The challenge
Selection and placement for competitive school programs is one of the most sensitive processes a department runs. Families care deeply about the outcome. The rules combine applicant preferences, eligibility criteria, priority categories and the physical capacity of each school, and they interact in ways that are hard to reason about by hand.
Before this work, that reasoning lived partly in policy documents, partly in spreadsheets and partly in the heads of the people who ran the process. The department needed a system that would apply the rules consistently, explain each outcome, and adapt when policy changed, without a rebuild every year.
What Booolean built
A configurable rules engine. Preferences, eligibility, priority and capacity rules are modelled as named, ordered and testable units. The thresholds and parameters that change between intakes are configuration with an approval path, not code.
A placement algorithm the department can explain. Every decision records which rules applied and why, so an officer can answer a family's question without a developer.
Stakeholder-facing portals and forms. A configurable form engine and reporting engine for applications and outcomes, built to be reused across the department's programs.
Reporting the department could stand behind. Outcome, capacity and exception reports fed from the same data the engine ran on.
How we worked
Scenario tests were written with the policy owners before the engine was built. Each rule was expressed as a set of worked examples that both sides agreed on, and those examples became the acceptance criteria. When the policy changed, the examples changed first.
We also designed for the cases the rules could not anticipate. An explicit review pathway meant that automation guided the process rather than replacing accountable human judgement, which matters in any public-sector system that affects individuals.
The outcome
A placement process that runs consistently at statewide scale, can be adjusted by the department when policy moves, and produces outcomes that can be explained and defended. The same platform later carried real-time photo validation inside the online application.