iTaggit Case Study

- Reliable and Secure Design
- Optimized and Scalable Architecture

iTaggit is a social collecting, private inventorying, research center rolled into one robust site. Recognizing that an individual's net worth includes high value items, iTaggit helps users manage valuable possessions by assisting them in organizing, researching, and appraising their items., while preserving user and data privacy. The site features also community resources, where users can connect and interact with friends, like-minded collectors, and knowledgeable experts.

iTaggit team came with the idea and basic design, but they needed a professional team which can actually bring the ideas to live, with the demand that the solution is secure, reliable, fast and scaleable. That's where On-Site came to help them achieve their goals with cost effective plan. On-Site held several meetings with iTaggit teams and fine tuned the basic ideas into a concrete set of requirements. The next important task was to design the application so that it not only performs what's required, but is also scalable and easy to maintain. For the implementation, On-Site selected the best of industry standard tools and practiced software engineering development models. On-Site was there to help decide iTaggit team on the what's best on the hardware and software side.

As the client wanted to keep a tight track of the progress, so On-Site developed the application using the Spiral process model, where On-Site had a session with the iTaggit team after every major module/area development. This not only help them track the performance and development, but it also helped them experience the site as it was being developed. This development model was such a hit for client, that they continued to follow it even after the site went live for the maintenance and still follow it for new feature development.

iTaggit was expecting a large number of user hits from the start, so special consideration was taken during the application architecture design phase to provide appropriate scalability. The security and reliability was important, and it was not possible to fully test every part of the site after a new release or feature update. So On-Site developed a batch test system which automatically tested the core features of the application before every release. For the performance tuning, On-Site ran the stress test on the application and fine tuned it to handle thousands of parallel hits without any noticeable degrade in the performance. The website was also tweaked to support a Web Farm environment for the load balancing and performance (leading to a very scaleable model).

Client testimony:

“We have used On-Site’s development team as a core part of our development strategy. The On-Site team members are technically excellent, reliable, and schedule driven. They have integrated well into our team and are strong contributors to our business. We have been very pleased with the quality of work and people from On-Site’s development team.” David Altounian, CEO