A simple bug fixing assignment brings us a big Project of Cloud Based SAAS Platform in Education Sector

It all started with a simple bug fixing assignment that came to us. At Piccosoft, every work we get is treated equally, whether it is related to minor enhancements in a website or a long term green field project. Every assignment is looked into with the same kind of dedication. This dedication and our attitude towards the assignments we get is what impressed one of our valuable Clients, Mr. Ricard.

Back in the year 2019, one fine morning, when I open my inbox, I see an email from

Mr. Ricard Gras. He is a highly ambitious, a passionate Educationalist and an IT Entrepreneur from Singapore. He wanted to get some bugs fixed in his exiting application. We took up the assignment and rendered all the support he needed. He was impressed by our work. He thanked me and my team for all the support.

I was happy about the service Piccosoft offered to Mr. Ricard, for bug fixes. While I was also thinking that one of Piccosoft's service models can also be for supporting Customers, who want such enhancements and bug fixes only, a few days later, I get another email from him, that read,

''I have shortlisted 3 medium-sized IT companies in India to get a SAAS based platform developed, for offering a service to Educational Institutions. They can use the services of conducting Online Assessments to their Students, from my SAAS platform. I want this to be developed using the technologies of NodeJS and Angular''.

His email also mentioned,

''In my three shortlisted companies, Piccosoft is the second one in the list.

I have approached you after I spoke to the first one. Of course, I will finalize a Vendor for me, after I speak to all the three.''

Today, I have been on-boarded as the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of Edunexis. Mr. Ricard Gras has posted this as his proud moment on LinkedIn. This is a even prouder moment for me and I would like to share the entire story with all my friends and peers.

Also, this is a success story of Piccosoft, where a Client, who first came in for bug fixes, then gives us a big project of Cloud based SAAS platform in education sector.

Edunexis is a next generation company, with extensive experience in the Education niche. They provide the support that schools and educators need for testing and expanding the holistic growth solution.

Edunixis believes that holistic growth is a personalized growth approach that can easily be added to any current education systems. In today’s context, it is not an option but a necessity to survive. Thus, they have the passion to support educators for enabling the learners to reach their full potential, ambitions, and aspirations.

The founders of Edunexis started the concept in 1993 in Pomezia, Italy. Initially, it was applied to achieving operational excellence. Later, it was extended to adult education, and the creation of learning organizations at major multinational corporations, mainly based on the development of problem-solving, change leadership and human capital development skills.

After 25 years of practical experience in the adult world, the concept was expanded to youth learners.

The product has been designed for schools and colleges, where they can assess the Students for their physiological, social, emotional, cognitive, conative development, in addition to academic development. This will help schools and teachers to help Students grow their skills. Also, it helps the teachers in designing tailor made curriculum for each Student, depending on the potential and the skills they possess. This product has been developed as a SAAS application, where each school or college or any educational institution can use the services of this platform to design and conduct the tests to their Students.

I replied to Mr. Ricard Gras, stating my interest and willingness to work with him, followed by a few meetings, where I showed the demo of Piccosoft's previous works. I introduced my Developers to him over a Skype call. I allowed direct interaction with the Developers over the call so that he could understand their expertise and gained confidence on my team. All these approaches made him comfortable in awarding the project to us.

I allocated a team comprising of:

• Product Architect - Suresh Sekar (myself)
• A highly experienced UX/UI Designer - Mr. Anil Kumar,
•   Senior Full Stack Developer - Pradeep Shan,
• Senior Front End Developer - Giriprasad,
• Mid-level Front End Developer - Amit
• Mid-level Developer - Gautam
• Scrum Manager - Pavithra Parthasarathy

While Designers and Developers are important for a project, a QA and Testing lead and a Delivery Manager is also of utmost importance.

I appointed Ms. Pavithra Parthasarathy, who had an expensive experience of working as a QA Testing lead in Cognizant Technologies.

I allocated her into the project as a QA Tester as well as on a Scrum role as Single Point of Contact. I worked with this team at the architectural level.

In SAAS concept, a technology with auto-scalable feature is what matters. Any business, initially might have less users. Moving forward, as the business grows, the application has to support unlimited users and data.

Being a SAAS based application in education niche, for online assessment, it is very important that the platform doesn't get slow at any point, even when a large number of students are taking the assessment.

And, NodeJS and Angular is one of the best technology stacks that can meet all the standards of a high performing SAAS platform.

Mr. Ricard, being in Singapore, was only having online interactions with the team. So, he said,

''Let's move phase by phase. We will see how things work between us. So, we will first start with phase 1. If everything goes well, we will continue and start Phase 2.''

The team coordinated very well with him with regular work progress updates through email, regular scrum meetings and Skype interactions. The Senior Developer Pradeep thoroughly understood the requirement and aptly executed it, without any discrepancies, while the QA testing lead Pavithra did end to end testing of the application.

During the project execution, Mr. Ricard was very happy with how my team executed the project. It was not a 'Work for you' concept that the team followed. It was totally a 'Work with you' model that was executed. The team not only met the requirements, but also gave ideas on what is suitable and what is not suitable. The team literally stepped into Mr. Ricard's shoes and owned the project. This approach is what he appreciated to a great extent.  He then offered me to work with the team for Phase 2. From there the team went on to develop Phase 3 and Phase 4 as well, while Pavithra simultaneously handled testing and scrum roles.

Mr. Ricard's Interactions with the Team

He was always clear about what he wants. Before every meeting, he would get himself absolutely clear about the scope. Before assigning the team with a task, he would always study on how to combine the list of tasks, based on the convenience of Developers, and then give them the requirement.

He would always study on what is more feasible for Developers. While giving requirement, he will be very clear in what he needs. He will explain and make sure that the Developers understand the requirement clearly without a doubt.

Mr. Ricard's Domain Knowledge and Subject Matter Expertise

He holds a great authority in his Industry. Before he had thought about this Application, he had thoroughly analyzed the industry. Only based on his analysis of the underlying problem in the industry, and what would be the best solution to solve that problem, he came up with this idea of a SAAS application. His idea had a long term vision and goal. For executing a good idea, a person should have first analyzed the industry. Next, they should be absolutely clear about the underlying problem.

Then, they should be sure about how their idea can solve the industry problem. On the whole, they should be clear about their idea's long term vision and goal. Mr. Ricard was very clear on these aspects. During the knowledge transfer to me and my team, he was excellent in walking the team through the journey of those goals and vision of his idea and how the SAAS application that is going to be developed can meet those goals and objectives. This process helped me and my team to clearly understand his expectations.

If a project is outsourced, it doesn't mean that the Owner of the project should remain mute. The Project Owner should regularly work with the Development team. Only then a project can be brought to a good shape. Mr. Ricard left no stone unturned when it came to working closely with the Development team. Being an industry adept, he worked as a Subject Matter Expert with the Development team.

The most admired quality of Mr. Ricard

I and my team have always spoken about this aspect of him - his punctuality. He would plan well ahead for a meeting He never missed meetings and he always made sure to be present on time. In fact, this quality of him, motivated me and my development team also to remain punctual, no matter how the situation arises. 

So, the entire project was perfectly tracked, throughout, from the inception and until now when in production.

What does my team have to say about Mr. Ricard

My entire team has expressed that it is an honor to have worked with a person like him. He is always absolutely clear about his requirement. He very well plans what work needs to be assigned to the team.. Also, he understands the difficulties of the Developers and the possible challenges the Developers can come across during the development stage.

One of the Senior Developers in the team says,'' There is no chance for missing any deadline in this project because, the requirement is absolutely clear and thus, we can plan our tasks and complete them, without a single day of delay. Even if

?Mr. Ricard needs an additional functionality, that will be planned during the next phase of development only. He always makes sure that at any given point, the scope of a milestone never gets deviated, affecting the deadline.''

Interesting Challenges that we faced when the Application was in Production

One fine day, Mr. Ricard called and told, the Application is now in a good shape and he wants to do a test marketing. He told me that he has taken an appointment with a School. He will be explaining to them how the application works and also be showing them a demo by conducting an online assignment for their Students. While conducting the assignment, Mr. Ricard's team came across certain issues. They immediately contacted my team. Pradeep and Pavithra acted in no time to fix the issue, while the Students were taking the online assessment. The qualities of my team to act in a proactive manner and acting immediately to give a solution is what Mr. Ricard appreciated very much. 

Here are some interesting instances of challenges that were faced and how it was successfully tackled by the Piccosoft team:

1. When Mr. Ricard wanted to show the demo of how the application works, our team supported him although the school to which he visited was altogether in a different time zone. It was around 4:30 AM in the morning for the team at Piccosoft in India. The entire team started their day early to support him to make the demo a smooth sailing one.

2. The Application that was built is not multi-language supportive and only supports English language. The Students of that school only knew Spanish. So, in order to take the assessment, the Students installed the Google translate plug-in to their browser and began taking the test. While answering the questions, the teachers and Mr. Ricard's team found that every Student has given the same answer (basically the answer that was for the very first question) to every other subsequent question.

The teachers were surprised to see, how all the Students have given the same answer for every question, while the answers had to be different for each question. Then, Mr. Ricard asked us to check if it was due to any issue in the application. We also couldn't initially understand the problem. Later, when we analyzed, we found that the Google Plug-in for translation doesn't work for content that come dynamically. The Questions in the application appear dynamically. So, every time the same question has got repeated, for which the answers were also same. The team went in-depth to analyze and find out this underlying issue. This was totally an unexpected scenario for my team and I feel glad to say that they were able to go in-depth to find out the real problem. 

3. Another issue was with regard to sending a notification to the students about the online self assessment test that was going to take place. The notification was meant for only 6th grade 'A' section students. However, due to a wrong instruction in the application, the notifications were sent to all the 'A' section Students of every other grade also. Mr. Ricard's team immediately reported this to the team at Piccosoft. The team immediately addressed the issue and cleared the data, even before the recipients opened and read it.

In this manner, Piccosoft team supported the project, when it was in production. The initiative that the team took to respond immediately and act instantly was very much appreciated by Mr. Ricard.

Piccosoft made sure that the entire workforce and infrastructure is always at its full capacity to provide complete, end-to-end and round the clock support to this project.

We laid certain action steps in plan so that the project can be executed in a smooth sailing manner, without a hindrance.

1. Pushing the Code to GitHub on a daily basis.
2. Frequently taking database backups.
3.  AWS Server Setup for Deployment.
4. Automation deployment.

Apart, from all these, we provided Laptops and broadband connection to every team member. The team members supported this project even from their homes, post office hours and this is what made the entire thing easy for us even during production, when the SAAS platform was being used by the End-Users.

Also, the infrastructure that was laid helped this project even during the Covid-19 Crisis. The project did not get affected at any given point, even when we had to shut down our office physically and become virtually operative.

This is another quality of Mr. Ricard that I personally admire and want to share. He is one among those very few Clients, who doesn't need any reminders about payments. After every milestone completion, after the team showed a demo of the work, he would approve the work done by the team.

Then, he would write to me saying, ''Suresh, I'm happy with the work completion in this milestone, and please send me an invoice for this.''. After this kind of a response from him, for the first two milestones, I totally forgot about the payment part as I thought, that will anyway happen. It is the work that needs to be completed and it is the launch for which our team has to aim for.

The Proud Moment

Working duration on this project

The team of Piccosoft has worked in this project and has delivered, starting from Release 1 and now currently, we are working on Release 4. The duration of each release has ranged from 4 to 5 months and so far, we have been working on this project for past over 16 months. Initially this application was developed for Singapore and then Mr. Ricard said, he would like to take this to European market as well. Then, we began working it out for Europe as well. 

Throughout the project, beginning from Milestone 1 to until Milestone 4, what worked between me, my team and Mr. Ricard is the perfect Chemistry. We understood each others' mindset, difficulties, strengths and weaknesses. We together combined the strengths of each other and accepted the weaknesses, found a collective solution to overcome every difficulty and weakness and worked out the best plan for project execution. This chemistry is what is the major factor that established a long term fruitful relationship among us.  

Today, he on-boarded me as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Edunexis. He looks forward to a long term partnership and same kind of support from my team. I'm happy that Piccosoft has been serving a Client like him, who is one in a million. I heartily want to thank him for giving an opportunity to me and my team to work with him.

Mr. Ricard, who designated me as the CTO of Edunexis told, his mission is to bring a new revolution in the Education industry. He says, this SAAS platform and the support from me and my team would play an integral role in the success of his business, moving forward.

My team and I will always be with Mr. Ricard in his business journey. We will render full, complete and continuous support and work hand in hand with him as he brings more and more Customers, and grows his business.