Socially responsible programming solutions are met quite often. But we wanted to create something different, meaningful, and selfless. That’s how we came up with a sensitive idea to take care of someone, who dedicates humans all their life, but often are treated in horrible and unfair ways.
We have dedicated a half year to create a tool, that liberates volunteers from the administrative paperwork and allows to suggest animals more care, love and cuddles.
The history
During the 16 years in IT industry Xplicity team has built up a vast baggage of knowledge and experience that we like to share with industry students. We enjoy teaching and imparting programming experience to students. For this reason, in 2016 the well-known Dev Academy was established.
It is an internship type project, that allows motivated programming students to get some real product development experience in our company. Also, we seek to enhance their technical knowledge via practical tasks, encourage youngsters to collaborate with experienced developers, and to get ‘know-how’ advices from our highly skilled programming experts. This year DevAcademy project was so successful and engaging, that we had to extend the internship for the half year!
So, what was different this time? Every year we assign a project to undergraduates that they will be working on during the foreseen internship time. With professional support of our experienced mentors, course participants undertake many tasks and work on solving various technical challenges. Usually, DevAcademy projects become prototypes that remain at Xplicity. But this summer we have decided to implement a project as a social initiative, that will be used by a third party.
The problem
‘Lese’ is an animal shelter that provides homeless and injured animals a place to stay, medical health check-ups and treatment, also animal adoption services. It is a non-profit organization, and all employees are volunteers here. No need to say that running an animal shelter is a challenge itself! But in addition, ‘Lese’ was facing another hardship as well.
Since volunteers change all the time, the administrative work has to be done by one person. It’s even more complicated for the reason that all the paperwork is written by hand. That makes it tiresome, time consuming and it’s easy to lose some crucial information.
The solution
Xplicity came up with the solution to make life for ‘Lese’ team easier. We have developed the software called Animal Shelter App. This is a program that turns all administrative paperwork into convenient digital tool with basic routine tasks categories and simple filtering.
The app has these features:
- registry and search of animals in the shelter,
- general report processing
- animal acceptance form processing,
- detailed medical history of each pet,
- counters that automatically calculate animal age and how long it lived (or lives) in this shelter.
- reminder that pops up when the animal needs to be vaccinated.
Joined team of developers and interns has been working really hard to make this app as convenient as possible. We were consulting with ‘Lese’ team in every step on the way, making sure the app is not to intricate and fits their exact needs.
Also, we must admit that the interface is particularly user – friendly, so the user doesn’t need to waste time on figuring out how to navigate in program.
The working process remarks
Today we can proudly state that the Animal Shelter App project was successfully accomplished. Moreover, it has even exceeded our own expectations.
The Scrum methodology used by whole team appeared to be super effective for all parties. As a result, working progress went very smooth. It was a great collaboration of our altruistic developers, talented and eager to learn interns, and, of course, heart-warming Lese team.
Conclusion
This project is finally completed and became our Christmas gift to ‘Lese’ team.
We hope it allows them to save some precious time doing administrative tasks and as a result, all these amazing volunteers can spend more time with longing for love animals.
We thank everyone who was involved in this project and hope that you all had as amazing experience as we did.
Karma points, kudos and our gratitude go to:
