The Business Challenge
The client was planning to build a productivity app for roadway workers to complete jobsite requirements by helping workers find locations and communicate easily in the field.
Product Features for MVP
- Ability for user to create new jobsite issues and track them.
- Group communication and collaboration via in-app chat.
- Automatic location tracking of the user.
- Ability to transfer large design files and contract documents to and from remote locations.
Agile Planning - Look before you Leap
The quickest way for us to identify feature discrepancies is to put our testing team on the job to test the working prototype and simultaneously run our code quality tools to identify potential styling, design and load / scalability issues.
We submitted the System Requirements Specification (SRS) document within a week outlining the features discrepancies, new features for both iOS and Android apps along with a no-cost, no-obligation statement of work clearly outlining the team, milestones and cost estimates.
We plan all the project work using Agile Features / Stories in Azure Board to provide real-time insights to all stakeholders about the progress of the projects with reports and dashboards that show capacity planning and burn down rates.
The Solution
The solution is to build a Swift based iOS mobile app and an Android mobile application that helps road workers on various project sites to have the following features at a user level.
- Project onboarding – invite users by emails.
- Location mapping on construction site via flags.
- Upload high quality camera pictures and record videos.
- Collaboration via chat with other invited users
- Ability to download documents, chats per project site.The technical specifications included:
- Highly scalable and High availability.
- Offline mode of the application if project site does not have good internet connection.
- Economical solution since the client is pre-MVP.
The overall solution is based of AWS Cognito for user authentication and profile management. Since there are Swift based and Android based SDK’s available for AWS Cognito, and the pricing is $0 until 50k users are onboarded this was the best economical solution possible. We have used AWS DynamoDB, S3 buckets for data storage.
We Measure our Outcomes
- MVP completed in 13 weeks and State Departments of Transportations spanning across multiple states in the USA are using the app today.
- The user base grew with multiple hundreds of road construction projects that were onboarded.
- The solution was scalable, secured for future needs and we got client testimonials that proved our commitment to excellence, innovation and faster delivery.
- The product was recently showcased on TechStars Demo day and we are glad to be part of their success story.
- Our goal to is help startups reach MVP and beyond, through our custom application development services that encompass enterprise level tools, technology and team.