Rights Management System for the leading insurance company – BALTA

Insurance is a sensitive topic when it comes to privacy, data and access to it. Especially, in health insurance. With GDPR law in place, companies have to be 100% sure that only certain people (who are absolutely required to get access rights to the data) acquire them to get the job done and again lose them afterwards.

BALTA, being one of the leading insurance companies in Latvia, considers privacy and data access control a serious subject, while being in need for granting the access rights in the right moment to the right people within the boundaries of the company in a fast and easy way to ensure their customers get the best service and they get it fast.

History of the project

Taking in account the given situation, a couple of years ago BALTA came up with an idea of developing an internal automation tool – Rights Management System (RMS) which was intended to automate granting and revoking of various access rights of the employees to various internal resource systems. Their goal was to make it possible to manage the given business process easily and securely.

Unfortunately, back then, the chosen software development vendor didn’t do its job very well and BALTA ended up with the system being under slow, continuous development for 2 years and not having a reliable solution which could be utilized in the production environment.

Taking over the project

As it wasn’t possible to continue this way, BALTA started to look for another vendor who could accomplish the project and reached Arkbauer.

It was agreed that we take over the development process of the unfinished software product. Our mission was to reach several major goals:

Perform an audit of the existing software;
Refactor badly written programming code;
Improve the performance of the software;
Implement missing business functions;
Launch the project;

The audit of the software solution

The list of technical issues discovered/traced down after the audit was the following:

Faulty program code lead to the loss of data integrity, in some cases;
No best practices/software design patterns were used in the software code;
Laravel framework and vendor libraries the software was based on, were considerably outdated;
No access rights were defined across many different controllers/actions of the software;
There were considerable performance issues related to processing and displaying of large datasets;
In general, Laravel framework wasn’t used as it is intended. Instead, various “hacks” were implemented to achieve certain goals in the software;
On one hand, many functions required by the business were missing. On the other hand, many of those already implemented had bugs;

Delivery of a working product

All issues discovered in the existing piece of software were gathered together, prioritized and put into the Backlog.

During a relatively short period of time (relatively to what was done during 2 years by the previous software development vendor) the following was done over several agile iterations:

The software got updated to the most recent stable versions of Laravel, PHP, MySQL and libraries used within the software project;
Badly written software code got refactored;
Data integrity loss causing issues got eliminated/fixed;
Performance issues of processing and displaying large datasets were eliminated by refactoring back-end and front-end parts of the software;
User experience was improved;
Data synchronization with other resource systems (Active Directory, Oracle DB, Navision) was fixed
Additional, missing business features were developed:
- Automation of rights management;
- Automated validation of errors;
- Active Directory automation layer;
A working and stable software solution was launched in production as soon as it reached the minimal set of required features, a decent level of stability and reliable security;