A Startup Healthcare Tech Firm Is Now Poised for the Future
Challenge
Force Therapeutics, a New York City-based tech startup with an innovative healthcare solution, has designed a platform for those who’ve recently had surgery or other medical procedures. The application provides virtual rehabilitation, digital navigation, and sophisticated outcome analytics for providers and researchers. Force Therapeutics received venture-capital funding to enhance its technology, but its small internal team needed expert assistance to move forward quickly without accruing technical debt. The application is coded in Python and Django, and the management team needed experts to review it, ensure proper coding, and identify areas of potential concern.
Solution
After being selected for its technical and collaborative skills, the Caktus team conducted a comprehensive review of the application, code, and unit tests to identify areas of potential concern and define success criteria. Throughout the process, meetings were held to keep the Force team apprised of findings. Caktus then presented an extensive summary, offering a prioritized set of recommendations for development. The primary recommendations were to expand unit testing and decompose the monolithic application into smaller, logical subsets of components, thereby laying the foundation for a more extensible and robust application. The Force technical team then asked Caktus to scope out a more extensive project for strengthening the foundation and resilience of the application. The ensuing project included the creation of an automated framework for the application that runs integration and unit tests, utilizing Selenium and Python’s unit test harness, to ensure that the code works as expected. This allows the team to immediately identify where code is breaking and fix it accordingly. The Caktus team tested the existing functionality to reduce the risk of regressions, which is when new code causes old code to break. Later, the Force team incorporated testing into their development process to ensure continued quality and reliability. Following Caktus’s successful unit test project, the team completed two additional phases of work focused on DevOps and deployment on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with Ansible and CloudFormation. Throughout this process, Caktus became an extension of the Force team, facilitating collaboration for future growth.
Results
In order to reinforce the product, the Caktus developers worked to increase the test coverage on the current application and helped to incorporate test writing into Force’s software-development culture. With the adoption of Caktus’s high standard of unit test coverage, the Force team increased its ability to uncover issues immediately, preventing potential costly issues and increasing ROI.
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