Results Achieved
- The product makes learning development skills easier
- Real-world-like experience through emulation of the developer’s platform
- A coding sandbox to learn new skills and programming techniques
- Tight integration with Visual Studio
Technology
- .NET
- C#
- HTML5
- JavaScript
Introduction
Training great developers can be a hassle. You know, ineffective instructors, trivial e-learning, expensive conferences…
Apro contributed to the creation of something different, something innovative. We extended the original team of our client, InnerWorkings Ireland, by adding six highly skilled programmers in outsourcing.
The result was the InnerWorkings learning platform, an e-learning system that emulates a developer’s real-world experience to improve software development skills.
What the client wanted
For this project, knowledge of a specific field was not essential: a general understanding and the ability to learn were more important.
Our client also demanded a high level of code quality. Therefore, we offered senior developers, experienced in working with a wide range of technologies.
Our performance
All our programmers:
- had experience in a variety of .NET frameworks
- had extensive experience in one or more of these frameworks, and could design simple applications without issues
- enjoyed programming and liked to learn new skills
- could write clear, simple and well-factored code
The role of our developers
The complete development process required strong collaboration between the management team in Ireland and developers both in Ireland and on our side.
Our developers were responsible for the following steps:
- Story development: developers researched the topic to be developed, and produced sketches of the scenario and the problem statement.
- Code development: the first of two important code development phases, with the goal of producing the resulting project.This is used as a sample solution offered to users at the end of a task. But more importantly, it serves during the development as the template for the task project in which the user works.
- Primary development: it created the remaining elements of the task (task project, task document, and task tests).The task project was created from the resulting project but modified to create the challenge that the user will solve in order to learn.The task document contains the scenario, the problem statement, and all the other presentation elements such as steps, hints, constraints, and summary.The task tests are also created at this point.
The system features
The platform is a coding sandbox, tightly integrated with Visual Studio, to help .NET developers learn new skills and programming techniques.
Developers learn by completing real coding exercises and submitting their solutions to the platform‘s patented code judging engine.
The platform‘s judging engine follows a rules-based model to provide each developer with detailed feedback on their code solutions in real-time. No waiting for instructors to grade the developer‘s solution!
The InnerWorkings learning system already contains hundreds of training programs (drills). Each drill consists of several steps.