How we dealt with

FreeQuest – the leave tracking mobile app

The app allows for managing and tracking vacations, sick leave, and remote work in the teams simply and intuitively.

Project’s background

FreeQuest is a dedicated leave tracking app that was built by Applandeo. It was created to address one of our internal struggles which are to simplify the process of leave management across our teams. The main function FreeQuest app brings is that it allows online submission of leave and remote work, so everyone in the team or a company can manage it in a simple and intuitive way with a click of a button on their phones. It applies to both submitting vacations, sick leaves or remote work done by employees, and approving it, monitoring and reporting done by managers and HR teams. The FreeQuest app was released in April 2020, it has been vastly improved since then. It is available on Android and iOS.

What inspired us to build our own dedicated leave tracking tool?

Managing offline leave applications is time-consuming and it generates additional operational costs. With the increasing number of employees and our teams’ complexity, we wanted to simplify the leave management process and reduce the paperwork and operational costs as much as possible. We tried other, external tools, but we were struggling with several issues, including technical aspects of a tool, non-intuitive interface or lack of a mobile version. We wanted a reliable and simple mobile app that reduces leave administration pain at the employee, managers, and operations level.

Name

FreeQuest

From

Poland

Objective

We are a software development company, with over 50 individuals, based in Poland, but serving clients globally. That requires a flexible structure in terms of human resource allocation and administrative and business processes. Our technical and administrative teams work in a dynamic environment, operating with multiple projects, different time zones, and locations daily. We needed a tool that helps us create better transparency and overview of daily and weekly presences, absences, remote work, vacations, and leaves planning within and across teams.

The objective was to build a dedicated mobile app that makes it easy and smoothing the leave tracking process on both the employee and the managerial side. What we needed was a digital automated platform that:

collects and presents information on leaves and remote work across all teams
simplifies the process of tracking and reporting data on holidays, leaves and remote work
transforms the time-consuming and manual paperwork into a friendly and intuitive environment
helps team members submit leaves and remote work with one click of a button
helps managers quickly receive and manage leave requests online and view their teams’ leaves’ calendars
helps HR teams collect relevant data on leaves and provide payroll reports any time it is needed

How we did it

For the FreeQuest project, we decided to create a native application for Android and iOS. For the backend implementation work, we used NestJS, TypeScript’s framework.

One of the goals was automating the entire process as much as possible, and Bitrise seemed the best way to build the project and upload it to the store automatically.

We use Firebase to distribute apps to testers. It helps us manage our build smoothly and quickly swap between releases. Apart from the distribution side, we use Firebase for bugs 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 that 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 UX & UI design of the app was created by Applandeo.

The daily work and project management is based on the agile Scrum framework.

Data Protection

The FreeQuest app meets all EU regulations about data processing, data security, 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

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Hi, I’m Marcin, COO of Applandeo

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