Technology Virtuosity
Technology design & architecture is a sequence of time-critical decisions that extend the product’s capability to dream more, do more
Design for Growth
We never forget that while we must move fast in the early stages of product development, there are some aspects of application architecture and design that can never be compromised. Simply because designing for growth cannot be done retrospectively, albeit without a lot of pain. Hence future proofing the product’s architecture is implied.
At the foundation, it begins with the implementation of all reusable non-functional requirements, such as services to connect to external systems or to extend the framework using libraries of reusable UI patterns, and themes, for example. Atop the foundation layer, we implement our core business services, including services around business concepts, business rules, business entities, business transactions, and business widgets.
These services should be system agnostic and based on the foundation services to abstract any integration detail we might need. It’s in these two bottom layers that we isolate all the reusable services or components. The topmost layer is designed specifically for the user segment. This is where we support users’ interactions through user interfaces and processes using the core and foundation services to support the user journey.
It is important that no dependencies across modules are introduced on this layer, and it stays as atomic as possible within one user workflow.
Design for User Experience
User research-led product design helps create a lasting impression with a high recall value, in turn making user adoption effortless.
At Caizin, we understand how important it is to capture user preferences and translate them into workflows. A methodic study of target users to capture their needs wants, and wishes helps maximize users’ satisfaction when working with the product.
When we couple these with technology leverages and constraints, we learn how optimally the workflows should be sketched to maximise learnability and usability.
Focusing on the nuances of human behaviour & impressions tremendously adds value in delivering a product with a heightened delight quotient, whilst maintaining technical feasibility & viability.
Know the boundaries, give wings to the product’s vision
Over time, systems need to be maintained to remain competitive with technology standards and user expectations. Relying on the system and development operations (Sys/DevOps) capabilities at Caizin, we are able to manage the platform systems ourselves, attributing to the fundamental requirements of cloud-hosted products and applications.
Keeping the product codebase maintainable, rightly picking contemporary and secure tech stack of technologies, and hiring engineers that can work with these technologies are implied considerations. Such decisions define the capabilities of the product.
As the platform grows, it should be easy to add new applications and components. The architecture of the ecosystem, its decomposition, and even the architecture of the individual components play a huge role in how elegantly the software grows and changes over time to support evolving business goals and associated software features.
Recurring cost of product deployment, execution & support
It is pertinent to create a technology roadmap that unveils a financial plan and investment schedule. Based on the product roadmap and technical roadmap, a schedule that outlines purchases is to be created to support the product’s growth strategy.
This includes project budgets which cover the development cost and the true cost of ownership & management. Every technology footprint must be evaluated for the current situation and that of the future when scale becomes the focus. As the product grows and attracts more users, the cost may rise exponentially and not linearly.
At Caizin, we ensure that the design & architecture of our solution are cost-effective without compromising on the best fit. The vast expanse of available alternative technologies we can work with enables us to create an optimal spending model for technologies e.g. low-cost yet performant during the validation stage, stable & secure during the growth stage, etc.
Keeping your data & application secure
At Caizin, following security best practices for security zones & islands, such as the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) recommendations, is a requisite, yet there is a multitude of other factors that come into play when approaching security for scale.
For example, maintaining our authentication system may make sense if we are starting out, but in the long run, do we want to be responsible for the personally identifiable information (PII) of all our users? That decision to build or buy is important though maybe mindfully deferred. Outsourcing such important responsibilities to a company specializing in authentication security, such as Auth0, could be a better choice for future security for scale.
When protecting against DDoS attempts and other hacking threats, a service such as Cloudflare can offload responsibilities from product engineering teams and future-proof products as they grow in popularity.
Implementation best practices, good principles, good code
At Caizin, we prefer to stay clean, refactor often, and avoid the accumulation of tech debt. The yield of writing good & clean code as under:
Maintainable - a well-documented code is easy to work with, usable for a long period of time, and can pass through the hands of multiple engineers with its sanity still intact. The code must expose the logic in the most obvious manner to a new person who has no prior knowledge of implementation, besides the use case.
Scalable - we start small and build on the top, and as such the code must offer itself to be scalable as more and more components get added over time, some get displaced, and some get re-constructed.
Logical - use well-known software engineering principles, design patterns, and data structures that map close to the business scenario to encapsulate the logic & implementation into standard recognizable code blocks, keeping it simple and uncomplicated. Simplicity does not equal sub-par programming.
Easy to test - clean code lends itself to be tested, to validate business use cases and rules and ensure the coverage on all corner cases are maximized. In case of failure, rely on the automated test suite to find problematic code areas instead of jumping into code debugging as a first reaction.
Caizin swears by theTwelve-factor methodology
for building modern-day SaaS apps and holds commanding expertise in its execution.
