Pulse App - team management platform
A custom solution to manage a software service company
Expertise
The Pulse App is a time management platform that the OceanoBe team is currently working on. We are passionate about software development and believe that having products developed in-house catering to our specific needs is a great opportunity for learning and growing our tech skills. We hope that this will showcase to our customers how we transform passion and vision into great products.
Analyze
Pulse App has been a project in the making for quite a while now. We pondered over the idea to buy a management tool but, in the end, we decided that an in-house custom build app will cater best to our specific company needs. Needless to say that this was and is a tremendously great opportunity for team members to be innovative and bring out new technologies upfront. In the beginning, the purpose of this app was to help our day-to-day time management and annual leave tracking, but as it turns out the future holds many more exciting features and plans.
Ideate
Capturing a skills matrix and capabilities was easy enough, given our expertise in the field of custom software. A small team of frontend, backend and QA was formed and we began laying out the blueprint of our future work. One of our major objectives was to use new technologies and have a very modular app that will suit our needs. We then laid out the initial functionalities including login, project management, time management, log for timesheet, annual and medical leave, history access, and so on.
Test
Once the UX design was set, our cross-functional scrum team started developing the app. As this is a greenfield project the team had the option of testing and selecting new technologies and setting the desired environment. Having full ownership over a project encouraged innovation within the group, which set a high bar for standards and results.
Idea to solve
One of our core values here at OceanoBe is “freedom to innovate” and Pulse App was just the ideal project where we would deploy our creativity, skills, and innovative ideas. In the beginning, we started the project with 3 people but as it developed more team members joined reaching a total of 8 engineers bringing expertise in:
- Front end: Angular 12 with nx-workspace, NGRX.
- Back end: Java 17, Spring boot, Hibernate, Microservices, Docker.
- DB: PostgreSQL, Liquibase.
- Automation QA: Selenium WebDrive and RestAssured with Java.
- Tools: GIT, GitHub, Jira, InteliJ IDEA, WebStorm.
- Browser compatibility: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.
Since this was a custom project designed to suit our needs, everyone was deeply involved and determined to reach the best outcome possible.
Problem statement
Setting out to create a custom software management system was not without any difficulties. From the initial market screening, we realized that other solutions out there did not suit us. We embarked on creating from scratch a flow that will cover all our team needs and fulfills the management requirements, having in mind a great user experience, after all, this is a tool used every day. Since we used only new technologies in the development process, we also took our time in the research phase to make sure we delivered the right functionality with the proper setup and avoided the rework. In the end, our strategy paid off and the end result reached the expectations set.
