The documentation provided served as a guide for implementing security in other applications.