Optimum Assessment: accelerating software development with NetRom

Digital learning and assessment is no longer a niche, but it is gaining increasing ground thanks to technological developments such as cloud computing and AI. Optimum Assessment is one of the players in this field. The company engaged NetRom to free up development capacity, allowing them to shorten their time-to-market.

The market for online assessments is growing rapidly, driven by digitalization, the flexibilization of work and learning, and the need for scalable and secure testing methods. The Netherlands plays a key role as an innovator in this area, with a strong presence of technology companies providing solutions for e-learning, testing, and assessment.

Adnan Maakoul, Product Manager at Optimum Assessment, serves as a bridge between the business and IT or, more precisely, software development. “With the Optimum Assessment platform, organizations can fully manage ‘high-stakes’ exams focused on testing and certification. These primarily concern so-called ‘summative’ exams at the end of a training or educational program, where the results hold significant value for the examinee. Examples include Wft diplomas or civic integration exams. High-stakes exams therefore have considerable added value and societal impact.”

End users of Optimum can generate, manage, and deploy content for a wide range of exams via the platform, covering both theoretical knowledge and practical skills. Optimum Assessment serves various parts of the Dutch government, examination bodies in vocational education, and educational institutions both domestically and abroad.

For high-stakes exams, processes and content are tightly organized. This is particularly important when candidates can take exams online without being physically present in a test center. To ensure integrity in remote exams, tests, or assessments, online proctoring is often used. This includes a range of technological measures to prevent cheating or unauthorized assistance. For example, recording the candidate’s environment on video, monitoring screen and application usage, using AI to analyze candidate behavior, and temporarily restricting certain software, such as web browsers.

“The Netherlands is one of the leading countries in educational software,” explains Maakoul. However, there is intense competition, both domestically and from Scandinavian countries and the US. For Optimum Assessment, the Netherlands is therefore more of an incubator for innovative applications than a market for further growth. For expansion, the company primarily looks to other European countries, especially since many of them have little experience with online assessments.

In addition, many of Optimum Assessment’s competitors struggle with technical debt because their platforms were built on older technology. Optimum Assessment addressed this thorough technology renewal back in 2018, Maakoul explains: “We use top-notch technology across the entire platform.”

To stand out, companies must focus on user-friendliness, scalability, and integration capabilities. “But what will really have a major impact in the coming period is generative AI,” says Maakoul. “In the future, you could, in principle, generate a test on our platform with the push of a button. In the long term, generative AI can also be used for formative assessment: providing feedback to examinees to support the learning process. In the short term, GenAI should assist test designers in compiling test components. Generative AI will determine a significant part of our roadmap in the coming years.”

For further growth, Optimum Assessment relies on international markets. “In many countries around us, the need for more digitalization is recognized,” explains Maakoul. In other words, those who are fast and have a good product can secure a position abroad. Maakoul adds: “Time-to-market is crucial for us.” In short, the development pace needed to increase. For this reason, Optimum Assessment collaborates with NetRom Software.

Optimum Assessment has two teams totaling twelve full-stack developers (including an architect and a tester). “In addition, we work with a few external testers. They are part of our flexible layer, something we like to maintain anyway. If you want to increase speed even more, you will need to expand that flexible layer. The supply of available developers seems quite large, judging by all the posts on LinkedIn. But expanding your team with external capacity is no simple task. From experience, we know how important it is to fully integrate external developers into your own team when outsourcing software development.”

When Optimum Assessment entered discussions with NetRom, these considerations were explicitly taken into account. “Precisely because of previous experiences, we wanted to start small, so in May 2024 we began with a clearly defined project completely separate from our own team. This also prevented us from immediately overloading NetRom with our own ‘baggage.’ That first PoC consisted of four sprints over two months and was very successful. Afterwards, it was clear that the collaboration was suitable for further scaling.”

Maakoul admits that the successful PoC was quite exciting for their own developers, as NetRom’s development and delivery speed was high. Within the internal team, there was a need for reassurance that Optimum Assessment wanted to add capacity (rather than replace their own developers) so that the internal team could focus more sharply on critical components of the roadmap, such as AI.

After the PoC was completed, the NetRom team immediately started developing features required for a new Optimum Assessment client. “That wasn’t the original plan, because we first wanted to work on an integrated team aligned with the roadmap. Now we work with three NetRom developers and one tester. In the background, a lead developer supervises and provides support for larger challenges.” The NetRom team also plays a role in the further realization of the PoC.

“You can write a lot of code in a short time, but what ultimately determines success is developing functionality that adds real value—our end customer must benefit from it,” emphasizes Maakoul. Equally important: with NetRom’s support, the development team at Optimum Assessment now has the bandwidth to focus on initiatives such as AI. The collaboration also provides ample opportunity to leverage the broad knowledge within the NetRom organization. “For example, the idea to add a webshop to our website arose ad hoc. They also have the right solutions and competencies in that area. The webshop is now being developed as a standalone project by NetRom.”

After less than a year of collaboration, “we are still learning”, Maakoul already has a clear view of the main lessons learned. The most important: empower the Product Owner, for example by removing tasks, to optimally guide the product team. Another key lesson: ensure all documentation is written in English so that non-native team members can work with it effectively.

“And meet in person,” Maakoul adds. “We visited NetRom in Romania and spent three days on the content and details of our project. Periodically, we want to have some of the developers visit each other. I am convinced that physical meetings contribute to synergy, especially at critical moments during the development process.”

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