4parents is an example of effective development of the complex and dynamic project with changing requirements, multiple stakeholders and a very strict deadline. 

We began a collaboration with a Product Discovery Workshop and Scoping Session that let us have a fair background for the development; among others, it helped us to clarify product requirements, define best technologies, plan the development roadmap and identify the major challenges. The latter was mainly centred around the complex user flows that needed to be aligned with the legal regulations concerning the statewide school recruitment. This part was a subject to in-depth discussion with a legal advisor who was one of the project’s stakeholders.

One of the milestones was designing and implementing a multi-tenant architecture that enables serving multiple customers (tenants) with one install of the application. We incorporated the shared database with shared schema approach to multitenancy which means that a single database keeps every tenant’s data. The key benefit behind this solution is development’s time reduction and robustness of the app. Namely, the shared code of the app and database means that one copy of them is available to all tenants and any changes only need to be made once for all tenants. This allows changes to be carried out faster and be up to date in terms of changing legal and users requirements. 

To make all this work, we followed Scrum-driven accompanied by Scrum events such as Daily, Reviews, plus ad-hoc Plannings, Refinements, and Retrospectives. Throughout the development, the team headcount varied from 7 to 11 people and the composition included product owner, UX and UI designers, QA, front-end and back-end engineers. 

To make sure the product is functional and aligned with the expectations of the end users, we conducted a presentation and demo sessions for over 40 representatives of educational institutions including head teachers, office workers, members of recruitment committees. Such extensive feedback, after its prioritisation session with the stakeholders, indicated the direction for the next sprints and product development.