Challenge
National Property Valuation Advisors (NPVA) is one of the largest independent commercial real estate valuation and advisory firms in the nation. Tackling such a massive workload requires enterprise software to manage contracts, evaluations, employee assignments and more. NPVA’s proprietary, cloud-hosted, mission-critical application manages these aspects and ensures its core business is on track. As NPVA’s business grows, changes and makes updates, so must the application.
Six Feet Up is providing development and deployment services — initially containerizing the application’s services, and then creating a repeatable Terraform deployment plan. This infrastructure improvement will make it possible to have a failover environment and to test new features in staging environments. The Six Feet Up team is also implementing features that address users’ needs and simplify the day-to-day management of the application.
Specifically, NPVA contacted Six Feet Up’s expert developers to:
- upgrade the application’s core framework;
- implement testing for 85% of the application;
- add new features;
- fix bugs and other maintenance issues; and
- deploy the updates to a production environment.
Implementation Details
Prior to updating the application, Six Feet Up’s developers dove into the code — which was primarily written using Python and some Node.js — and explored both the front and back-end of the application.
During the discovery phase, the team learned that NPVA’s proprietary application is hosted on the Google Cloud Platform and uses Google API and app engine. Additionally, the application features:
- a core framework built with Pyramid;
- integration with Google Drive and Google Calendar;
- seven microservices hosted on the Google app engine; and
- a PostgreSQL database.
To ensure that the application remained usable — and to facilitate a seamless upgrade — Six Feet Up’s experts used Docker to get a version of the application running locally and downloaded the involved dependencies. Next, the team developed and ran repeatable tests that covered 85% of the application.
Once the local development environment was up-and-running, the team implemented requests to enhance the application’s security and increase its functionality, including:
- updating the Pyramid framework from version 1.7 to version 1.10;
- adding functionality that allows employees to add office locations;
- solving access issues for employees using Google Drive folders; and
- writing scripts to manage annual and quarterly business functions.
Results
The NPVA application is ever-changing and always improving. As a result of the infrastructure improvements made by Six Feet Up’s developers, the NPVA application now has a failover environment and can test new features in staging environments. Plus, employees now have the latest and greatest version of their primary tool thanks to new features that address users’ needs and simplify the day-to-day management of the application. Going forward, by maintaining and updating their proprietary application, NPVA will keep a competitive advantage in the field.
