Rebuilding an Interactive Portal for Parents and Childcare Providers Without Downtime

The project is an interactive community for parents and childcare solution providers.

Marketing

Ruby on Rails

MS SQL

The need

The company needed to redesign its web solution, as well as add e-commerce functionality and advanced search to enable visitors purchase services online. The previous version of the application had issues with security and maintainability; therefore, this functionally had to be improved.

The challenges

The customer’s web services had to stay available throughout the entire development process. The developers at Altoros had to conduct code refactoring and integration gradually, so that the website would retain its functionality. The outdated code structure made adding new modules, providing integration, and testing quite a challenge.

The solution

Each unit of the existing code was carefully tested to find out how it behaves. When a new piece of the code was created, we wrote new tests for it. As soon as unit tests had been passed, the new code was uploaded to staging, where real users and QA engineers tested it. After that, the new module was moved to production. These step-by-step code updates guaranteed that each new unit functioned properly and would not damage the system. Initially, the system had about 400 unit tests. After the redesign, it had over 1,000 tests that can be utilized now by any other developers who want to add new functionality, while retaining maintainability.

The outcome

The website was redesigned into an interactive Web 2.0 community, which provides relevant information to visitors and brings profit to owners. The resource stayed available throughout the entire development and QA process.

Technology stack