What We Did & How We Did It

Altura Learning (formerly ACC), is a leading provider of education and support to health professionals in the Aged Care sector in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Established more than 25 years ago, Altura Learning have created high quality, media-rich learning solutions for those working in or aspiring to work in the residential or home care sector, with the goal to continually improve the quality of life of older people and those that take care of them, with better care outcomes. Starting in the 1980s, the founders developed the art of live interactive satellite television, setting up the first successful TV training networks for doctors and pharmacists throughout Australia.

In 2003, thanks to rapid technology advances, aged care training was released with ACC Online, which later became Altura Learning Academy in 2017. It provides specific training for carers, with innovate learning tools utilising using high-end software and technology, to provide a unique learning experience, available online, anytime, anywhere.

In building their application, Altura Learning had utilised a number of developers throughout the application's lifespan. Altura Learning’s Technology Director, Grant Ricker said “a dedicated focus was required to ensure a more consistent approach to the development process.”

Clients request a reinteractive Code Inspect for many reasons and often come with a particular concern. As part of this, we made sure we conducted a thorough review of Altura Learning’s code according to our checklist for a Rails Application Code Inspect.

How it works

A thorough bottom-to-top, file-by-file review of an entire Ruby on Rails application is done to evaluate it for best practices, visible security issues and code quality and maintainability issues across an entire application.

Our Code Inspect developers go through the code looking at the implementation and development of the application from many angles, using our Code Inspect audit checklist as a starting point. They review every aspect they can get their hands on.

As with all of our Code Inspect clients, a dedicated developer was assigned an entire week to review the Altura Learning code base and produce a detailed report.

We looked at how their application could be improved, including security issues, database concerns and Ruby and Gem versions. It is vital for any business to know about all of these as it enables their technical team to know where to focus their attention, and where fixes need to be made.

We also looked at how their application’s documentation stacked up and how easy or difficult it would be for a new development team to come onboard. It was important for Altura Learning to be aware of this in case they need to onboard a new employee or outsource this to a new team in the future.

As part of our Code Inspect service, we always make sure to acknowledge the plus points of any application’s code review. While we were looking for issues in the Altura Learning code, it was just as valuable for Altura Learning to be aware of the areas of their application that were structured according to best practice and were found to be performing well.

We then made sure that this report was reviewed by a number of reinteractive developers to ensure the application received the thorough check we promise our clients. The resulting document was delivered to Grant Ricker at Altura Learning.

The final report shared is thorough and often extends past 15-20 pages of hand-crafted recommendations covering all the points we have discovered.

As well as making Altura Learning aware of the issues raised, the detailed report advised their team on how they could implement changes for each of the action points so they could easily get these fixed as soon as possible.

Once Grant and his team had reviewed the Code Inspect report, the reinteractive team were hired to fix the issues found in the Code Inspect.