The challenge
Animikii had a very tight deadline of only 4 weeks to complete a brand new portal for the AABO from the ground up, with only wireframes - no designs or project management oversight.
Client work · 2017 · for Animikii, Inc
Aboriginal Apprenticeship Board of Ontario
Animikii presented approved wireframes to Lotus and asked us to develop and launch the Aboriginal Apprenticeship Board of Ontario portal in only 4 weeks. The portal allows employers, career seekers, mentors, and tradespeople to connect for mentorship and job opportunities.
- Client
- Animikii, Inc
- We built
- Rails Web App
- With
- Ruby, Rails, Sidekiq
What we made
Lotus created a brand new Rails 5 application hosted using Dokku, complete with a gorgeous material design admin tool and a vanilla bootstrap frontend.
AABO Admin Tool
Animikii was on a tight deadline and did not have any user stories, wireframes, or requirements for what an admin tool should provide in terms of functionality or appearance.
We reviewed the limited requirements and wireframes for the AABO portal itself and created user stories in Trello to track all the work needed for the portal to be useful. Visually, we decided to go with a gorgeous, yet generic, Material Design style for the admin tool.
Portal Development
Starting with only basic wireframes and some rough requirements, we immediately spent the time to understand the project and create user stories in Trello to track all the requirements and functionality to develop the AABO portal itself.
We created a new Rails 5 application, using plain Bootstrap, to implement the AABO portal itself. With this approach, Animikii was able to spend an afternoon to implement a basic style that mimics the existing AABO online presence on a different website.
Testing and Deployment
Initially, with such a tight deadline, Animikii requested we skip any automated testing altogether for sake of speed. However, we were able to convince Animikii of the benefits of automated testing and show that it does not slow us down - in fact empowers us to move quicker and be agile to changes in the development process. We weren't able to do as thorough job testing as we liked, but with 51% code coverage and a suite of unit and integrations tests written in capybara to test the critical registration and portal functionality requirements, we were happy.
The hosting provider Animikii chose offered us the option of using Dokku for deployment, and we accepted the challenge. After a few false starts with firewall issues at the hosting provider, we were able to deploy a Rails app using Dokku for a very Heroku-like experience.
