Thoughts > Web Team-as-a-Service

Our Methodology to App/Web Maintenance

After a project launches, the resources that brought the project live are diverted away towards other projects. Transitioning a project from active development into maintenance requires support architecture to ensure long term sustainability. Convertiv’s maintenance agreement is designed to put that architecture in place and ensure performance, security, and stability.

There are two categories of services in Convertiv’s maintenance agreement.

Strategic Engineering
Strategic Engineering is the core of all of our efforts. The digital marketing space is in the midst of a sea change. Our engineers, project managers, and business development team are engaged in mapping this shifting landscape. By building on our existing frameworks, we deliver ongoing incremental improvements designed to manage risk, improve visibility, reduce downtime, and support best practices.

Defensive Maintenance
The flip side of our offensive, strategic effort is defensive maintenance.  This is the hard work of monitoring and reinforcing systems against both known and emergent risks.  We are committed to a defense-in-depth engineering philosophy. This means a rigorous front-line defense – best practices, regular patching, instrumentation.  Paired with the front-line systems we have systems that assume those front-line practices will fail – people, processes and technology that can detect and respond to emergent events.

  • Regularly scheduled security and stability updates
  • Active patching of emergent issues
  • Project management and quality assurance
  • Proactive monitoring
  • Troubleshooting and issue triage

Architecture

The following struts are the foundation that Convertiv puts in place to support your project as it transitions into a maintenance and sustainability phase.

  • Frameworks Innovation – Convertiv has developed a set of technical frameworks, built on open source technology. By using frameworks like this across all our work, we can improve speed to market, manage risks, and make it easy for engineers to move across projects.  Most importantly, as we build on these frameworks, new innovations can be pushed into legacy projects.
    Continuous Development/Continuous Integration Deployment – By using a sophisticated development operations (DevOps) deployment system, common across all our projects, developers and project managers can quickly jump into a project, reducing switching costs and ensuring high quality code.
  • Instrumentation and alerting – Automated systems monitor for uptime, security updates, critical exceptions, infrastructure performance, and critical transactions.  By automating our instrumentation at multiple levels, our systems can quickly escalate alerts, and will catch issues before they impact
  • Project Management – A dedicated project manager provides continuity and a single point of contact for the project. The project manager will keep visibility into the scope and backlog, using Jira to build an ongoing roadmap.
  • Resource Availability – Long term sustainability requires dedicated resources who have eyes on the project. In addition to a project manager and backend developers, we also have access to subject matter experts from other teams including designers, SEO, DevOps, security, and business strategy.

Convertiv Frameworks

The following frameworks are currently actively developed and supported at Convertiv:

  • Fjaka Frontend and UI – A highly opinionated web UI toolkit, Fjaka enforces best practices, and clear interface hierarchy and inheritance.
  • Developer Environment – Every project has a docker based developer environment allowing any developer to easily boot into a common test environment.
  • Runforest Build Tooling –  Runforest is our build system, written in typescript and built on NPM. It allows us to orchestrate the project build process in a clear, readable configuration file.
  • Cloud Infrastructure as Code – Built on CloudFormation and Ansible, this framework enforces a common, secure, sustainable pattern for provisioning and configuring cloud infrastructure in the AWS cloud.
  • Decoupled Forms – Our decoupled form framework is designed to securely accept user submissions, and shipping the data to remote API’s, while complying with regulations and privacy restrictions.  By decoupling the forms from the CMS, and making it agnostic to the CRM or datastore, this framework allows us to quickly scaffold up new forms and steering the data according to the business requirements.
  • First Party Data Collection – As browsers continue to restrict cross browser cookies, we’ve designed this toolchain for efficiently collecting, transforming, and storing first party data.  Built on opensource technology, this framework can be deployed to an AWS cloud account to provide a foundation for a sophisticated, privacy conscious, first party data strategy.
  • Reportiv Reporting Framework – Reportiv is our analytics and dashboard framework, providing a powerful foundation for building instrumentation and business intelligence visualizations.
Monitoring, Maintenance & Support

Operationalize applications with the support processes, tools, and infrastructure required to achieve long-term success.

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Global Website Network Delivers Long-Term Value  

Over a decade ago, one of the largest privately-owned cybersecurity companies in the world asked us to produce a network of sites to deliver regular content to their international audiences. The result is a long-term success story of continuous improvement, evolution, technical debt mitigation, and fulfilling business partnership.

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Engineering Disciplines

Throughout the year Convertiv’s maintenance agreement delivers our clients technical innovation and process changes in the following technical disciplines. Each quarter the engineering and project management teams provide an update to clients reviewing which of the following disciplines have evolved and how it affects their digital property.

  • Infrastructure
  • Development Operations
  • Security
  • Proactive Monitoring
  • UI/UX
  • Data Engineering and Instrumentation
  • Analytics
  • MarTech (Marketing Technology)
  • SEO Performance
  • Project management
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