How Better Health Generation built an MVP application in 10 weeks
181305 lines of code
92% bot written
MVP built in 10 weeks
Company: Better Health Generation
Product Owner: Dr Kylie Henderson
Location: Australia + United Kingdom
The challenge.
Dr. Kylie Henderson is a clinical psychologist and Managing Director of the Better Health Generation. She identified an urgent need in the community for a technology solution in the wellbeing space.
As a first time product owner, with no internal software team, the risks were high.
Dr. Henderson had a limited budget and an urgent deadline to deliver an MVP (minimum viable product) application, plus she needed to collaborate with an international team on different timezones. The challenge was to keep software development costs low but still get the application market-ready as fast as possible.
“A short turnaround time was really important. Every week that went by we were using paper-based business processes with clients and there was always going to be a better solution for it with technology.”
Dr. Henderson engaged a team from WorkingMouse, trained in Codebots technologies to scope and develop her application. They followed the scoping process available in the Codebots Way of Working.
The first thing that was established was the problem statement and from there, the team deep-dived into understanding the problem, observing it in action, ideating for solutions, and finally prototyping for validation.
The solution.
YourHealth+ is a digital health solution, using The Better Health Generation’s clinical expertise plus digital innovation to achieve better health outcomes for users. Clinicians receive real-time information from their patients with daily tracking and activities. This allows them to early influence and communicate with maximum impact.
“Technology gives us the chance to communicate more efficiently.”
Technology framework
- C#Bot: A full-stack bot, paired with a React clientside.
Behaviours implemented
- Forms: YourHealth+ used runtime configurable forms and surveys to capture user submissions so their wellbeing can be measured, monitored and guided.
- User: This behaviour controls which users and groups can access particular parts of the application. YourHealth+ has multiple types of users: Patients, clinitians and organisations.
- CRUD: YourHealth+ used this behaviour for managing their users’ data and to accelerate development by using bot-written code included in the front-end CRUD design to display data and in-built functionalities.
Codebots Behaviours hold a lot of power so at the beginning of the YourHealth+ estimation the WorkingMouse team calculated how much coverage they might get. They reviewed the the MVP’s requirements to see if a behaviour could be fully, partially, or was unable to be used for its implementation. The results can be seen in the following sketch; 25.8% of the requirements can be fully written by a codebot, 53.2% partially written, and just 21% of the requirements would need to be completely custom code.
Features of the app
- React native mobile application.
- Integration with an external video chat platform.
- Customisable SaaS (Software as a Service) application.
- Learning Management System.
- Search functionality.
- Dashboard and charting tools to visualise user data.
Why Codebots?
Speed.
The Codebots visual builder comes with pre-built Behaviours that you can drag-and-drop into your application to save time. YourHealth+ implemented three of these behaviours and the project velocity was massively accelerated.
“This short turnaround wouldn’t have been possible without the Codebots platform.”
Collaboration.
With a global team of 350 health professionals, key stakeholders, and developers in different timezones, the Codebots Platform ensured that there was one central point to collect information and communicate with the team. The Build section of the platform allowed team members to collaborate in real-time when modelling YourHealth+ application code.
“Just knowing that we had this technology platform that was cloud based, it was safe and secure, I owned it as the product owner and it was a place that everyone could go to – it’s all in one spot.”
Customisable.
With full access to the code repository complete with bot-written documentation, API and developer notes and no vender lock-in, the YourHealth+ team can now run the application on any local environment.
“My ability to customise the app was really important because it gave me a broader market. The bots were able to write for me the ability to customise it to different cohorts. I think my return on investment is going to be far better by working with the bots and that’s going to support my business for the next five years and beyond.”
Written by Eban Escott
Founder of Codebots
Dr Eban Escott received his Doctorate from UQ (2013) in Model-Driven Engineering and his Masters from QUT (2004) in Artificial Intelligence. He is an advocate of using models as first class artefacts in software engineering and creating not just technologies, but methodologies that enhance the quality of life for software engineers.
