Case Study: Intelligent Taxonomy Manager

Customer Benefits

For our client:

highly skilled developers,
flexibility in the availability of developers: more frontend resources in the initial stages of the project, then more backend resources, introduction of a test engineer halfway through,
expertise in agile methodologies,
a greater trust in the product from the Mondeca team.

Benefits for the end customer:

a positive user experience that guides the users throughout their activity of taxonomy management,
an application with a modern architecture and best of breed technologies: graph database, REST & GraphQL API, messaging pattern, infrastructure as code,
greater software quality, that make the users more comfortable with the product.

Project Background

Mondeca is a company that develops market-leading software for taxonomy, ontology, and content annotation management. They have over 10 years of successful experience delivering products to major organizations in Europe and North America.

At the beginning we sat with our client and talked about the history and current situation of the product: Intelligent Taxonomy Manager. This application was created for enterprise taxonomy management, business data management and semantic data management.

Over time their best-selling product has become difficult to maintain, let alone expand with newer functionality. It was hard to understand, both at the technical level and at the level of user interfaces. In effect the time to learn it was much longer than what’s offered by competitors. Furthermore, due to its complexity, the original system was hard to sell as a product. The software was based on outdated technology and its maintenance costs around 150k € per year.

We were able to help Mondeca and provide them with a much simpler solution that will be much easier to build upon in the future.

Main Challenge

Mondeca values the positive experience of its customers. Their business needs were connected not only with measurable technical indicators, but also with the qualitative reception of the product by the end user.

The growing number of customers motivated the company to develop the product in the latest technology, increase the intuitiveness of the application and strengthen its scaling potential.

Stepwise main aim in this project was to ensure that the application provides a unified and coherent experience through all the user interfaces. What’s more, we wanted the software to guide the users in their daily work more easily. The system had to be prepared for heavy loads and support for many users at the same time. Last but not least the ITMX app should be ready to handle large quantities of complex data.

Our Approach & Final Outcome

The ITMX was an existing application, so at the time Stepwise focused heavily on the right strategy of building (or modifying) the architecture and code of the current software.

One of the initial problems was to assess whether it was reasonable to reuse the existing codebase and build upon it. After extensive analysis of the current system, we decided that in order to satisfy Mondeca expectations mentioned in the section above, the application would have to be rewritten from scratch.

Stepwise implemented a new application with the use of scrum methodology, where we were mainly responsible for development and some of the project management aspects. In order to create a coherent UI we were helped by Moonite. They coordinated research which involved multiple users of the current application and came out with a new and fresh look of the system. We cooperated daily with the client Mondeca in order to organize the work and ensure that we have a clear understanding of the requirements.

Due to the high complexity of data, managed by the application, we decided to frequently produce quick PoCs (Proofs of concepts) of various solutions.

The cooperation between Mondeca and Stepwise is still ongoing. Trust and thorough knowledge of our client’s business expectations allow us to consistently deliver the best quality software. Probably that’s why ITMX is our 3rd project with Mondeca. From the very beginning we have shaped transparent rules of cooperation, so our teams could carry out their tasks effectively.

ITMX is a very complex software. Agile allows us to efficiently implement updates (in the form of PoCs). Our teams are constantly creating new ideas for improvement. For sure, there are still many challenges ahead of Stepwise, but we are optimistic and looking forward to it!