Ragnarson

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Stewardly is a social-purpose business in the human subjects research administration space. When people perform research on other people, testing drugs and devices within hospitals and universities, there is a series of checks and balances that exist in order to ensure that the research is ethical and that everyone has done their homework before testing potentially risky new health products in humans. When people make a decision as to whether to participate in research, they need to be fully informed of the known risks and what the demands on them will be. Through our work, and our software, we aim to cut 1-2 years out of the up-to-14-year, up-to-5-billion-dollar drug development process by helping the people who oversee research at hospitals and universities to be more efficient at what they do.

I am the founder of the startup, which is a social purpose business.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Ragnarson?

Like many startups, we have done a bunch of software development in order to establish an MVP [minimum viable product] from which we could receive feedback. We had what I would call “intern-quality” software at the time, and when we actually needed to deploy it and gain a larger user base, it behooved us to have enterprise-grade software out-of-the-gate. I found out about Ragnarson through an excellent software platform they had developed, and got in touch with them because I was looking for help in making that leap.

Because I work in a fairly specialized field, I didn't have the same worries as someone building solutions for the general population. We will never suddenly gain a billion users, but we are still planning for the future, and are re-architecting our software in order to make it as efficient as possible.

The business goal was to work on the world's first hosted electronic research ethics administration software. In the field, there is something called an IRB [Institutional Review Board], which is a group of people who oversee research that is known by different names in different parts of the world. We wanted to come up with the first free software service for research ethics administrators, allowing them to keep track of the research studies their IRB oversees. One of the problems is that there is a big divide between hospitals and universities in terms of the resources they have available to them. Many places use Excel in order to keep track of studies, but there can sometimes be hundreds of them going on at the same time, which amounts to a lot of manual labor. As part of ‎Stewardly's social purpose model, we wanted to take the least valuable work, namely, Excel “grunt-work”, and level the playing field, allowing any research ethics committee across the world to get away from these types of arduous efforts, and to have good data as a right instead of as a privilege.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Ragnarson was tasked with recoding our entire codebase from scratch. In the process, we took advantage of some opportunities to create elements which we hadn't even thought of for the intern-grade software, in order to better serve our users and take certain tasks off of research administrators' plates. Ragnarson was in charge of everything from authentication to security elements, which were all rolled from scratch. This is not often done nowadays, and it speaks to Ragnarson's abilities. We have a Ruby on Rails- and JavaScript-based software service, which are Ragnarson's specialization.

One senior developer from Ragnarson was assigned to our project. I also interfaced with their chief executive officer and account manager at the front-end of the process, as well as over the course of development, in order to keep things on track.

How did you come to work with Ragnarson?

I spent a significant amount of time and effort looking for a good platform-as-a-service provider. That search eventually led me to a Ragnarson spin-off company. I eventually followed the fruit back to the tree, given that whoever built that solution knew how to build good, intuitive, human-centred software. That solution was a joy to use, compared to every other platform I'd seen.

The larger consideration for me, as a startup business owner, was if we were going to become a software development organization or not. If yes, we needed to provide the environment and resources which developers need in order to grow and thrive. I came to the conclusion that it wouldn't make sense to do this, especially since hospitals and universities often make purchase decisions through long and involved processes, so it wouldn't be reasonable to expect a need for continuous software development. Oftentimes, the product would be built, and only enhanced months or years later, depending on how long it would take for it to gain traction.

The quest then became to look for an organization which invests in its people and provides a good environment for them to thrive. I wasn't looking for the lowest bidder because developing software requires craftspeople. It became readily apparent that Ragnarson makes significant investments in sending its team to conferences, taking on open-source projects, and mentoring junior developers, assigning them different kinds of projects that could provide opportunities to learn.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Ragnarson in February 2016 and worked continuously until April. We took a pause at one point, but have now resumed development for the Stewardly software. We are now in maintenance mode, and make small tweaks to the software as needed. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

A good portion of our budget is dedicated to communication. We meet every day with Ragnarson for one hour in order to review the code written on the previous day and to plan the next day. The collaboration has been quite good in enabling us to ensure that test coverage is proportional to critical aspects of the code. Within research ethics administration, there is a concept of proportionate review: the riskier the research, the more “pairs of eyes” need to review it. There are a few different camps with respect to test-driven development in the software world. On one hand, there are people who drive everything with tests; on the other hand, there are those who find tests to be a waste of time. I don't necessarily believe either of those and have followed a philosophy of proportionate test coverage. It's hard to assign a metric on this, but knowing that we will be actively discussing and making decisions on test coverage at every point, as a trade-off to new features being developed, it has been a good way to gain peace of mind. The sense that I've gotten is that Ragnarson is entirely flexible, based on the philosophy of a business. I've never gotten a one-size-fits-all feeling working with Ragnarson.

How did Ragnarson perform from a project management standpoint?

We use standard tools like Pivotal Tracker for user stories. Ragnarson has its own time-tracking app for developers and we share documents through Google Drive. Slack is used for communicating day-to-day things and scheduling meetings. Ragnarson has a default toolkit of services, but they're also open to using other tools or services which I might want to bring to the table.

I've worked with different groups of technical resources in the past, and communication was not necessarily their strong point. It's been quite the contrary experience with Ragnarson. It's always easy to communicate with them, and nothing is ever lost. If something comes up which needs discussing, the appropriate members of the Ragnarson team will quickly make the time to do so.

What did you find most impressive about Ragnarson?

It all comes down to Ragnarson's team giving the impression that they care about what it is they're working on. One common theme I noticed was their eagerness to be involved in purposeful projects which can improve the world. Ragnarson's team takes their work seriously and has looked at the larger business context of why I was working on a project, and whether the solution would have the ability to be maintained, expanded, and cultivated over time. Ragnarson has an internal selection process in order to ensure that the team is working on meaningful projects with a certain level of impact and longevity, and I am honoured to have “made the cut” so to speak!

Are there any areas Ragnarson could improve?

Ragnarson's project manager asked me this at certain touch-points, but there's nothing that I can think of right now.