Service provided: Staff Augmentation

Better insurance plans for users

Trellis uses data to help insurance companies offer more convenient and personalized plans to their customers.

Type of product

Enterprise tool.

Business Vertical

Insurance.

Project Duration

January 2020 - Ongoing.

TECH USED

RESULTS

Trellis forged key partnerships with several clients and greatly improved its product's performance.

The CLIENT

Founded in 2019 and backed by top Venture Capitals, Trellis is an online platform that allows American users to access personalized and more economic insurance plans.

Through modern software and APIs, Trellis' platform automatically collects, processes, and analyzes data from thousands of users and helps insurance providers offer more convenient deals.

When Trellis contacted Bixlabs, they already had an operating platform launched in production, a proven business model, and a broad base of loyal customers.

The CHALLENGE

To provide its service, Trellis uses a suite of scrapers in NodeJS that collect data from various insurance sites. Although this technology works reliably most of the time, several conditions could cause the scrapers to fail.

In early 2020, as the project grew and Trellis gained new business partners, the issues became more recurrent and complex to pinpoint and solve.

Since Trellis' business model relies on ensuring the system stays operative at all times, each downtime represented a huge amount of money loss for the company.

To deal with this problem, Trellis was looking to hire a dedicated development team that could:

Update and test the scrapers
Provide continuous support to solve the identified issues
Develop new critical features for the platform.

The client needed to be able to identify the error, and fix, test, and deploy an update in production in 2-4 hours.

Our Staff Augmentation service provided Trellis with the workforce and expertise they needed to have continuous support in their platform and develop new and innovative functionalities.

We made sure that Trellis could access the most experienced developers 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

This project, however, wasn't short on challenges.

On a daily basis, Trellis presented unexpected occurrences that required our developers to be very vigilant and creative to solve emerging issues.

Each insurance provider working with Trellis' platform had its internal system, backend, user flow, and data input.

So, we had to implement a lot of inverse engineering to understand how each user would behave and interact with the system.

Errors could be produced by multiple factors and in unpredictable ways. For this reason, our developers needed to have high investigative capabilities and be able to come up with creative ways to identify the source of the flaw and fix it.

Problem

Trellis needed a dedicated, highly experienced team of developers to support their product and develop innovative features.

Solution

We provided Trellis with technical leadership to ensure development best practices and development workforce to solve the platform's issues, reduce downtime, and build a series of core tools and features.

Developing innovative solutions

Trellis entrusted us with the complex task of collecting, analyzing, and storing user data drawn from multiple insurance websites.

Data collecting and management is a critical asset because it allows Trellis partners to boost sales by offering better insurance plans.

Before we got involved with this project, the platform presented a series of core problems:

Development antipatterns causing multiple issues
Some processes worked inefficiently because the product didn't follow software development best practices or clean architecture principles.
Extracting data from users was a complex and chaotic process.

We incorporated a technical leader to guide developers through programming best practices, improving the existing code, reducing errors, and amending development patterns.

We developed a series of tools and features that enabled Trellis to automate data collection and storage. These utilities helped us improve data parceling, data processing, and data structuring to interpret and register the information more efficiently.

We optimized the information gathering regarding what type of insurance plans users had, what services those plans included, how much users paid for them, and what could be a better alternative.

By implementing a code audit software, we ensured maximum performance and quality and reduced potential programming flaws. We monitored the consequences of each error, tracking with precision how much time the system was down, so we could have precise estimations of the financial impact of each issue and the costs of fixing a particular bug.

We also carried strict planning and clean architecture guidelines in the development of new features for the platform. Through a code quality metric software, we measured the time it took us to develop each new functionality and the staff hours it would take us to make a complete change in the code.

We are currently providing support and maintenance to the platform, including

Fixing recurrent system issues
Applying agile methodologies and clean architecture principles
Implementing development best practices to improve the overall quality of the code.
Conducting automated tests and raising the work-quality var within devs.

Improving development practices helped the client set a new quality standard. Now, Trellis demands its developers to work using the same principles and techniques as us to ensure the highest work quality and reduce errors.

Working with Trellis allowed us to improve our own documentation process. Trellis has a comprehensive and detailed approach regarding development documentation we think is greatly enriching, so we were pleased to learn from it and incorporate it into our skillset.