Changing the Present is a new kind of non-profit website for people who want to make a difference, and it makes giving more rewarding by letting you choose exactly what you want to accomplish. arvato systems had been tasked to apply modern e-Commerce technologies in a new way to help this nonprofit fulfill its goals in a cost effective yet engaging manner.

With a nonprofit client, it was imperative that every dollar spent on the platform was accounted for. arvato systems recommended the Ruby on Rails as the framework for the following reasons:

• Rails allows agile development practices, a big advantage in a startup environment.
• It is cost effective, a must for a non profit.
• Rails enables us to develop, test and deploy new features quickly resulting in a high level of productivity.

With a team distributed across three different time zones, we focused our process around short, focused one-week iterations. Instead of using a typical test cycle, we heavily relied on our developers to build test cases as we coded, keeping the team size small and productivity high.

With development starting in September, we showed significant progress in our weekly demos to the client. We deployed at least weekly, adhering to strong automated testing methods. The first order was placed in December with the launch of the beta version. With the framework, we quickly scaled to growing traffic demand and added new features such as social networking. The launch was very successful and arvato systems was delighted to have Changing the Present among its successful clients.