We recently undertook a project with a client to revamp a legacy internal tool that manages a queue of inbound enquiries. The main aim of the system is to carry out analysis and pre-processing of enquiries before distributing them out to individual staff to be actioned.

The original system was several years old, and was authored without the benefit of modern development frameworks. It had been evolved incrementally since that time to add a number of new features. While it was relatively old, the system was stable, with no known bugs, but did not provide the flexibility required, or a clean basis on which to develop significant new features.

We worked to define the functionality to be maintained in the rebuild, documenting the existing feature set and agreeing the features to be present in the new implementation. We then rebuilt the system using the Laravel framework, a modern development framework which  provided benefits in terms of reduction of development effort, opportunities for system scalability, and a much improved baseline for ongoing development.

The new system comes with a comprehensive set of automated tests that were used to provide confidence that the rebuild was as stable and error free as the original, and also provides confidence in continued stability as the system continues to evolve.

Enquiries coming into the system use Laravel’s queue/worker system to handle enquiries as background jobs. This provides the ability for processing of inbound enquiries to be more complex, and intelligent without affecting end-user response times.

Staff on the rota have access to an intranet area where they can view recent enquiries, reports, and also report quality issues with enquiries they have worked on. This feedback is automatically fed back into the system to improve assessments of future enquiries.