Quilie
Quilie recognized the need to design software specifically for Trades to run efficiently throughout the entire project process.
Many trade professionals are forced to use software designed for General Contractors, Project Managers or end up using Microsoft Office documents to manage their business. Because no solution is all encompassing many of them will use separate tools for different parts of their work, including Timesheet, Inventory, Purchasing, and Site Material.
The first versions of Quilie were built in-house and provided a proof-of-concept product that was clunky, was unmaintainable and lacked scalability. The in-house project was constantly going offline, overutilizing server resources, and lacked proper software engineering methodologies. Each release was a painstaking gamble for the over 250 users who never knew if the new fix would break more than it fixed.
Kelowna Software Ltd. was tasked with taking the existing code base and re-designing it using modern software design principles that would result in a modern, maintainable, scalable SaaS product that could be marketable to more companies at a low cost.
Problem
As users continued to ask for more feature requests, Quilie got to a point where new features would either take a significant amount of time to be implemented, or become impossible without massive amounts of changes to untested, undocumented code. Its security was lackluster and didn’t adhere to being state-less.
Quilie needed to be redesigned from the ground up on modern architecture and built for the cloud. The existing code base was written in-house by a developer with very little experience. It had aging frameworks that couldn’t be upgraded without a significant rewrite, and was constantly dead-locking the database.
The database did not have any referential integrity causing thousands of orphaned records, and records were being deleted without a proper archival process.
Solution
Kelowna Software first started by taking on the existing maintenance and new feature requests of the existing application. We worked with users to better understand the system and how it worked, its shortcomings and what each users workflows are.
We analyzed each page, workflow, database table and met with each stakeholder to define, redesign and implement the entire application from the ground up using modern software approaches that would decrease time to release features, improve maintainability and build the web app as a cloud-native application.
Result
Kelowna Software was able to produce a fully-functional, redesigned web application built using modern software methodologies that facilitate building new features more quickly, resolving bugs faster, with fewer regressions and high confidence-level releases. The new Quilie app has been carefully crafted to work on all web browsing experiences – from mobile to desktop.
“It’s too quiet, users aren’t complaining, they’re able to work! I’ve never had a software launch this successful”
Neal Rempel – Quilie Software
