ObjectiveLimitationTeamImplementation

Community Life

An insurance startup, which helps you to estimate risks, execute a contract, and issue a life or health insurance certificate on-line.

Time of development:

3.5 months

Team:

7 people

Technologies:

Objective

The Community Life startup needed to develop a web application, which could be integrated into the web-site of any insurance company. The user needs to proceed through several steps in the program:

  • Log in to the personal account using your login and password;
  • Choose your profession to calculate the insurance rate;
  • Answer several questions about yourself and your state of health;
  • Upload documents required for issuance;
  • Get an insurance certificate after executing a contract and making a payment on-line.

As a result, the user doesn’t need to spend time and petrol driving to the company’s office to issue a document. You can issue certificates fast and easily from the comfort of your home.

AuthenticationChoice of specialtyList of questionsClientInsurance policyDownloading documents

Limitation

The project was on a tight schedule and a minimum viable product (MVP) had to be completed before a presentation for the funder - HDI, the largest insurance company in Germany.

Community Life’s own team participated in this project; they supplied us with logic, and questions scripts, as well as the design of an interface appearance before the start of the project. Our team was required to:

  • take the lead on the project and establish communication between the teams of developers;
  • implement the software product. Due to the tight schedule, several backend and frontend developers had to be involved;
  • set up and test the workability of the application and its communication with the external services;
  • release the MVP before the presentation to the funder.

Team

The following roles were required to implement the product:

  • Two frontend developers implemented the user interface in TypeScript using React library;
  • Two backend developers were responsible for application features, using Java language, Spring Cloud and Spring Boot frameworks;
  • DevOps engineer organized code deployment on a server and synchronized the development;
  • Project manager supervised the progress of the project and organized interaction with the client;
  • Architect was in charge of technical aspects and supervised the interactions between all developers;
  • Requirements engineer defined the set of necessary requirements for product workability;
  • QA-engineer tested the workability of all program components according to the task of the requirements engineer.

To optimize the work, some roles were combined; for example, a project manager and an architect were the same person.

Implementation

To calculate the cost of insurance, the user answers several questions - at least 22. But there may be more of them, depending on the prescribed scripts. It was supposed that we’d implement our own microservices in this application, that would exchange data with external services:

  • Compas - it stores the scripts with thousands of questions in XML format. The developed application should exchange information with the service and dynamically form a chain of questions depending on the user’s answers;
  • Fizalis - it performs the calculation of the insurance rate, issues the certificate, and accepts on-line payment.
FRONTENDAuthenticationChoice of specialtyList of questionsLoading documentsInsurance policyBACKENDMicroservice 1Microservice 2Microservice 3Microservice 4SERVICESCompasFizalis

However, in the middle of the project we understood that due to the huge amount of links in XML files we wouldn’t have enough time to set up the interaction between microservices and Compas. And it was impossible to optimize the scripts processing in Compas promptly, as it's a typical service for calculating insurance which is unavailable to us. This fact set the implementation of the project in time at stake.

In order to meet the deadline, we developed our own subprogram. It forms a chain of questions according to the user's answers and saves the survey results on a separate server. The client’s team helped us to understand the questions script, due to their help we managed to test the algorithm and perform MVP release just in time for the presentation.

FRONTENDAuthenticationChoice of specialtyList of questionsLoading documentsInsurance policyBACKENDMicroservice 1Our ServiceMicroservice 3Microservice 4SERVICESFizalis

The presentation was successful. The service works without a hitch and forms an insurance certificate with the possibility of payment. The startup founder, HDI, was satisfied. The next step is to implement the working project on the insurance company’s web-site.