Innovative Corporate Training Software for Professionals

Innovative Corporate training software delivered

Consistent successful delivery of platform upgrades and new functionality over the course of many years gave BrainStorm the confidence to pass their entire engineering process to BitsByteSoft, leaving only product ownership on their side. BitsByteSof has become BrainStorm’s single development provider for the cloud-based corporate training platform.

Implementation of innovative features for corporate eLearning

QuickHelp is designed to stir users’ desire to learn by providing a constant stream of targeted learning resources in a variety of formats. It uses machine learning to display the most relevant content to users. The platform delivers personalized learning experiences with smart recommendations and measures the impact of training with the help of these engaging and interactive tools:

• Skill paths

Short, easy-to-understand videos united by a shared theme make up a skill path that takes the learner through a productivity-focused program. Training courses are either assigned or recommended to employees based on their job roles, skill sets, and unique professional needs. Once a learner is through a course, they complete a quiz and can share their results with colleagues.

• Gamification badges and ratings

QuickHelp’s gamification approach to learning includes achievement badges, assessments, and company standings to motivate healthy professional competition within the company.

• Communication tools

To keep employees engaged and informed about new assignments and upcoming live events, communications are personalized through a powerful mailing engine. Users receive notifications, reminders, and announcements via consolidated or individual emails and MS Teams chatbots.

• Performance tracking and engagement reports

Using a set of corporate eLearning solutions, companies get deep insights into employee learning behavior, user progress, and training effectiveness through customizable analytics dashboards. Based on the data in these dashboards, employers can further improve the company’s educational processes and incentive mechanisms.

Development hub for a corporate training solution

We built a strong development organization for BrainStorm, bringing on over 50 senior engineers — and counting. Our five teams provide end-to-end software development services for corporate eLearning, from requirements analysis and design to production and database management. Team members work cross-functionally, taking on a variety of on-demand roles as the need arises.

Each end-to-end team is responsible for a specific business domain:

• The engagement team analyzes customer behavior and devises quizzes and email campaigns to encourage users to continue learning.
• Two content teams are responsible for integrating the content consumed by users into the system. The platform includes video sessions, guides, assessments, resources, practice files, and more.
• The people team deals with users, roles, and groups. This team provides services to simplify the onboarding of new customers and to help end users in QuickHelp.
• The account and security team has built a single mechanism for identification and authorization that allows for synchronized access using a single sign-on. The team has also provided a full set of security measures to comply with GDPR requirements.

As we’ve worked on our client’s innovative сorporate training software, our engineers have participated in a series of workshops and brainstorming sessions where each team member can chime in on how the new system should be implemented. Our ideas and suggestions have laid the groundwork for BrainStorm’s brand-new product that’s already in the works.

Overcoming major challenges

We handle the most complicated technological and process challenges brought about by the market, BrainStorm’s business needs, and the rapid growth of the QuickHelp platform.

• Moving from a monolithic architecture to microservices

One of BitsByteSoft most significant initiatives was the move from a monolithic to a microservices architecture. With a massive inflow of customers to QuickHelp over the years and a new business model adopted by BrainStorm, there came the need for much greater scalability of the system.

BitsByteSoft experts from our digital consulting services suggested a scalable microservices architecture that could provide near-infinite expansion of corporate eLearning solutions. We encouraged the use of the latest technologies and approaches to implement this new architecture. Our engineers are now building a new system where each service will have its own database and infrastructure. This will simplify infrastructure maintenance and allow us to scale services separately depending on the specific load on each of them.

• Handling high loads

As the number of QuickHelp users is growing fast, one of our goals is to build a system that can withstand a much higher load. Our client’s new corporate training solution uses Microsoft Azure to ensure seamless scaling of the system by automatically growing its resources and thus increasing the load capacity many times over.

• Speeding up production

To keep up with the pace of the eLearning industry, we initiated a transition from biweekly releases to a continuous delivery process, where new features and updates go into production within a day or two. This gives us clear visibility into the product’s current state and reduces the risk of detecting issues far into development.

DevOps practices for a corporate training platform

From the very beginning, our team approached the development of QuickHelp with a DevOps mindset. We helped our client cut infrastructure costs by 20% by reviewing resource utilization, optimizing pricing tiers, and setting up auto-scaling policies for resources. We then continued to establish a set of practices to optimize the implementation of our client’s new SaaS corporate training platform and built an entire DevOps culture around that process. From the DevOps perspective, our key achievements include:

• Automated deployment pipeline

Our team transformed the product delivery flow from manual and scheduled deployments to automated and frequent deployments. We refactored the delivery pipeline with built-in Quality Gates: every commit that passes through the gates successfully is automatically deployed to the production environment. This mechanism triggers multiple automated deploys without any manual action on the developer’s part.

As a result, we simplified the process of bringing changes to the environment and improved the development velocity of our teams, who can now support the infrastructure of their services themselves without the assistance of infrastructure engineers.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

We set up the project’s infrastructure according to IaC principles, so the entire infrastructure is written in code and can be built instantly with the push of a button. If there’s a need to build an application from scratch in a new region, using a unified script, we can automatically create an identical environment with all the resources needed to run the platform’s components.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are used for provisioning environments and are executed with an identical and repeatable process. Any configuration changes to the environment are made automatically in an infrastructure release pipeline, and infrastructure changes are included in the code review process.

• Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

By following the CI/CD methodology, where deployment happens based on readiness, our team accelerated the product rollout dozens of times over. Because developers don’t have to wait for the release date and can merge their changes at once, any issues can be quickly spotted and fixed. All new features go through the Quality Gates, which include unit tests, component tests, code inspection, and other types of tests. If all these steps are passed successfully, a feature is automatically launched into production.

Thanks to the introduction of CI/CD automation, we turned such critical events as production releases, infrastructure changes, and disaster recovery into a stress-free routine for our development teams.

Business outcome

After eight years of partnership, BitsByteSoft has become the bedrock of BrainStorm’s development. We’ve created a tight bond with our client in working on their flagship product. BrainStorm completely trusts us in all aspects of product development, including in the choice of technologies, delivery, staffing, team structure, and other important decisions.

We’ve developed a productive synergy that has allowed BrainStorm to win such reputable clients as Visa, PepsiCo, and Deloitte. We’ve also implemented necessary customizations to respond to end users’ individual preferences and needs while using сorporate training software. Today, the QuickHelp corporate eLearning solutions allow over two million active users worldwide to access thousands of training videos, track their expertise, get recommendations, organize their personal libraries, upload and share their own videos, and participate in online instructor-led training sessions.

BrainStorm has started naturally expanding their presence in the $200+ billion eLearning market, acquiring new customers in Europe, Asia, and Australia. As more and more organizations start to see tangible ROI as a result of the increased professional skills of their employees, the demand for BrainStorm’s corporate training solution is growing. With BitsByteSoft vast engineering capacity at their disposal, BrainStorm will continue to surge ahead with their innovative, on-demand corporate eLearning solutions.