Custom LMS Rewrite & Mobile App

We started with an audit of the existing code rather than a feature list. The obvious plan was to fix the bugs, add the reporting, and wrap the whole thing for mobile. The audit found a foundation that would not hold any of that.

There were more than 120 SQL injection vulnerabilities in the application, caused by a lack of input filtering. These are not exotic. A relatively unskilled attacker could have altered or destroyed the database the entire LMS depended on. The application was also running on two different kinds of databases at once, which blocked the use of the underlying platform’s own capabilities and made every change slower than it needed to be. And a portion of the code had been taken from an unrelated application and bolted in by developers who did not appear to understand how it worked, producing bloat that slowed the system down and made its stability inconsistent.

So we recommended a rewrite. A rewrite is usually the more expensive answer and we do not recommend one lightly. What made it the cheaper option here was the audit: patching meant tracing and closing 120 separate vulnerabilities inside a codebase nobody understood, including the people who had written it. Rebuilding on a foundation we controlled cost less than proving the existing one safe. The rewrite reproduced every function of the original in six weeks. The original team had spent close to five years assembling the version we replaced.

With a foundation worth building on, we added the reporting the unit wanted: a survey system that prompts soldiers to record their progress at the end of each session, turning training into data the unit can see rather than an assumption.

Then the mobile app, for both iPhone and Android. We built it to work without a connection, because building it any other way would have missed the point of the requirement. Lessons are available offline, data syncs from the device once connectivity returns, and the unit controls who has mobile access from the website.