A timeline of some devProcess projects
This is our twentieth year developing solutions for a range of customers. We can't list all of our projects, but here's a sample of them over the years.
Schools
A consultancy and contract development project in 2004 led us into developing software for schools. We're still actively developing solutions for education.
Inspections
There's a lot that happens behind the scenes of a school inspection. The challenge is to maximize efficiency as inspection cycles get shorter and inspection guidelines change. Our first system was developed for Nord Anglia inspection services, but we continue to be active in the development of inspection systems.
Software engineering
devProcess started in 2000 developing systems for software and process engineers, with a particular emphasis on the development lifecycle of software. We continue to develop application lifecycle solutions.
Other solutions
We also provide consultancy and contract solutions. We are still active in the development of a number of white-label systems for our clients.
Experiments
Just some of the other projects that we've developed on the side.
Diagram generation
Automatic generation of diagrams from models and associated rules defined by their metadata.
Active directory integration
Deeper integration with LDAP and Active Directory.
Rules based configurable forms
Workflow forms based on configurable workflows and business rules.
Past Paper Panda
An A-level student found existing past paper sites frustrating. Manual process were required to track which past papers had been completed and time was lost looking up mark schemes, examiners reports and grade boundaries.
PastPaperPanda is an experiment to attempt to make the process of finding and tracking past paper progress as simple as possible.
Business process modelling
A neat feature which takes a textual description of a process and creates a BPMN model. We also wrote an online drag/drop editor which allows more sophisticated modelling.
Inspector checks
We implemented workflows to help validate and verify the checks that are needed to certify school inspectors.
SagePay integration
We've integrated with a number of different financial systems, but this was our first SagePay integration.
It all went smoothly, these sort of APIs usually do.
Concern tracking
Concerns raised about schools are tracked using a back-office management system to ensure that they are handled appropriately.
Online store
Development of a specialized online store. The nature of this system meant an unusual checkout system was needed.
devmodel
It's unusual for us to talk about our recent work on engineering products, but rapid Model Driven Architecture seemed interesting.
devmodel takes Markdown business specifications and transforms them into platform specific development assets.
NomPlan
A personal site to answer the question "What's for tea?".
Family members add suggestions for meals and activities, these are then dragged and dropped into the week to create a plan.
Modern development tools are so productive that these sorts of small projects can be developed and deployed to the cloud in an evening.
WorkModerator
WorkModerator allows teachers to moderate work together according to defined learning level descriptors,
helping to promote accurate and consistent grading across schools.
WiderProgress
All good developers are constantly looking for new things to learn about.
Saylor.org has self-paced courses on a variety of subjects.
We found it difficult to track progress on their site -
so we wrote WiderProgress to help us with that.
WiderSchool
WiderSchool helps schools track and engage students who aren't able to attend school full time.
RevisionHero
RevisionHero helps students revise class material at home.
Teachers can easily create engaging work relevant to
their syllabus and students track their progress across a range of leaderboards.Students at one school correctly answered over one million questions in their first year!
College inspections
College inspections differ from school inspections and require unique business rules built into
the software.
Team collaboration
We started using a new live team collaboration, timesheet generation, invoicing and task management
applications in 2011. This was developed as an internal experiment, but we've never found anything
that's commercially available that works as well as this project.
Model browser
A web application for browsing and discussing software models.
Gravatar iPhone app
A small iPhone contact application to synchronize photos with users' gravatars.
This allowed us to investigate the iPhone store application submission process.
Diploma Support Programme
The diploma support programme included forums, wikis, video conferencing and other tools to
help teachers deliver the new diplomas.
QIA star awards
A site for nominating people for awards and tracking the progress of those nominations.
Trudy
Trudy was an agile process definition application, integrated with TFS for task management,
timesheet and invoice generation.
Although this was an experimental application, we used it at devProcess for many years for our own process tracking.
Bahrain inspection services
Inspection services for schools in Bahrain. Internationalization was an important part
of this development.
Childcare voucher services
Leapfrog childcare vouchers was our first childcare voucher processing and back-office system.
MathsZone
MathsZone provided mentoring and content in mathematics. This was developed for
Edexcel and Nord Anglia Education.
Recruitment system
The Nord Anglia Recruitment system was developed to provide temporary and
permanent recruitment services to a range of educational and training organisations.
Area-Prospectus
We've developed many prospectus systems. Our first one was in 2005, later versions allowed
providers to submit material via email or url, where it was then then moved through a quality
assurance process.
XML schema synchronizers
The development of these bi-directional XML schema to UML model synchronizers required
maintaining schema that were accurate whilst still being easy to read.
Nord Anglia inspection services
Nord Anglia inspection services was responsible for inspecting schools in parts of the UK.
The system we developed for them scheduled inspections,
managed inspector and skills databases, data flow to OFSTED and mobile evidence gathering.
My-iPlan
My-iPlan supported web-based individual learning plans. An active project for nearly ten years
it had a number of refreshes and updates. This project was closed in April 2014.
Virtual-Workspace
The Virtual-Workspace was a dynamic learning environment developed for Nord Anglia education.
Live online mentoring, active learning communities and a rewards system made this a fun project
to work on. Engagement allowed the student to accrue points which could be used in auctions
to bid for iPods and other rewards.
Report writer
This wasn't really an engineering project (although it did link to UML models), but it
helped users create data transformations and publish to websites.
Model Driven Architecture
Model Driven Architecture was an OMG software development approach from the early 2000s.
Our MDA solution integrated with modeling and other development tools to help implement
that approach.
UFD generators
A utility specifically built to help an insurance company generate data files in a very
specific file format.
C++ synchronizer
A software engineering project to synchronize C++ code with UML models. What made this unique
was a fuzzy syntax matching engine that could interpret code without being as fussy as a
C++ compiler.
Process definition and rollout
Our first process definition and rollout application was released in 2001. We
continue to develop software for process engineering.
Reviewer for Rational Rose
Reviewer for Rose validated and verified Rational Rose's UML models based on
definable organizational standards.
Reviewer for Select Enterprise
Reviewer was our first product. An engineering tool that checked software models for completeness,
consistency and correctness against a range of configurable checks.
We were still developing this software until very recently.