The Client
The product company is a leading provider of display based solutions to retailers worldwide that help retailers to electronically display pictures, promotion pricing, and other information pertaining to item on the store shelf wirelessly, thus reducing the need of paper based solution which require manual intervention and are not prone to errors. In order to retain its product leadership, client was engaged into research and development of a new display device to be used for displaying product promotion information in retail environment.

Business Problem
Client wanted to get the first mover advantage by launching the product in the biggest trade show in Japan. Thus it was decided to develop the software product in parallel with the hardware to reduce the time to market. The device had proprietary protocol and command set with a set of communication infrastructure to be used for communicating, and with the evolving hardware as well.

The Solution
Appulse got involved in the conceptualization of the product and release, five months before the launch of the product. First Challenge was to define the features of the product from market needs perspective.

For features capturing, Appulse analysts conducted workshops with a 12 people client team (including key stakeholders, Support, R&D, and Sales persons) in Japan for writing use cases and detailed description of requirements. Visual modeling and prototyping was used in the workshops to fasten the development, and capture the features agreeable to all the stakeholders.

After finalizing the Product Vision document, Appulse studied the basic prototype of hardware and started using an iterative development model. Appulse architects worked out a command pattern and layer based architecture. The iterations were 3 week long and provided implementation of specific feature sets corresponding to device commands. Simultaneous changes to device hardware and firmware were made in case the product features could not be implanted as desired.

At the end of major iterations, Appulse engineers went to Japan to review the features and demonstration and acceptance of product. All the time development continued with little or no availability of latest hardware. The product was tested by a host of Integration suites, and the output gets checked automatically by creating automated hardware simulator which compared product output (in the form of logs at each stage) with the expected pre-defined behavior in the hardware specifications. This helped the software development to go independently of actual hardware development.

Next was the acid test of demonstration during the trade show. Before the real show begins, Appulse's engineers demonstrate the product and impart quick training to the client's sales team demonstrating the product at the show.

After a successful event, and buy in from key stakeholders, the consecutive releases of the product were further developed in the same iterative manner.

Benefits