Week 1: Stabilizing the Handshake — Overcoming E2E Integration Roadblocks

In the final development phase for MedReachAI, the focus shifted from building core features to ensuring the application's real-world usability, security, and stability. The team tackled a major milestone: getting the React frontend and FastAPI backend to communicate smoothly under heavy data loads. This phase was all about overcoming memory crashes and integration gaps that had been causing issues.

Initially, MedReachAI struggled with ingesting massive healthcare provider datasets directly through the web server, leading to cloud server payload limits and Out of Memory (OOM) crashes. The solution was a Direct-to-Bucket architecture, where files were uploaded directly to a Google Cloud Storage (GCS) bucket, bypassing the web server.

However, when moving to End-to-End (E2E) testing, the team encountered several roadblocks. Firstly, the frontend UI was attempting to fetch data from endpoints that weren't fully set up on the FastAPI side, resulting in 404 Not Found errors. Secondly, the backend required an X-User-Role HTTP header for authorization, which the React frontend was not attaching to the network request. Without this header, the backend defaulted to a read-only state and blocked the uploads.

To address these issues, Sprint 7 was dedicated to resolving cross-system integration bugs. The workload was divided into three main tasks: Auth & Header Parity, Endpoint Alignment, and E2E Dynamic Load Testing. The team's progress included updating React fetch requests to pass the UI state role into the X-User-Role header, scaffolding and wiring up missing API routes for /records and /provider_walkthrough, conducting E2E dynamic load tests, and implementing graceful UI error states to inform users of any permission issues.

The team's efforts were aimed at achieving a stable, production-ready upload pipeline, ensuring secure and smooth communication between systems. The next week would bring the results of their load test.