Our collaboration aimed to streamline school finances with efficient fee collection, ensure engaged learning with AI-driven blended education, support educators with robust professional development tools, and monitor school performance with real-time insights—all in one accessible, offline-ready Student Information System (SIS) solution.
Challenges:
- Documentation & Standards: Lacking product documentation, linting, coding standards, and standardisation for commit messages, branch names, and PR descriptions.
- Data & Database Issues: Data inconsistencies and non-normalized databases.
- Backend Development: Missing validation for API endpoints leading to crashes, and unauthenticated API endpoints for mobile applications.
- Testing & Deployment: No defined SDLC strategy, unit testing, or CI/CD pipeline.
- Performance & Accessibility: Poor front-end performance on slow connections.
- Security & Access Control: Lack of role-based access validation for frontend pages.
- Coordination & Collaboration: Difficulty synchronising development across time zones.
- UX/UI Design: No standard style or component library, and no standard design platform.
Implementation:
- Performance & Usability: Improved product user friendliness and usability, enhanced front-end performance and loading times, and removed irrelevant client-visible template pages.
- Development Standards & Tools: Implemented linting and standardised backend coding using service architecture, introduced consistent error-handling mechanisms, set standards for branch names, PR descriptions, and titles, integrated task management tools and version control, and improved error logging.
- Mobile App Enhancements: Introduced standardised branching strategies, database migration, UI upgrades, and expanded functionality with new features for the mobile app.
- Features & Functionality: Expanded functionality with new features like academic year management, scoresheets, fee collections, attendance summaries, daily summaries, and user onboarding. Extended search and export functionality, and improved bulk upload functionality.
- UX/UI: Started using a centralised design platform for a standardised design approach, and added a standard component library aligning with the design platform.
Results:
- User Experience: Improved overall user experience for new user onboarding and school leaders, modern and attractive user interface styling updates, and mobile app UI upgrades.
- Development: Enhanced developer experience with a cleaner and well-structured code base.
- App Stability: Significantly reduced app crashes during updates, ensuring smoother transitions for users.
These strategic efforts have transformed the SIS solution, fostering a user-friendly, efficient, and robust system that supports educators and enhances the learning experience for students.