FDLIC / Passare

Passare is a SaaS solution that helps funeral directors and the families they serve navigate the difficult end-of-life management planning process so that they have more time to focus on people. Year over year, they’ve been experiencing over 100% growth. We’ve completed over 6,500 work items on the project.

Up and Running has had the honor of working with Funeral Directors Life Insurance Company (FDLIC) on one of their initiatives, Passare.com, since early 2013. We have over 15 full-time team members who contribute to software architecture, development, systems engineering, DevOps, and quality assurance efforts. Our team works in close cooperation with Passare’s product development team to design and develop new functionality. The product is a SaaS system that offers transformational services for families and funeral home professionals to communicate and navigate end-of-life events and next steps. The client had over 300% growth in 2015, and we’re very excited about the future, for both the product itself and our relationship.

Video source: FDLIC / Passare

From a technical perspective, at a high level, the core application back-end is written in Ruby using the Ruby on Rails framework and interacts with a PostgreSQL database for primary data storage. The application also mirrors searchable data into SOLR to provide high-performance and flexible search options to users. Dynamic functionality for the front-end is written in CoffeeScript and relies on jQuery to maximize cross-browser compatibility. Code quality is a top priority on the project, and an extensive testing suite built upon RSpec, Capybara, and Selenium helps identify issues before they leave development.

The large size of the project led to a unique team structure designed to integrate easily with Passare’s development team. Due to the size of the engineering team, we have divided it into four subteams (three development and one QA), each of which is led and managed by a lead developer or QA engineer. For each sprint, our engineering team leads—one of which is the overall project lead—meet with the client's product planning team for an initial discussion on the features and changes requested for that sprint. Significant features are then divided between the development team leads for further planning and technical design work. Once a team lead finalizes the requirements and technical design of a feature, they work with members of their team to implement the functionality. Team leads are responsible for reporting the status of work done by their development team back to the planning team.

Again, we can’t say enough how much of a pleasure it’s been to work with such an excellent client and their team members. Passare / FDLIC and Up and Running have built a great product together: it’s serving a social need, and impacting everyone’s bottom line positively. Building out the technology is a reward in and of itself, but it’s quite a joy being able to help so many people at their time of need in such a direct manner.

The information above covers the project in a nutshell. What follows is more detailed information, presented in bulleted lists for easy reading.

Some of the major features we built out, and what they achieved

Passare: Reporting Engine
Image source: FDLIC / Passare
Passare: Chat
Image source: FDLIC / Passare
Passare: OAuth based api
Image source: FDLIC / Passare
Passare: Online collaboration system
Image source: FDLIC / Passare
Passare: Activity feed
Image source: FDLIC / Passare
Passare: Online collaboration system
Image source: FDLIC / Passare
Passare: Online collaboration system
Image source: FDLIC / Passare
Video source: FDLIC / Passare

Some additional features

More detail about how the project is tested

More about the project from a technical perspective

Some of the development best practices that are followed

How communications flow in detail in respect to the work being done

Our general process flow for a feature

The Up and Running team

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