Case Study: POS System for a Fitness Club
Highlights
- Rapidly complete with high quality in a very tight deadline
- An agile project development process
- Build a whole POS system that includes management module and touch screen terminal module
The client
Based in Netherlands, the client has been developing creative and practical software solution for many years. They have successfully developed international markets in Europe with their products.
What they wanted
The client was looking for a vendor who can provide high quality product with experienced developers to meet a short deadline. The target product should have all functionalities of popular POS systems in the fitness market. And the system would be working fine with all required devices (e.g. receipt / barcode / card printer, cash drawer, etc.) and the vendor should understand and implement all requirements and functionalities quickly.
Screen Shots
Solution
Technology required
Development methodology
.NET Platform
.NET Framework provides a comprehensive and consistent programming model with a common set of APIs spanning Microsoft platform. Our developers who have years of experience effectively built the application based on latest proven best practices in .NET platform.
DevExpress XPO
XPO builds a powerful bridge between the true object world and relational databases. It gives us the freedom to build true business objects without having to deal with the tedious complexities of mapping them to database tables. With XPO, we never again have to deal with table mapping - all we need to do is to define persistent object classes, and XPO will generate our database for them automatically.
DevExpress Controls
DevExpress provides lots of useful and beautiful controls with easily using. That makes us work out many gorgeous and powerful features very quickly, and save more time for other important things of whole development process.
Mindfusion Controls
MindFusion.Diagramming is a general-purpose software component that can be used to display various types of diagrams and charts, in many different formats. It is implemented as a .NET control and can be easily integrated into any application targeting Microsoft .NET platform. By providing your software with ready-to-use capabilities for visualizing and editing relational data, MindFusion.Diagramming saves you from hundreds of hours of coding and debugging efforts.
Challenges of the development process
A tight deadline is our biggest challenge, and time is the key factor that can impact on everywhere of this project. So we have to do things more agilely.
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Our client cannot provide any specs or documents that contain details for the expected functionalities, the descriptions of these functionalities and features only include several simple sentences. So we use instant message tool such as Skype frequently to discuss the requirement, questions and suggestion more than emails after sufficient systematic considerations of requirements or implement solutions.
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There are always some things that cause changes of original design during developing, since we don’t have enough time to review the documents to keep nothing wrong or nothing missing before starting implement. Fortunately, the control and XPO techniques and our rich design experiences helped us dealing with these changes and make them out rapidly with a proper solution.
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In the whole development process, we often figure out some impressive features, some better ways to implement and some places needed to refactor, but the reality is we are running out of time. So we choose an agile way to manage them and only pick some of them for current version based on its value for the end user, which is very similar with Scrum’s backlog item.
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Client’s feedback plays a very important role of development. During such short development cycle, we do not have enough time to conduct full testing by ourselves. So client’s early feedback would be very important. Sometimes we usually discuss the user experience / usability things and system behaviors / logics whether if they match with things in client’s mind via using team viewer while this task is still in progress, we are trying to get the confirmations and opinions from client side earlier.
Benefits to the Client
- Due to proactive and timely communications, the development process has been under control and the product was successfully published with a high quality before the deadline.
- The client gained more clients and successfully increased the market share with the attractive application.
- Comparing with local development company, the client saved 60% on development cost.
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