Working on ITMS2014+, we have provided IT outsourcing and full range of services ranging from architecture design, through implementation, integration with 3rd party systems, to load testing, configuration management, and testing infrastructure operation.
ITMS2014+ is an extensive project. When designing the architecture, we have taken great care to ensure the system is performant, testable and, above all, maintainable even with changes in legislation or additional requirements. Architecture is designed with regard to developer productivity as well. The development environment does not require external dependencies in the form of remote databases, LDAP, etc. All dependencies on 3rd party systems are mocked-up. This has greatly reduced the development costs and increased productivity.
ITMS2014+ is truly a huge project. It has more than 1800 user interface screens, more than 1400 database tables and views, and nearly 2 million lines of code. At the project's peak, more than 20 developers have worked on it. With a project this size, it is essential to maintain the consistency and quality of the source code, so we have developed a library of reusable user interface components, which significantly increased productivity and dramatically reduced bug count. We have performed regular code reviews too - only the code that passed the review was integrated to the shared development branch.
One of the basic requirements of the system was its interoperability with other public administration information systems. Emphasis was placed on the "Only once encoding" principle, when the State should not ask for the information that has already been provided. Therefore, we have designed and implemented integrations with the accounting system of the Ministry of Finance and with the majority of information systems processing the state agenda, e.g. with the Integrated System of Funding, Registry of Individuals, Registry of Addresses, Registry of Legal Entities, Central Public Administration Portal (slovensko.sk), Electronic Marketplace, Public Procurement Office, Criminal Records, Electronic Cadastre Services, Central Reference Data Administration, Bankruptcy Registry, Financial Statements Registry and others.
Within the ITMS2014+ project, we did not leave anything to chance. Before each important release, we have designed, performed and evaluated load tests to demonstrate the performance characteristics of the system. And not just that - the ITMS2014+ system and its architecture were designed to overcome the agreed performance characteristics several times.
The ITMS2014+ system is hosted in the Data Center of the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic. However, it also consists of several staging environments where new versions of the system are tested, bug fixes are verified, etc. For ITMS2014+, we have built and operated four staging environments and a complete infrastructure for continuous integration.
The ITMS2014+ project has set high standards for other public administration projects not only with its quality, but also with the fact that it is fully implemented using open source technologies, which also significantly reduced its price. Although it was a huge project, we were able to deliver high quality, performant and maintainable software.