Case Studies

National Criminal Registry (Polish Ministry of Justice)

A web platform to enable access to the submission of questions and getting answers from the National Criminal Register (KRK) as well as from the European Criminal Records Information System (ECRIS) via the Internet. A web frontend and backend application which was integrated with the Ministry core systems and an online payment provider.

Project overview

The goal was to enable all Polish citizens to easily access their data from the National Criminal Register (KRK) as well as from the European Criminal Records Information System ( ECRIS) via the Internet. The intention was to provide a seamless experience with simple forms, electronic signatures and online payments.

The challenge

Due to a very tight deadline, analytical work, design and implementation took place in parallel. Significant part of the software development effort was based on incomplete requirements.

The system was going to be used by all Polish citizens and to replace the pre-existing manual business processes. This imposed a very steep user count curve. High availability and performance were crucial for the success of the platform.

The core logic included integration with one of the government data processing systems. It was imperative that the integration is reliable and the system is stable even in the corner-case scenarios.

Our approach

We introduced short development cycles in Agile spirit as well as the best software development practices. Extensible design allowed to swap modules when new requirements arrived. Automated tests with high code coverage allowed rapid feedback to changes – it made keeping quality easier and component delivery reliable, steady and predictable.

Hardware and software redundancy was introduced to meet high load demands and make the system highly-available.

The solution was delivered in a very short, three-month time. It was deployed to production environment with confidence and went live without a single “production-issue”. It has been based on establish open-source components which made it reliable and free of vendor lock-ins.