Doping in sport—the use of banned performance enhancing drugs (PEDs)—used to be monitored and reported by disparate organizations around the globe. A major doping scandal in the 1998 Tour de France turned this approach on its head and led to the formation of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

WADA acts as a global regulatory body, developing and coordinating anti-doping rules across all sports and countries. “When people think of WADA they think of anti-doping, regulation, and sports. You don’t think about software development. But our systems sit at the center of the anti-doping process,” said WADA’s Head of Digital Development, Fei Wang.

Their systems managing anti-doping procedures were developed with traditional programming and had become cumbersome for WADA to enhance and maintain over time. WADA sought out a low-code platform to help them deliver the next generation of applications for their business.

Since adopting Mendix in 2022, WADA has developed several low-code applications that are enabling them to efficiently deliver on their promise to make sport cleaner for athletes around the world.

Changing the Game

WADA is an international independent organization that operates in collaboration with the athlete community, the Sport Movement, governments of the world, the anti-doping expert community, medical professionals, WADA-accredited laboratories and other stakeholders.

They handle incredibly sensitive and personal data – and the handling of that data varies across the many groups that they work with.

Because of this complexity, many of WADA’s Java and mobile applications had become monolithic, legacy, and difficult to maintain over time.

“At the time we started to migrate from a monolithic to microservices architecture by introducing APIs, but the pace of change from the business side was too quick. We have a small team here, so it was difficult to keep up,” she said.

WADA’s development team was also more experienced with back-end than front-end development, leaving application UIs feeling less modern than users required.

Looking at the next generation of their application landscape, Wang and the team were seeking a software development platform that would:

• Be fast and flexible enough to match the pace of changing user and regulatory requirements.
• Fill skills gaps in the existing development team, allowing them to produce modern user experiences without bringing on new specialists.
• Offer high levels of data privacy and security, as data in WADA’s applications cannot leave their administration.

Going for Gold with Mendix

WADA evaluated several leading low-code platforms. They ran a rigorous proof of concept testing each platform’s maturity to deliver key features on their wish list. This included creating workflows, PDF generation, email notifications, audit trails, and CSV exports.

They ultimately selected Mendix as their low-code development platform in 2022.

Mendix also stood out with regards to its:

• Cloud Flexibility: Mendix is cloud-native, allowing WADA to continue deploying to their private cloud on Amazon EKS—where most of their data lives—but also with the flexibility to deploy to Azure if needed.
• Deployment Speed & Scalability: Mendix supports Kubernetes cloud clusters, which WADA’s team was already familiar with, allowing them to spin up new clusters very quickly.
• Developer Experience: Where WADA’s experienced Java developers liked the Mendix IDE and felt that they had more control as compared to other platforms.
• Support from the Mendix Team: Who guided them through the evaluation and set realistic expectations for the platform’s capabilities.

WADA’s Senior DevOps Lead and Architect, Alex Rousseau, also highlighted Mendix’s core architecture as most compatible with their vision.

“What I like about Mendix is that it is stateless architecture. Stateful applications can be challenging to manage, particularly when it comes to load balancing and maintaining resilience. Issues often arise when nodes go down or traffic is redirected,” said Alex Rousseau, WADA’s Senior DevOps Lead and Architect.

Future-Proofing Apps to Make Sport Safer

WADA’s typical end-user groups for their solutions include athletes, anti-doping organizations (ADOs), and laboratory personnel. Their first Mendix project was revamping their Athlete Biological Passport (ABP) system.

The ABP tracks biological variables over time to reveal the effects of doping rather than attempting to detect the doping substance itself. The historical system, built with Java, had become outdated and was difficult to modify and maintain.

It could not manage the entire ABP process, from sample collection to analysis, within the system and required additional work in 3rd party desktop application.

Rebuilding and modernizing the ABP was an ambitious project that had to account for several degrees of complexity:

• Four different sub-modules based on four different passport types. Each has a different criteria with varied integration points and security access.
• Several different integration types with WADA’s legacy platforms, and other Mendix Marketplace modules.
• Five user groups, whose access is controlled by the role they play in anti-doping and have their own delegation and contract of information sharing.

The new ABP application was delivered in 10 months, contains millions of athlete records, and includes hundreds of microflows and nanoflows. The application is more modern, responsive, and adaptable.

“It took us 10 months to develop, but if you look at the actual amount of work that went into it, it’s very fast compared to how much time it would have taken if we had developed it in Java,” said Wang.

As WADA’s user requirements change over time, or as requirements are simplified, the team can adjust the application more flexibly and release updates as frequently as needed.

Moving from a Monolith to Microservices

Rebuilding the ABP was just the first step in WADA’s long-term transformation.

“We’re also decoupling what was previously a large monolithic platform that contained every function from anti-doping to sample testing to athlete whereabouts. We’re splitting it into several Mendix applications to make a simpler microservices architecture,” said Zhang.

This approach sets WADA up to be more agile and flexible, and has resulted in the development of several standalone applications with Mendix. This includes:

• Sample Management, which allows end-users from labs and ADOs to manage samples that are available for analysis and prioritize ones that need to be expedited.
• A user access portal, which serves as the gateway to other WADA applications and standardizes role-based permissions.
• Athlete Center, which is in the early stages of development. It allows athletes to report their whereabouts so that doping control officers can find them if they are needed for an unannounced test.
• Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE), an application still in development for athletes to request TUEs to be treated for medical conditions – even if the treatment involves using a prohibited substance or method — while avoiding the risk of being sanctioned. The TUE application leverages Mendix Workflow to carry out the approval process in these cases.

Standard & Scalable DevOps

With the adoption of Mendix, WADA has revamped their cloud operations, infrastructure, and architecture to optimize technology costs and app performance.

For example, WADA now deploys using infrastructure as code technology. “The infrastructure as code model has allowed us to standardize our deployment,” said Rousseau.

“Because Mendix was so well-positioned with our cloud provider, we were able to revamp our approach to modularity around applications. Each module that we’re breaking out of the monolith gets its own stack, which guarantees that if there’s a degradation of performance in a given situation, we can isolate it to that module without adjusting the entire system,” he continued.

The WADA team is also building up their library of reusable Mendix components, all of which can be used on the established common UI framework and design system. This ensures consistency across new applications.

“We’ve made a significant effort to improve the collaboration and knowledge sharing between teams, as well as the reusability of components across applications. That’s the power of Mendix,” said Zhang.

Deployment has also been reduced to a single click and can be done by product owners without the intervention of a DevOps team member. The proper procedures and standards are baked into the process.

“We landed on Mendix for Private Cloud because it gives us the ability to have a hybrid approach where we have some simplicities like the Sprintr tooling for deployments and releases, but maintain full control of the data and audit trail,” said Rousseau.

Faster Development, Ready for the Future

Wang shared her learnings looking back on the early days of implementing Mendix within a small team:

• Start small. While the ABP was a successful first project, Wang shares that the team would have benefited from piloting a smaller project first to sharpen their low-code knowledge.
• Invest in Training. Low-code development can get you to an outcome more quickly, but that doesn’t mean you should skip baseline training and enablement for your team as they adopt a new platform and ways of working.
• Partner with Experts. WADA has leaned on an external implementation partner and the Mendix Expert Services team to bolster their low-code expertise and ensure they abide by best practices.

“We have a great relationship with the Mendix Customer Success and Expert Services teams. I think that’s a differentiator for Mendix compared to other platforms—we’re able to work with the same people who understand our business and are there to support us,” said Wang.

Using Mendix has successfully helped WADA improve development efficiency and their working culture:

• Standardization has shortened the overall software development lifecycle, lowering costs and time to market.
• Professional developers are happy that they can still flex their Java expertise and not worry about having to learn new front-end development skills to deliver a beautiful outcome.
• Business and IT stakeholders are collaborating more often and talking more frequently. The result is better requirements from the business, and more human-centric solutions from IT.

Over the last four years the WADA team has taken strides in future-proofing their technology strategy for the next generation of their business. Moving forward, their goal is to continue modernizing and growing the team so that they can pick up more Mendix projects in parallel.

“In terms of capabilities, we can achieve the same objectives as if we were writing the code, but in terms of delivery, it’s much faster with Mendix. Overall, the lifecycle of delivering and updating an application has been reduced, which is beneficial for our organization,” said Wang.