Scripter

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am an instructor at a University. I teach programming and data analytics to non-engineering majors.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Scripter?

I've relied on Scripter for project management, development, and QA of a web platform that would allow us to post tutorials for students.

What were your goals for this project?

Teaching programming to students without any experience is always challenging. We wanted to create a website where we can easily publish tutorials with both text and code. We needed a customized solution as any of the existing blogging platforms didn't provide the custom functionalities we were looking for. We also wanted to provide a mobile-friendly version, which was challenging given the large amount of code in tutorials.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

I have reached out to the project manager via another platform after looking at the team's past experiences and tech stacks.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

We only had vague ideas and layouts of what we wanted. It was only after discussing with Scripter when we've realized we were heading towards a mess. During the initial few weeks, Scripter has helped us identify the requirements. We were able to step back and think from a user's standpoint. Once we have agreed on the requirements, they led us in stages of development and QA.

What was the team composition?

I only communicated with the project manager who is a near-native English speaker (Yuliya), but a developer and a QA engineer have worked with us.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

The project has just been completed, so we haven't showcased it to the students yet. We will be able to gather feedback from the students this upcoming semester. But we are very happy that we now have a site to publish technical lecture content. Previously, we had to share these content as Jupyter notebook or PDF files. This has caused a lot of inconveniences and was one of the most frequent complaints we had received from the students. Hopefully, this site will make them happier :)

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The project management by Yuliya was top-notch!! I was very impressed with how every step was broken down into small tasks on Trello. There was no concern on our end as the Trello board summarized daily progress. We also had 2-3 meetings a week, but they were rather short as the Trello board had all the information we were looking for.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Large teams don't always correlate with better results. Scripter may be small, but they are very efficient and technically knowledgeable. We are extremely happy with the results. Also, this whole process felt like taking a course on project management. I have personally learned a lot about how to keep things on track and manage tasks. They were able to beat the deadline by two weeks.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Not that I can think of. Our experience with Scripter has been amazing.