What each window delivers
Engineering milestones only.
Integration & hardening
August
- Go-live minimum integration: identity + roster sync must be flawless on 1 Sep. Attendance write-back matures during the parallel run — it is not launch-blocking.
- Data minimisation at the integration layer: student ID, display name, role, class — nothing else crosses.
- Sandbox contract tests green; upstream schema changes require 30 days' notice by agreement.
- Security review complete; role-based access enforced at the API level, not just the UI.
- Zero-rating verified technically: full student flow on 0 EGP prepaid SIMs, every operator, low-end devices — plus continuous synthetic monitoring after.
- SMS pipeline load-ready: digest batching and operator rate-shaping for report-day volumes.
- Offline-first capture and late-arrival reconciliation tested against real weak-connectivity school profiles.
Pilot & hypercare
1 Sep – 30 Nov
- Paper and digital attendance run side by side. Paper is the legal record until the gate fires.
- Timestamp telemetry feeds the anomaly engine — batch-copied entries (identical timestamps, no intraday variance) are excluded from parity.
- Releases: weekend windows only, staged 5% → 25% → 100%, rollback package prepared before every deploy. Never a school-hours change.
- Retroactive attendance adjustments: reason code + approver + audit trail, 3-working-day SLA; edits beyond the window lock at school level.
- Support ladder: champion Tier 0 → desk Tier 1 → platform ops Tier 2 → vendor Tier 3. Security-flavoured tickets bypass all tiers.
- Nightly reconciliation jobs + dead-letter queue keep upstream and platform provably in agreement; consumer lag is the early-warning metric.
- Holiday calendar configured (6 Oct in-window); calendar exceptions applied centrally with an audit reference, never per school.
The gate: digital matches paper at ≥98% for 4 consecutive weeks → paper retires automatically under a pre-signed directive. It cannot be accelerated, locally overridden, or gamed — timestamps are audited.
Protected scale-up
December
- 480,000-concurrent stress test — 2× safety margin on expected Phase-2 peak, replicating the morning spike shape, not a flat average.
- Backlog burn-down: every pilot P1/P2 closed or consciously accepted before scale.
- Disaster-recovery restore drill — a verified restore, not a verified backup.
- Data-portability export test to open format, end to end.
- Support tooling scaled for the January desk; delegated-access support views (agents never ask for credentials).
- No feature launches. December ships stability only.
Phase 2 — national scale
From 10 Jan
- 800K students, ~1,000 schools, ~20,000 teachers onboarded via cascade training.
- Online assessments go live — the feature deliberately held back from the pilot.
- New schools run their own shorter paper+digital parallel window (~20 working days) with the same gate discipline.
- Consumer-lag and DLQ dashboards are the first screens on the wall; term-start mass sync routes to read replicas, never the primary.
- Ramadan calendar configuration (Feb–Mar 2027) tested before it arrives — shortened-day rules must not generate false absences.
Ground rules — non-negotiable
- If in doubt whether it's a bug or a breach, treat it as a breach for the first hour. Security path bypasses every tier; preserve evidence before any fix.
- Never trade slow for absent during school hours — shed load, fail over, put up an honest status page.
- Access revocation on termination: within 1 hour of the upstream status change. Substitute access: scoped, time-boxed delegation — never shared credentials.
- Merge, never delete: duplicate records consolidate to a canonical ID with history preserved. Bulk operations reversible within 72h with audit trail.
- Working week Sun–Thu. Holiday freeze dates in-scope: 6 Oct, 7 Jan, 25 Jan.
- No ranking or punitive dashboards — aggregate support analytics only. This is a product commitment, not a preference.