ObjectiveChallengeTeamRealization

Community Life

An insurance startup that aims to make the process of obtaining life or health insurance certificates easier by allowing users to estimate risks, sign contracts, and receive certificates online.

Time develop:

3.5 months

Team:

7 people

Technologies:

Objective

The main goal of Community Life was to create a web application that could be integrated into any insurance company's website. The application allows users to:

  • Create a personal account and sign in with their login and password;
  • Select their occupation to calculate the insurance rate;
  • Fill in an inquiry about themselves and their health;
  • Upload necessary documents;
  • Receive an insurance certificate after executing a contract and making an online payment.

This eliminates the need for users to visit the insurance company's office to obtain a certificate.

AuthenticationChoice ofspecialtyList of questionsClientInsurance policyDownloadingdocuments

Challenge

The project had a strict deadline and a minimum viable product (MVP) had to be presented to the main investor, HDI, a leading insurance company in Germany.

Community Life's own team of developers provided us with the necessary information, including the logic and question scripts, as well as the design for the interface. Our team was responsible for:

  • Project management and interaction between two teams of developers;
  • Development of the software. In order to complete the project in a strict deadline we had to invite more frontend and backend developers;
  • Testing the application's functionality and compatibility with external services;
  • Releasing the MVP before the presentation to the investor.

Team

The product required specific roles to be filled in order to be implemented successfully. These roles included:

  • Two frontend developers to create the user interface using TypeScript and React;
  • Two backend developers responsible for the application's functionality using Java, Spring Cloud and Spring Boot;
  • DevOps engineer to manage code deployment and synchronization;
  • Project manager to oversee the progress and communication with the client;
  • Architect to handle technical aspects and oversee interactions between developers;
  • Requirements engineer to determine necessary requirements for the product's functionality;
  • QA engineer to test all program components according to the requirements engineer's task.

To optimize the work process, certain roles were combined, for instance, the project manager and the architect were all in one.

Realization

The goal was to create a program that would calculate the cost of insurance by making the user answer a series of questions. The inquiry usually consists of at least 22 questions, but the quantity may vary, depending on the prescribed scripts. Originally, we planned to use our own microservices to interact with external services called Compas and Fizalis

  • Compas stores scripts with thousands of questions in XML format. The developed application should be able to communicate with the Compas service and generate a series of questions tailored to the user's responses in real-time.
  • And Fizalis performs the calculation of the insurance rate, issues the certificate, and accepts online payment.
FRONTENDAuthenticationChoice of specialtyList of questionsLoading documentsInsurance policyBACKENDMicroservice 1Microservice 2Microservice 3Microservice 4SERVICESCompasFizalis

However, during the project, we realized that due to the large number of links in the XML files, we would not have enough time to set up the interaction between the microservices and Compas. It was also not possible to optimize the scripts processing in Compas quickly. This put the project at risk of not meeting the deadline.

To overcome this, we developed our own sub-program which forms a chain of questions based on the user's answers and saves the inquiry results on a separate server. Community Life's team helped us understand the question scripts, which allowed us to test the algorithm and complete the MVP just in time for the presentation.

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

The presentation was successful and the service worked seamlessly and formed an insurance certificate with the option of online payment. The startup investor, HDI, was pleased. The following step is to implement the working project on the insurance company's website.