The Client
A 5 MUSD hi-tech product company, into a hardware intensive product with a team of hardware engineers, wanted to roll out the product for electronic shelf labeling market.

Business Scenario
ESL management system helps store chains in strategic and dynamic price management of the items being sold. The system includes hardware like base stations, transceivers and electronic shelf labels (ESL’s). System supported both serial and Ethernet based communication channel. Faster time to market such a product required parallel development of hardware and software. With market pressures of providing better features during different stages of progressive development, it was difficult for hardware team to keep changing the hardware from time to time. Cost of making hardware changes for minor feature addition was very high as compared to making software more intelligent for better hardware management.

The Solution
Our highly reliable, multithreaded, scalable software solution helped our client in effectively penetrating the market with new features being supported progressively throughout the development. Since the development process needed parallel development of hardware and software, our software team made extensive use of mocks replacing the real hardware.

The Business Process
The Product was developed through an iterative process, and the customer was made the integrated part of the software development which helped in getting clear requirements, and defining clear direction to the development process. The engagement spanned for more than 3 years. During initial phase more stress was given on getting detailed requirements from the client. These requirements helped in creating a stable, robust, component based architecture. As we progressed, our approach was more agile which helped in focusing on development as per dynamic customer requirements. Development process required ceaseless interaction of both hardware and software team. Teams made extensive use of video conferencing/ messenger communication to update each other on regular basis. Daily standup meetings about the progress were carried out both onsite and offsite, and notes were exchanged amongst both the teams. Extensive nUnit testcases helped in thorough unit and integration testing of the system.

Today our client is a 60 MUSD organization.

Benefits

Reliable, high performance, scalable system.

Multi O/S support.

Multi language support.

Feature driven progressive development.

Web GUI for operation administration and configuration.