I’ve been blogging about the benefits of Ruby on Rails in abstract terms. I’ve been writing about these topics because my customers can’t get enough. Recently, I’ve wrapped up an engagement with AutoGas Systems, Inc. We were successful beyond our wildest dreams. Rather than talk about the engagement in abstract terms, I thought my readers would like to hear the message directly from the Development Director on my project, Cheri Byerly. Let me warn you in advance that this conversation is a customer reference, so it directly promotes my company. That said, I think there’s still value in posting the entire conversation. Here’s what she, had to say:
Q: What does AutoGas Systems, Inc. do?
AutoGas is a leading Software developer in customer loyalty solutions for the gasoline marketing, high-volume retail, and convenience store industry. Through value-added solutions, designed to enhance the retailer’s revenue, AutoGas focuses on developing software applications that will provide the most innovative solutions for its customers in order to help them achieve optimal customer traffic and sales.
Q: What did RapidRed do for you?
RapidRed was our only external source for our QAdmin project (ed. note: I brought in Relevance, LLC for some targeted UI work), providing training, design review, and development work for Ruby on Rails. RapidRed allowed us to rebuild an extended version of an existing application in record time.
The original application took over a year and a half with a team many times as large. We rebuilt the application and deployed within five months. We now own the source code, which was very important for us. The solution allows us to easily maintain and extend the code base, which we couldn’t do previously without incurring outrageous costs.
Our users notice a dramatic difference. The new user interface is far superior to the prior interface, allowing us to provide a better user experience—through both effective design and use of technologies like Ajax—and understand more about our business.
Q: Can you describe the business problem?
QAdmin is the web portal application used for administering our mission-critical DIGITAL REWARDS product. Users can use the portal to do simple reports, and to easily add retailers, vendors, products, offers and programs. The business rules governing offers and programs are quite complex.
Q: Why did you like Ruby on Rails?
The main thing was that we could quickly engineer a solution and deploy it. The developers loved it, so they worked harder and bought into our business at a much higher level. We’ve used other tools and architectures before which left us with a spaghetti-type mess. The result of using Ruby on Rails is a more extensible, more maintainable, cleaner code base.
_Q: What limitations did you find?_
The only limitation that I can see is that there is not a vast amount of knowledge on this technology. We used RapidRed to help us bridge that gap with the training, knowledge of tools, and follow-through. People need to be very careful in choosing their partners. We’ve worked with lots of companies and independent contractors, and they have not always lived up to our expectations.
Q: How would you rate your productivity for this project?
It’s hard to tell for sure, but we were at least four times as productive when compared with using other technologies. Probably more. In terms of the total programming man hours, we implemented the same specification in less than a third of the time, and with a fraction of the team.
Q: Would you use RapidRed again?
Of course. We will recoup the full investment that we made with RapidRed within six months!
Q: Would you use Rails again?
Yes. We hope to use it again soon. I would say it is becoming strategic at AutoGas. We need tools that let us quickly take advantage of our business opportunities. In our business, market windows close quickly, and if we can’t move, we’ll lose the opportunity. Rails lets us move quickly.
I’d like to personally thank Cheri for letting me talk about this publicly. She’s very excited about Rails, and you can see why.
(Digital Rewards is a registered trademark of AutoGas Systems, Inc.)