Composer
Automating lesson planning
Mappen provides Australian schools with customisable lesson plans that meet the Australian, state and catholic curriculum requirements.
In order to grow their offering, they needed to make it scalable. They could no longer be responsible for creating all the lesson plans that met all the required standards for all schools around the world; they needed to take all their first-hand teaching and lesson planning experience and build a tool that automated as much of the lesson planning process as possible.
Composer was the tool Mappen had designed to achieve this. They approached Sawwa for assistance getting it to market. We took the Composer idea, collaborated with Mappen to understand their goals for the product and developed a strategy to build it together.
Challenge
Assess, advise and assist building Composer - a tool that would allow Mappen to scale their business. Develop Composer using a joint team made up of Sawwa and Mappen engineers.
Outcome
We assessed Composer's technical feasibility, built a proof of concept and developed a strategy to build it working alongside Mappen’s development team. We led the engineering effort and, when Mappen had to pivot due to COVID-19, we put everything in place for their team to finalise the release when they returned to working on the Composer project.
Scope of work
Strategy
Software architecture & design
Software engineering process
Web application development
Strategy
Understanding the unknowns
We started our engagement with Mappen diving deep into the reasons for Composer, why the industry needed it and reviewing their UX design. Through this process, we uncovered an innovative rich text editor they wanted to develop and identified that it posed a technical risk to the project. Another potential risk was that Mappen had their own engineering team they wanted to develop the application’s backend.
De-risking the project
Composer’s UX design specified a smart text editor that would assist teachers with their lesson planning. The text editor was a risk to the project because it was core to Composer’s offering and there were no other implementations of anything similar. To remove the risk, our engineering team shortlisted tools that could be used to build it. From there, we developed two proof of concepts. This allowed us to, one, prove the text editor was technically feasible and, two, better understand developer experience working with each of the tools.
To allow Mappen to contribute to the development providing the backend engineering team, Sawwa drove the engineering effort. To reduce friction and ensure this split wouldn’t introduce bottlenecks during the build, we developed a process to allow most of the build to take place simultaneously. Throughout the build, we continuously reviewed how the process was working for both teams and iterated to improve it.
The COVID pivot
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit and Australian schools moved to online learning, Mappen’s development team stepped away from the Composer project to pivot back to their core product, updating it to support home learning.
Our development process handling the two independent teams accommodated for this situation well. Sawwa was able to finalise the front-end development without affecting the backend development. Once completed we provided Mappen with all the documentation, tooling and assistance to allow them to finalise the Composer build in 2021.
Release
Mappen approached Sawwa with an idea they wanted to get to market. Our team analysed their designs, played devil’s advocate to improve them and worked with their engineering team to build it.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the Mappen’s release plans to 2021, we were able to prove Composer’s technical feasibility and were able to set the Mappen team up to finalise the build and release it when they returned to working on the Composer project.
