Ruby on Rails development team for an artisan cheese factory
"The team is consistent in their work and responsive, and they do a good job despite the high-effort nature of their tasks."
About Cowgirl Creamery
Cowgirl Creamery is a company founded in 1994 in Point Reyes Station, California. They manufacture their cheeses and sell other imported and domestic cheese and fine artisan foods.
The Challenge
When we were contacted by Michael, their former marketing director, Cowgirl Creamery had 2 applications for their institutional and E-commerce websites. The challenge was to maintain Cowgirl Creamery's applications and propose improvements to their workflows, fix bugs, and implement their feature requests.
The Solution
Hands-on the project, we started evaluating the state of the institutional and E-commerce websites and the list of bugs and feature requests Cowgirl Creamery had before reaching out to us. Both the CMS (Lolita CMS) and E-commerce (Spree) websites were outdated, a couple of versions behind the latest releases of their software, and, unconventionally, 2 apps took place instead of a regular E-commerce website with institutional pages.
The first thing we did was upgrade the applications to the latest versions of their software and dependencies and work on some performance issues in the Spree application. Their Spree implementation was heavily customized and had quite a lot of performance issues. Then, we started fixing long-living bugs that were making Cowgirl Creamery's staff work hard and dependent on their IT team and implementing features that were on their to-do list for some time before we started working together.
The Outcome
The Spree commerce application and the CMS were upgraded to the most recent version of their respective frameworks and dependencies possible and mitigated several security vulnerabilities. Long-living issues were addressed and several long-awaited features that helped the back office users daily work were developed.
"They inherited a system that had a lot of flaws in it, and they've done a good, consistent job of making sure that things run, despite how high-maintenance those efforts can be."