Team Augmentation for Platform Migration

Truth Initiative is a national public health organization that is inspiring tobacco-free lives and building a culture where all youth and young adults reject tobacco. In 2008, they launched BecomeAnEX, a digital quit-smoking program developed in collaboration with Mayo Clinic.

BecomeAnEX has helped more than 800,000 users on their quitting journey. Research has shown that, by following the BecomeAnEX quit plan, a tobacco user’s chances of quitting are quadrupled. The platform’s large, active social community brings together current and former smokers who share information and support each other through the ups and downs of quitting smoking.

In addition to the extra flexibility and functionality that Truth Initiative was looking to bring to their platform, BecomeAnEX was not originally built in a way that easily supported a modern API. A diverse technical skillset was needed for the migration, including expertise in Ansible, Wagtail CMS, and JavaScript. This represented a substantial amount of work for Truth Initiative, who needed to rely on outside resources.

“It was the highest workload we’d ever had.” – Jody Brookover, Director of Software Development, Innovations at Truth Initiative

Truth Initiative turned to Caktus to manage the migration and help meet their exceptional internal quality standards.

Caktus’ staff combines some of the best coding talent available, with a commitment to high standards and ensuring the long-term success of a project. Both Truth Initiative and Caktus are accustomed to a culture of rigorous code review and testing, so it was a seamless fit for Caktus’ staff to step in, quickly gain an understanding of the issue, and work with Truth Initiative to come up with a customized solution to allow them to meet their deadline with no compromise in quality.

The Caktus team integrated easily with the staff at Truth Initiative’s, with leading Django experts ensuring that the migration from PHP to Python was completed on time and within budget.

“We considered several other vendors for this project, but the Caktus team blew everyone else out of the water.” – Jody Brookover, Director of Software Development, Innovations at Truth Initiative

Caktus worked closely with the engineers at Truth Initiative to maintain visibility of the migration and guarantee peace of mind that the product would meet their requirements. Crucially, this meant that Truth Initiative could follow the process every step of the way and know that the product was being built and streamlined for the long term. Like Truth Initiative, Caktus developers promote a culture of extensive code review and testing, further guaranteeing high quality but without any slowdown in the process.

Partnering with Caktus gave Truth Initiative the temporary resource boost they needed. With a tight timeline, the Caktus team’s consulting experience and technical proficiency allowed them to quickly grasp the scope of the BecomeAnEX migration. Thanks to their rigorous approach, rapid iteration and ability to integrate closely with the developers at Truth Initiative, the project was delivered on time and within budget.

Looking to bring in additional resources to augment your own project, or for expertise in customized web app development? We’d love to hear from you.