Dedicated team to develop custom iOS native mobile app for data capturing and electronic documents filling on iPad

Our customer is a German company whose various products simplify paperless document management and data capturing. One of these products is a comprehensive system that covers all stages of data capturing and processing activities.

The customer decided to develop a mobile data capturing app (for iPad tablet) in addition to existing desktop and web-based software. They hired Brightgrove as their nearshore IT partner.

We identified the following challenges:
• Absence of both business and technical documentation.
• Incompatibility between the existing formats of metadata, communication protocols and specifics of mobile devices.
• Limitations and challenges to processing metadata generated from PDF documents.
• Lack of technological solutions that might have been used for the creation of a highly customizable metadata-driven UI for the iOS platform which mimics paper forms.
• A need to establish stable and effective communication, development, and quality assurance processes.

Our customer chose to use the Dedicated Team development model to establish a long-term and stable partnership. We hired highly experienced developers whose skill set precisely matched the customer’s IT and business requirements.

The team implemented a flexible development process, which included the best practices from traditional and Agile methodologies. For communication, we used Skype, voice calls, emails, and online collaboration tools.

Development Process

• The current status and daily progress were reported to the customer via online collaboration tools. All source code of the system was stored in the version control system hosted by the customer and each commit was commented.
• Our engineers proposed necessary modifications of the existing metadata format to define the mobile app’s UI without breaking its compatibility with other data capturing component.
• Our team created a native iOS application for iPad devices which represents a mobile client for the customer’s document management server. The server exposes the set of web services for obtaining information on the list of available documents, their metadata, and document instances.
• The most challenging part of the system development was the creation of the data capturing UI, which was fully built and driven by metadata that defines the electronic document content.

We added substantial value to the customer’s product by suggesting significant improvements in the development process, business flow, and features usability.

The manufacturing companies successfully adopted the app, due to its tight integration with internal business processes. After the app’s launch, Brightgrove handles the ongoing improvements of the product. We created several versions of it based on the feedback collected from end-users.