Overview

Since 2007, LDARtools has worked to become the innovation leader in their industry of Leak Detection and Repair compliance. Building upon decades of in-the-trenches experience of founder, Rex Moses, this family-run company has built its reputation on providing solid LDAR hardware and software solutions built upon the latest technology.

In 2013, Art+Logic was hired to create a small app that would organize the routes of in-field technicians surveying every joint, valve, and fixture at a massive processing location.

Later that year, LDARtools asked Art+Logic to hop on a legacy project that was in need of debugging and refactoring.

Then, in 2015, LDARtools contracted with Art+Logic to build out a massive compliance platform: Chateau.

When we began the project, the client was determined to create a better LDAR monitoring and compliance platform. The monitoring of fugitive emissions is a very labor-intensive, audit-prone, and expensive part of any oil, chemical, natural gas, or other processing and manufacturing company. Remaining compliant with local, state, and federal EPA mandates is necessary to avoid expensive fines and disruptions to production and to ensure the air we breathe remains safe. However, at the time, people looking for a monitoring platform could choose from only two very poor solutions. For all the importance placed on LDAR, the platforms available were written with dated technologies, failed to produce reproducible results, and, in one case, relied on a poorly extended version of an application originally used to monitor fire extinguishers. The client had a vision for a contemporary, powerful, flexible, and full-featured app that would tie together all aspects of LDAR — from building out and applying new rules to preparing government-ready reports, to tracking and approving repairs, to organizing teams to run onsite analysis and scheduling them so that a user was ensured that adequate monitoring could be completed by the staff on hand at the appropriate times.

The App Development Philosophy

Data-Driven System

The data is supreme; everything else follows the data. Whenever data design and code design ideas are at odds, by default, data wins. Object orientation was not maximized to its full potential but rather was honed to facilitate data management, especially via the ORM capabilities of the Entity Framework. Object-oriented design was employed more fully in the UI.

Rule-Based System

Many activities, from data entry to scheduling inspections, are affected by rules. Although some simpler aspects of rules could be represented in the database, there are some aspects that could not or should not be evaluated in the database. This meant that the Business Engine became the centerpiece of the Chateau system.

Complex rules are evaluated in Workflow Foundation (WF) activities. Each activity processes a specific part of the rules. After the end of a flow, results are saved back to the database. These results are later used as inputs of other flows.

Given the requirement of high flexibility in the representation and configuration of rules, overly-rigid data structures would not suffice. We chose to represent the semi-structured data of rules in XML. This choice facilitated the configuration of rules in the Builder app. At the same time, we employed schema validation to ensure that rules met a minimal standard before being parsed and saved to the database.

Technical

Building a highly flexible and complex app while maintaining a high degree of data and reporting compliance. Competitor applications required users to run reports multiple times to triangulate a rough result. This rough result meant that some companies were over-monitoring and wasting money or under monitoring and exposing themselves to expensive EPA fines.

Previous applications required users to update their application by installing updated disks which was a scaling nightmare. We needed to build a Rule Building Engine which would allow users to define rules relative to their local, state, and federal guidelines per their industry WHILE ensuring that the rules they created mapped to the application and created reproducible and reliable reports.

For the size and ambition of the project, the Chateau team started out small with only two lead developers, a designer, PM, and QA. This reflected the team’s initial focus on learning the client’s vision for Chateau intimately, understanding the problem domain, and building a detailed backlog and initial sequencing plan for the project.

This phase lasted through several four-week milestones and included the development of prototypes and proof-of-concept code for key areas of business logic as well as fleshing out the UI design. Though it is tempting to shortcut this phase of a project and dive into doing “real” development right away, taking the time to get a deep understanding of the project at the start saves time and cost in the long run, particularly for a more complex problem domain.

The first phase of Chateau culminated in a goal for an alpha release. This included both identifying the approximate minimum features necessary for alpha as well as a limited business environment where alpha testing would occur. The client identified schedule as the key driver for them, so Art+Logic scaled the team up heavily for the push to alpha.

Results

After digesting the results of alpha, we entered a phase of steady development balancing enhancing existing features to cope with environmental complexities beyond alpha and adding new features. Priorities changed when a regulatory change in the client’s business domain prompted a new business opportunity for them. This resulted in a change in direction and sequencing of the project for several milestones to add a new feature set to address that new opportunity. Then it all ends with beta testing and final release.