Case Study

2. WIRELESS - Mobile Application Porting and Testing

Customer
A US company is creating a portal for mobile devices to provide instant messenger, mobile chat and VoIP calls. They have 12 million mobile end users worldwide and are one of the largest mobile portal providers in the industry.

Challenge
The actual mobile client was developed in J2ME without a completed test for various devices. Each device supports different J2ME standards. The customer reported that the prototype mobile client only runs on some device brands (e.g. Moto) and various other platforms (e.g. BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile) but that it did not run properly on other brands (e.g. Samsung) and the J2ME platform. The mobile client was also operating with different Service Providers Networks that each have different policies and restrictions on VoIP. Each official release must be tested completely on various devices via different carriers, before it is made available to end users.

Service Delivered
ArcherMind engaged the customer and proposed a Virtual Oversea Development Center (VODC) service delivery model in China at ArcherMind's main development center and the customer accepted. The customer initially purchased ArcherMind's testing services, which then evolved to ArcherMind forming a dedicated team of developers and QA engineers for the project. This cost effective team fixed software bugs, implemented new software features, and ported applications to different devices and different platforms. This team-based approach dramatically shortened the development lifecycle. This led to the customer sourcing the entire mobile application development and testing to ArcherMind, which included clients on Windows Mobile (5.0/6.0) PPC & SP, iPhone (2G/3G), BlackBerry and Symbian. The VODC has grown to a large team who now covers multiple mobile platforms, develop new features and also work on the server side. ArcherMind adopted a creative non-linear approach for deliverables achieved through overlapping in the testing and development stages and still managed to execute all programming effectively between developers and QA engineers. The migrated mobile client bug fixing and porting runs were done in parallel with the existing application, which allowed the customer to focus more on new development and in growing their user base.