How we built

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.

Name

FreeQuest

From

Poland

Objective

As a software development company with over 70 individuals, we operate in a dynamic environment, with multiple projects, different time zones and locations daily. We aimed to create a tool for better transparency and overview of daily and weekly presences, absences, remote work, vacations, and leave planning across all teams.

That includes:

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

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

Redis

MongoDB

NestJS

TypeScript

Android

Kotlin

iOS

Swift

Find us on Clutch

Don’t just take our word for it; take a look at our profile on the world’s largest B2B reviews site, Clutch, to see what others are saying about us and how we work. Our attention to detail and highly effective project management have ensured our partners’ business success and happy clients.

Let’s chat!

Hi, I’m Marcin, COO of Applandeo

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