FreeQuest – the leave tracking mobile app
The app allows team members to monitor and manage vacations, sick leave, and remote work simply and intuitively.
Project’s background
FreeQuest is a dedicated leave tracking app we built at the Applandeo team. We aimed to address one of our internal struggles and simplify the leave management process across our teams. With the FreeQuest app, each company member can submit a leave request and remote work simply and intuitively, with a click of a button on their phones.
The leave tracking process covers vacations, sick leaves, or remote work that employees submit. Conversely, it allows managers and HR teams to approve, monitor, and report all the submissions.
The initial version of the FreeQuest app was released in April 2020 and has been significantly improved since then. The app is available on Android and iOS.
What inspired us to build our own dedicated leave tracking tool?
Managing offline leave applications comes across as time-consuming and generates additional operational costs. With the increasing number of employees and the growing complexity of our teams, we looked for a way to digitize and simplify the entire leave management process. We needed a solution to reduce the paperwork and operational costs as much as possible.
We tried other external tools but faced several issues, such as technical aspects, non-intuitive interface, or lack of a mobile version. At the end of the day, we wanted a reliable and simple mobile app that reduces the operational pain across all company structures.
FreeQuest
FromPoland
Objective
- Collecting information on holidays, leaves, and remote work across all teams,
- Tracking and reporting data on holidays, leaves, and remote work,
- Transforming the time-consuming and manual paperwork into a friendly, intuitive, and automated act,
- Submitting leaves and remote work with one click of a button,
- Managers receive and manage leave requests online and view the teams’ leaves’ calendars
- HR teams collect relevant data on leaves and provide payroll reports any time it is needed
Our priority was to make a mobile app with an intuitive and friendly interface that is easy to use and enables submitting a leave request or remote work with a click of a button on your phone.
How we did it
We aimed to create a native FreeQuest application on Android and iOS and completed the app’s UX design and UI design in-house. For the backend implementation work, we used NestJS, TypeScript’s framework.
The goal was to automate the entire process as much as possible, and Bitrise was the best way for us to build the project and upload it to the store automatically.
We distribute apps to testers with Firebase. It helps us manage our build smoothly and quickly swap between releases. Apart from the distribution side, we use Firebase for bug reporting and basic application analytics.
For quality control, we do:
- Automatic tests
- Automating code review, using: https://github.com/danger/danger, with static analysis: ktlint (Kotlin), SwiftLint (Swift)
- The manual tester confirms the correct operation of the application.
Technology Stack:
- iOS – Swift, RxSwift, RxCocoa, Alamofire, Realm, R.swift, Swinject, SwiftLint, Danger
- Android – Kotlin, RxJava, Koin, Android Jetpack, Retrofit, Material-Calendar-View, ktlint, Danger
- API – Nest.js, MongoDB, MariaDB, Redis, TypeORM, AWS s3, AMQP
- Web – React JS, TypeScript
Main Tools and Solutions:
- Amazon’s Buckets – photo storage
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud – production server
- Bitrise – automatic tests, application deployment to test devices, application deployment to App and Play stores
- Danger – automated PR checking
- Cloudflare – caching and faster image loading by applications
- Confluence – technical documentation
- Firebase – reporting bugs, basic application analytics, providing test versions of the application
- Jenkins – automatic tests, deployment to test servers
- Jira – project management
- Slack – internal communication
The daily work and project management go with the agile Scrum framework.
Data Protection
The FreeQuest app meets all EU data processing and security regulations and complies with GDPR standards on data encryption and communication.
The app collects only the data necessary for application operations.
The outcome
By bringing FreeQuest to life, we improved the internal process of leave management significantly, we also reduced operational costs.
FreeQuest optimizes the leave tracking processes at both structural and individual level, and it automates the reports that are crucial for remuneration settlement.
The app does not allow ads and micropayments, nor generate any additional costs. It provides only the necessary data on vacations, sick leaves, and remote work from the manager, employee, and HR perspective.
FreeQuest is mobile-first and easily accessible by everyone. That brings additional comfort to working as remote and global teams.
The app is continuously developing and improving. The latest release is available for both Android and iOS.
Technologies we used
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Hi, I’m Marcin, COO of Applandeo
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