An important part this year on the roadmap of product line CRM is the addition of HDN (Hypotheken Data Network) functionalities. Always wanted to know how such a piece of software is created? Johan van der Graaff , tech lead at ANVA, describes in his blog how the team tackled this.
'In consultation with stakeholders, we drew up various wishes and requirements for a first version. The focus came to be on receiving and sending relevant documents for a mortgage application via the HDN network. Think for example of documents such as an employer's statement, a salary specification or a copy of an identity document.
To get a good idea of the application process, a delegation of the team started working with a number of stakeholders. After this step, the engineers work out that process on a technical level in a "design session." This involves both figuring out and modeling previously mentioned requirements and process steps. The result of this session is an outline of what needs to be developed in the software. Using so-called "smart use cases" makes the translation from functional to technical relatively easy. At the end of the session, everything is in place to start programming the software. Moreover, if we make good use of this methodology and models, it is possible for any engineer within ANVA to be able to use it, regardless of his or her knowledge of the process itself.
In this particular example, the team chose to automate the desired process steps as much as possible. To accomplish this, a dozen or so "workers" were created to periodically do their thing. In addition, we also built a central component that handles all communication to and from the HDN network. Users can access HDN functionality through a new app we developed on ANVA Hub. Incidentally, this new software makes intensive use of various functionalities on the AWS (Amazon Web Services) platform, such as SQS (Simple Queue Service) and S3 (Simple Cloud Storage Service). All of these are modern, robust technologies.
" Good thing we use more time to write test code!"
Software testing is an important component within our field. Within the microservices landscape and associated architecture, a number of agreements have been made about how software is automatically tested. Specifically, this means that roughly 65% of the time an engineer spends programming is now spent writing test code (and that's good!). All new software specifically for the HDN path is therefore tested in this way, which I believe makes the final product stable and production-worthy.
Another important aspect is the required certification. If, as a software supplier, you want to use the HDN network, you must be able to demonstrate that your software actually meets the requirements set by HDN. This includes the correct drafting of network-specific messages and the correct arrangement and configuration of the HDN software. At the time of writing the first preparations for this certification process have started.
All in all, I think that as a team we can be proud of the result we have achieved so far. Also, as a team we have gained a lot of knowledge of the new platform. And that is important for future assignments.'
