High-Performing Cloud Software for Aviation Insurance Automation
Customer
The Customer is an international insurance company that offers universal and industry-specific types of insurance and related services to businesses.
Challenge
The Customer planned to replace one of their core enterprise solutions – a 20-year-old legacy aviation insurance web application. The application was widely used by the Customer’s underwriters located worldwide, as well as by external brokers who used it on the SaaS model. It was of strategic importance for the Customer’s business that a new version of the application was easy to maintain and provided a more valuable user experience.
The Customer was looking for a vendor that could take up the solution’s modernization while accounting for the complex business logic it relied on.
Cooperation
Chosen as the vendor for software development outsourcing, ScienceSoft provided the Customer with a self-managed dedicated team of senior specialists. The team consisted of a software architect (acting as a project manager as well), a business analyst, 3 back-end and 3 front-end developers, and a QA specialist. Project management was shared between ScienceSoft’s PM and BA, and a product owner and a scrum master on the Customer’s side.
Change management
To get an in-depth understanding of the Customer’s needs, ScienceSoft’s BA elicited new requirements at the meetings with different groups of stakeholders and user acceptance testing (UAT) sessions, as well as ad hoc, when business needs and goals altered. Relevant user stories were created to accommodate the requested changes, added to the backlog and prioritized at the meetings with the target user groups.
Development and QA
ScienceSoft’s developers established the CI/CD pipeline with Azure DevOps Server to speed up the delivery of requested changes.
The team carried out code refactoring, replaced outdated non-maintainable technologies with modern ones, and adjusted the system’s architecture. They implemented a brand-new permission structure and optimized functionality with the automation of manual recalculation and audit processes to help users streamline their work.
ScienceSoft’s team provided proactive problem-solving and consulting throughout the project. It allowed minimizing internal integration issues and risks of the backward compatibility with the old application’s architecture.
The QA process involved performance and functional testing: smoke tests, UAT tests, and regression tests. The latter helped ensure the modified functionality didn’t affect the rest of the solution.
Results
Thanks to the input of ScienceSoft’s dedicated team, the Customer was able to cut development time and reduce project costs, as well as lower future maintenance costs due to the implementation of modern technologies. The new version of the application has stable high performance and enhanced functionality, which allows the Customer to attract new B2B partners and draw external users’ loyalty and revenue from insurance purchases.
Although the initial outsourcing engagement was supposed to finish after the application’s modernization was completed, the Customer chose to extend cooperation with ScienceSoft. Currently, at the 4th year of collaboration, 4 developers from ScienceSoft continue working on the application’s evolution and maintenance.
Technologies and Tools
Project management and DevOps: Confluence, Jira, Azure DevOps Server
Solution: .NET, Microsoft SQL Server, Angular 1.5.8, IDE Visual Studio, Microsoft SQL Studio, Azure
