In November last year I was contacted by Mathias and Oskar who attend their last year of the Information technology program at Örebro University. They wondered if they could do their SUP (System Development Project) at TIQQE during this semester and now they will finally present what they came up to!
Who we are and what is the SUP?
We are two students from the Information technology program at Örebro University, who have studied together since the beginning of our studies. We are currently in our last semester. Our last semester involves carrying out a system development project, where you either do your own project or you carry out a collaboration project with external actors (such as a company).
The point of the SUP (system development project) is to apply and develop previously acquired skills in a longer project. The project means that we plan and carry out independent work where the focus is problem solving and application. This involves all parts of the system development, from analysis to implementation.
How did we end up at TIQQE?
For us, there was no doubt that we wanted to do the SUP at a company. So last year in November, we started thinking about what kind of company would suit both of us. For us, it was important to find a company that could offer a challenging project. But it was at least as important that the company’s culture and values were in line with our own, this was important because we wanted the best opportunities for personal and professional growth. We wanted to be in a place where it feels good and that we actually contribute something.
So we came in contact with an TIQQE:r who told us about TIQQE, the culture, values and what technologies they use. This caught our interest, so we contacted TIQQE because we wanted to know more about them and if they could possibly be interested in offering us a project. We had an interview, where it turned out that they were interested in a SUP project. They were able to offer us what we were looking for and best of all we got the same good feeling from those as we got from the TIQQE:r that we had spoken to earlier. So the journey started from here.
What is the project and what was the result?
TIQQE had a time reporting and salary system that was working but the current processes were time-consuming and not sustainable for the future. It involved a lot of manual work, so TIQQE wanted us to review this and see if we could automate this instead.
We started by reviewing the current time reporting- and salary system to identify unnecessary time-consuming processes and then investigate what can be done smarter and what can be automated. After investigating we came up with a new design, created and implemented it.
The solution for the new salary system ended up to work like this:
First we are collecting all the absence time entries from the past month from Clockifys API by making some GET requests. This data is then sorted so only TIQQE employees’ time entries are left. The data is then transformed into an XML file and saved in an S3 bucket. This is done with AWS Lambda. The Lambda then creates a temporary link for the file to be downloaded within 7 days. The link gets mailed out with SES to a group mail owned by TIQQE. From here the person responsible for the salary can just download the XML file from the group mail and import it to Visma (The salary system).
When the automation of the salary system was implemented we started to work on creating an analyze tool with AWS Quicksight. This is done by getting a detailed report from Clockifys API by making a POST request from a Lambda. The data arrives in CSV format and gets transformed into JSON and saved in an S3 bucket. When the data is in the S3 bucket, a Crawler creates metadata for an ETL which transforms some data types into other data types and saves the newly formatted data as parquet into an S3 bucket. This data is then crawled to create metadata about the parquet files. With the new data in place, all we needed to do from here is to create SQL questions that are used in Quicksight to pick out relevant data. Then create the Diagrams to display the data. And now TIQQE can see things like total profit per month/year, profit per customer, and much more.
We have done some testing and everything seems to work. So now we are eager to put it in production.
How has it been to do SUPEN at TIQQE?
It has been a great experience. Everyone at TIQQE is super nice and we felt as if we were a part of the team since day one. They included us in meetings and activities if we wanted to join. We never got the feeling that we are “less worth” only because we are there and doing a school project, which is great. TIQQE also provided us with a good project at a perfect difficulty level. We also got a person to give us technical advice when things got a bit tricky. When we have talked to other students, some of them didn’t even get any technical specialists or advice, and this held them back quite a lot. Both from learning and from progressing with the project. We did not experience any of what some of our fellow students explained. So this was well done by TIQQE. Lastly, we want to thank everyone involved and TIQQE for allowing us to do this project. We learned a ton of new stuff.
We been very happy to have you with us and great job with your SUP!!
