Common Sense Media is the nation's leading nonpartisan, non-profit organization dedicated to improving the influence of media and entertainment on kids and families. Everyday Common Sense Media writers review and rank movies, video games, TV shows, Web sites, books and music, examining levels of sex, violence and adult language. Ratings have recently been expanded to review more complex concepts such as the influence of role models and consumerism. The company provides trustworthy analysis based on child development criteria created by leading national experts. Its writers work round the clock to produce and publish timely content, making Common Sense Media an authoritative source that helps parents and guardians make better informed decisions.

"On average, American children spend 45 hours a week observing and interacting with modern day media: television, videos, movies, video games, portable music players. That's more time spent with technology than with parents or in school," said Liz Perle, Editor-In-Chief, Common Sense Media. "Parents know that this fascination with modern media does not always yield healthy learning, engagement or interaction, so more and more parents are seeking out resources like our site."

Common Sense Media launched in 2004 and immediately took off. By 2007 this popular Web site was in the midst of a site traffic boom fueled by a dramatic increase in user-generated and staff-contributed content. A need for updated search tools and improved site experience drove management to consider a significant investment to upgrade the overall Web platform and user experience. The company partnered with Codesta, engaging the development team to personalize its community with a rich, new, best-of-breed experience.

"Codesta helped us move from a proprietary site architecture to a new open source content management system that greatly streamlined both the user experience and back end operations we manage in-house," said Jennifer Grasso, Director of Product Development for Common Sense Media. "We knew we not only needed a more robust platform that could grow with us, but we wanted to design a more user-friendly content delivery and management system. All this needed to be tied together to extend our search engine optimization (SEO) performance and give us an updated look and feel.

Outgrowing Its Clothing

Continues Grasso, "We anticipated tremendous growth in Web page visits as awareness for our content grew. Obviously being a Web-based service we knew that ongoing technology upgrades would be essential, with investment going to both product and service." As a non-profit, Common Sense Media focuses on developing and delivering informative content, and must use every donated dollar to its maximum potential. "Our lack of engineering personnel necessitated the need to partner with an external development group; a group able to come in and act like in-house team. The team would need to truly grasp the nature of our business, and had to assess, recommend and implement key technology that could grow as we grew."

Pat McCarten, Managing Director of Codesta, states, "When we initially met with Common Sense Media the staff had a clear view of what was needed and was already knee-deep in Web infrastructure updates. Any new development partner had to bring added insight to the technical table and start implementing immediately. We anticipated they'd want to reduce cost in all areas, and recommended they utilize open source technologies. Solutions such as Drupal for CMS and Solr leveraging Lucene were ideal tools to meet goals."

Dressing Up an Agile Method

Using two week Agile sprints and conducting daily project Scrums, Codesta commenced with the design and implementation of a high-level Web infrastructure upgrade. Broken down into phases, the team deployed the new Web site on Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) virtualization platform. Leveraging RightScale to manage the environment, Codesta was able to deploy a more robust, fault tolerant and completely virtualized application while delivering significant cost savings. In addition, the team was able to provide more robust site reporting by taking advantage of the Google Analytics platform.

The Agile Methodology allows Codesta and Common Sense Media to stay on track in meeting overall 10,000 foot objectives and permits true flexibility should project changes be needed midstream. A need for such flexibility became the case when a major business opportunity surfaced several weeks into the work. Shares Grasso, "The majority of Common Sense Media review and rating content is hosted on our own site, but a core mission of the company has always been to make this content as widely available as possible. When an option to greatly expand upon an existing content syndication partnership with major third party online retailer came along, the Codesta team stepped into action." Grasso points to Codesta's expert ability to re-engineer and re-deploy resources. "The team's use of iterative Agile sprints allowed for an easy shifting of priorities. We were able to immediately take advantage of this significant new strategic opportunity. Codesta helped with full implementation, their deliverables remaining on time and on budget."

To date, Common Sense Media has garnered additional success working with Codesta on two other large-scale partner syndication programs.

Keeping Up Appearances

"Codesta is a partner with real technical chops," adds Grasso. "They immersed themselves in our business procedures and user experience to thoroughly understand our operations. The team has deep knowledge and understanding of developing for the Web environment, plus an ability to guide us through key issues in highly detailed, thorough ways. Their recommendations have saved us time and money; a key suggestion early on was a move from a costly traditional managed service to a new virtualized platform. We're impressed with their service and ability to guide us as we grow. We like their approach extremely hands-on, keeping both management vision and site usability on par."

Codesta continues its ongoing relationship with Common Sense Media in providing new feature development and ongoing system upgrades. By practicing Agile, Codesta is able to offer clients like Common Sense Media the ability to reset or re-prioritize with ease should an alternate or additional plan become necessary.

About

Common Sense Media is the nation's leading nonpartisan organization dedicated to improving the impact of media and entertainment on kids and families. Common Sense Media provides trustworthy ratings and reviews of media and entertainment based on child development criteria created by leading national experts. www.commonsensemedia.org

Codesta offers emerging companies such as Common Sense Media the design and engineering support to help customers bring to market their visionary business ideas. Codesta functions as a technology consultancy firm, providing custom software products and expertise in product management, software design and development of large-scale Web applications. Team development experts work closely with clients, from initial white board mapping, through timeline estimation, software development, systems implementation and any required ongoing support. www.codesta.com