Strengthening the Development Team for a Transportation Logistics Platform

Client Overview

TRUCKER delivers solutions for cargo owners and carriers. The company's flagship product, the Transportation Management System (TMS), facilitates the creation and automated distribution of orders among carriers, bidding, and direct order routing. TMS also supports customizable rules for order allocation, real-time route tracking, electronic document exchange, and a powerful analytics module for data reporting. The system is designed for multimodal logistics (road, rail, sea, air) and integrates with client ERP systems, providing transparency and reducing manual effort.

The Product

TMS is a monolithic Rails application built with Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles. Its architecture incorporates Event-Driven Design and CQRS, using tools such as Rails Event Store and libraries from the dry-rb ecosystem.

Development follows a functional programming style, ensuring more reliable, logically consistent code. While Ruby often leans toward imperative programming for speed, functional programming provides long-term benefits by making systems more scalable and stable.

Evrone developers worked across multiple internal teams under the client’s supervision, contributing to product development, maintenance, and new feature rollouts. Our team included highly qualified middle and senior Ruby developers, and below are some highlights of the tasks we tackled.

Billing System

The TMS billing system is based on the Open Source Lago tool, which includes a GraphQL API, webhooks, and an admin interface. While Lago’s out-of-the-box features didn’t fully meet TMS requirements, our team adapted it to comply with regulations and integrated it with the 1C platform for billing.

SDK for Integrations

TRUCKER prioritizes flexibility to meet the unique needs of logistics businesses. The system's architecture includes:

1. Core functionality
2. Customer configuration
3. SDK for communication between core systems and client customizations

Evrone developers contributed to SDK development by addressing two key objectives:

• Implement reusable protocols for sending and receiving messages.
• Develop mechanisms to process inbound and outbound messages in Customer Configurations.

Addressing Unstable Tests

TMS relies on over 17,000 automated backend tests to maintain its high-quality standards. However, unstable tests (flaky tests) caused delays during deployments.

One of our developers devised a solution that automatically reruns failed tests multiple times. If errors persisted, the issue lay in the app code; if results varied, the test itself was faulty. This system reduced debugging time and improved efficiency.

Technical Support

TRUCKER provides two levels of customer support. The first line addresses basic inquiries, while complex issues are escalated to the second line, where engineers, including Evrone specialists, provide expert solutions. This ensures not only problem resolution but also continuous system improvements based on user feedback.

Feature Flags

TRUCKER employs a Continuous Delivery approach, releasing updates several times weekly. All updates are controlled by feature flags, which allow for incremental feature rollouts to specific users or groups without restarting the system.

Digital Queue Management

The digital queue tool streamlines loading and unloading processes, offering real-time updates on vehicle statuses, orders, and slots. The system also allows clients to reserve slots for specific partners, optimizing workflows and preventing downtime.

Frontend Optimization

End-users rely heavily on tables with large datasets, which can strain low-powered computers. To address this, one of our senior frontend engineers developed a custom table component with features like:

• Smooth horizontal and vertical scrolling.
• Fixed and dynamic column widths.
• Expandable rows.

Additionally, we optimized the rendering of dynamic translations, improving performance by 2.5x with the native pluralization mechanism.

Results

Evrone continues to collaborate with the TRUCKER team, implementing updates, refactoring code, and improving the TMS platform. Over the past year, our contributions included:

• Billing system integration.
• Enhancements to the digital queue functionality.
• Optimizations for table performance.
• Development of group order functionality.
• Resolution of flaky test issues.
• Automated assignment of logistics providers.
• Introduction of new modalities (sea and air freight).

Group orders will launch in early 2025, and SDK development is ongoing.

Looking for experienced developers for large-scale projects? Contact Evrone to discuss how we can join your team and accelerate your product development!