This client offers a market-leading, turnkey solution for mid- and high-stakes computer-based exams. Its software suite enables simple and easy exam creation, delivery and scoring/analysis on a secure and reliable platform.
Overview
Since iPads are increasingly replacing laptops, there was a pressing need to migrate the product from a desktop version to a tablet one. The engagement kicked off in June 2012. The team consists of four professionals including one team lead.
Activities
The Excellarate team is involved in creating an iPad version of the client’s flagship product. The desktop and Mac versions of the product are built on .Net; the Excellarate team is engaged in building a native client for the iPad version from scratch. The team has designed the architecture, decided the technology platform, frameworks and even the build and project-tracking tools.
- Architecture & design
- Coding- automated code documentation, unit tests, cocoa coding guidelines
- Continuous Integration- CI Builds which can produce ‘app’ and ‘documentation’
- Delivery & Implementation:
- A product demo is scheduled every 2 weeks. The Excellarate team uses JIRA for issue tracking and
- Grasshopper as a Agile Board.
- Excellarate, asked client to redo the UI (done by another contractor) and client agreed it, now Excellarate’s
- Lead is supervising that contractor work too (UI).
- Tools/components & Technologies:
- IDE: Xcode4.5
- Programming language: Objective-C and Cocoa Touch framework
- CI- Jenkins
- OS- OSX Lion, iOS 6.0
Highlights
All code is documented completely. The code is split into small modules with each developer responsible for her own code and design. Each module is built as a library, as a result of which refactoring in code has lesser impact.
The team suggested best practices to the client for integration. A Rich Text Editor was created from scratch that enables exporting the RTF to HTML.
Future Plans
The client wants to add testing services to the engagement? a QA professional will be soon added to the team.
This client has identified other areas where they think iPad will be a great media, that is a possible opportunity for Excellarate.
