Q3 develops an online quiz application for a University to make their sessionals exams online.

Q3's global sourcing model gives the maximum benefit to customers in terms of cost savings, improved quality, access to highly talented professionals, flexibility of operations and reduced time to market.

Company Profile

The Client, a US based university, is a leader in the field of education with an uncompromising commitment to provide individuals the freedom to learn and grow in a collaborative and supportive environment that fosters success.

Business Situation

The Client aimed at developing a quiz application to make their written exams online. The online exams were conceived as an Online Quiz. The Client used to hold various written exams for the students and wanted that the Online Quiz include modules and questions that are displayed in a random order to the students appearing in the exam.

Challenges

The challenges were to:

• Study the specifications given by the Client.
• Handling browser related functions such as Back and Forward. These functions must not work as the clock keeps moving even if one navigates to the previous screen.
• Display questions as well as their options for the answers in a random order.
• Develop an application that provides high performance as there are a huge number of students appearing in the written exam.
• Maintain confidentiality.
• Display only ‘Pass’ or ‘Fail’ to the user. The correct answers will not be displayed to the user.

Technical Solution

Q3 came up with a dedicated team of developers and QA experts to bring up a technical solution for Client’s requirements.

The team of developers analyzed the requirements, designed the application as per Client's requirements, and finally came up with an Online Quiz that ensured all needs and objectives of the Client are covered. The quiz application runs on SharePoint servers. As per Client's requirements, it displayed the questions as well as their multiple choice options in a random order every time the question is displayed. It also gave the option to set the number of attempts a user can appear for a particular exam and a button that navigates back to the previous question. The application also saved the personal information of the users and the answers given by them in its database. The developed application was very secure and tested properly. The major concern from the client was not to allow cheating during a test. Having this in mind the development team handled the entire browser button to avoid any cheating. The performance of the application is also very good. Once the time is over user cannot even see the answers he entered. There were nice and informative reports developed for the administrators which can be printed and exported. The application is designed in such a way so that everything is configurable by the administrator in a secure list in very easy steps. The application was packaged in such a way that it is very easy to deploy, there is one exe which installs and configure everything after taking required parameters from the administrator.
 
The QA team got involved from the very beginning to ensure desired quality and bug free software is provided timely including all the objectives laid by the Client.

Technologies

• MOSS 2007
• WSS 3.0
• JavaScript

Benefits

• The Client gained more popularity; 15000 students appeared in the online quiz in the 1st week.
• The Back and Forward buttons on the browser do not work. The user will be able to navigate to the previous questions only if the administrator has set the navigate option.
• The application is fully secured. There is no access to all the questions saved in the database.
• If the browser is closed, the leftover questions are marked incorrect.
• The Administrator can view the results of the students in a graphical format.