VIP Auslan

Introduction

Auslan (Australian Sign Language) is the main language used by Australia’s Deaf, Deafblind, and hard-of-hearing community. Since 2006, our client, Vital Interpreting Personnel, has been dedicated to giving this community the access they need to connect and thrive. They provide vital services like professional interpreting, VRI (Video Remote Interpreting), Communication Guides, and Deaf Support, all focused on empowering their clients and supporting their independence.

To handle the complex job of managing thousands of appointments, VIP uses a custom-built booking platform. This system acts as the main hub for their admin team. A main dashboard gives booking officers a quick overview of operations and lets them easily manage Bookings, Clients (community members), Employees (their interpreters), and Customers (organizations). The platform also streamlines all the essential back-office work, including Timesheets, Accounts, and the company-wide Calendar.

Challenge

VIP approached us to enhance their platform, which faced stability and performance issues affecting operations, staff payments, and customer invoicing. They needed a reliable solution to support their work for the Deaf, Deafblind, and hard-of-hearing community.

Our partnership began with an initial scope to fix critical bugs, but quickly expanded as we worked with the client to identify key outcomes needed to make the platform viable.

Our primary challenges were to:

• Navigate a Complex Legacy Codebase: We inherited a monolithic architecture with minimal documentation and no formal handover. This required our business analysts and software engineers to reverse-engineer the business logic and functional specifications. We had to gain a deep understanding of the system to ensure that fixing bugs and releasing new features would not disrupt the platform’s existing functionality.
• Reduce Reliance on Manual Workflows: Currently, the Vital team runs a parallel, manual system using an Excel spreadsheet to track all bookings, manage payroll, and create invoices in their accounting software. A central goal of our collaboration is to progressively automate these processes to decrease administrative overhead and minimize the risks associated with manual double-entry.
• Ensure Financial Accuracy: A specific priority was ensuring the platform accurately handled cancellations. We needed to implement logic that aligned the applied cancellation charges (which vary by service type and notice period) with the correct billing rates, while ensuring all relevant participants received accurate, automated notifications.
• Stabilize Core Functionality: Resolve deep-seated bugs in staff availability, recurring bookings, and confirmation notifications that were causing confusion for staff and clients.
• Improve Platform Usability: Enhance the UI for both admin and staff users. This involved simplifying workflows, improving the mobile app’s scheduling, and refining the logic for staff access to sensitive shift notes.

Solution

Our team took a two-step approach. First, we stabilized the existing application by fixing critical issues. Next, we developed new features to add value for all user groups, including clients, support staff, and administrators.

• Critical Bug Fixes & Stabilization: We began by triaging the most pressing issues, which immediately improved platform reliability and restored user confidence. We tackled a range of frustrating problems, from communication failures, like notifications failing to send and crucial confirmation emails from government hospitals not going through, to mobile app issues, like a bug that prevented updates by simply re-opening the app. We also fixed app freezes linked to Google Maps and resolved a key scheduling error that caused interpreters to receive outdated notifications for bookings that had already been reassigned.
• Automated Cancellation Logic: We built the complex, business-day-aware cancellation logic directly into the platform, ensuring the correct fee (0%, 50%, or 100%) was automatically applied and communicated in email templates.
• Workflow & UI Enhancements: We simplified the user interface, developed a feature to archive inactive contacts (cleaning up the database), and updated contact card information.
• Mobile App Improvements: We enhanced the staff mobile app’s functionality, focusing on how they view their schedules and shift notes, ensuring they only see relevant, time-sensitive information.
• Core Logic Fixes: We addressed fundamental flaws in the system, such as incorrect staff availability for recurring bookings, and ensured all relevant parties received confirmation and cancellation emails correctly.

Our Testing Approach

For a platform that manages people’s livelihoods (payroll) and critical community services, reliability lays the foundation of trust. An error could mean an interpreter isn’t paid correctly or a client is billed the wrong amount. Quality assurance was therefore essential.

• Functional Testing: We conducted exhaustive functional testing to validate that every piece of updated business logic worked as intended. This meant testing every scenario for the new cancellation rules. We manually verified that all calculations, email triggers, and status changes matched Vital’s precise operational needs.
• Regression Testing: We were working on a complex, pre-existing codebase where one fix could easily break another feature. After every update, we performed extensive regression testing to ensure that our new code didn’t reintroduce old bugs or disrupt unrelated workflows. This was critical in ensuring that fixing the timesheet system didn’t accidentally break the booking availability algorithm or the invoicing module.