Risk-Based Monitoring Application

Our client is one of the largest contract research organisations (CRO) providing clinical trial services, with annual revenues of over $2 billion and over 11,000 employees in more than 60 countries.

Currently, the market demands that the sponsors of clinical trials find ways to reduce trial complexity, decrease drug development costs, and get more value from limited research and development budgets. The main goal of this project was to develop a platform that would help investigators to find out the riskiest parts of a clinical trial and thus to reduce a cost of an entire study. The application should be performant, user-friendly and elegant — strength, function and beauty are the essential qualities here.

Our team performed architecture design, database design, selection of 3rd party libraries, development, quality assurance, setup and maintenance of build system, and issue tracking. The project was done using Agile approach.

Quality was one of the main focuses of the project. In addition to functional testing, we used continuous integration, automated testing, code reviews, load testing and security testing.

To provide the best user experience, we created a Web 2.0 single-page application with a large set of visualisations. We used AngularJS as a frontend framework and ASP.NET Web API for the back end of the application to provide the required level of maintainability, performance, and flexibility. Besides, we chose D3.js library for visualisation, because most of the requirements were very specific and could not be implemented in other charts frameworks.

For development, we used Atlassian product stack — JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo, and Stash. The latter provided such possibilities as Git repositories, branch management, and pull requests mechanism, which, in our opinion, had a significant impact on source code quality.

The application was developed according to GxP guidelines and validated by US Federal Drug Administration. A distributed сustomer project team is running other parts of the system, such as ETL, using Agile methodologies.

The first version was released for the testing group and got a very positive feedback. The team continued adding features to the application.