Working With Rolls-Royce: A Case Study

In 2016, at the Nuclear Information Technology Strategic Leadership conference (NITSL), Rolls-Royce presented their SDS website. This was met with outstanding success, leaving a strong impression and much interest among clients. However, this also created expectations to present a more feature-rich mobile version at the 2019 edition of NITSL.

The initial version of SDS started as a desktop responsive website that allowed users to access power plant sensor data. While promising, it was still missing some of the essential features needed to release a final product for customers.

Rolls-Royce also realized that their technical organization and software development practices were outdated and in need of a transformation. This presented the perfect opportunity for BairesDev to propose a solution using our Delivery Team Approach.

Through our strict process that selects only Top 1% Talent in the market, BairesDev’s staffing team worked to quickly select the roles and skill sets required to ensure best practices in code, software quality and enhanced user experience.

During an initial 2-week Discovery Phase at the Rolls-Royce offices with an Engineering Manager and Tech Lead, the project’s tech stack, scope, and backlog were defined in conjunction with RR’s Product Owner. Development started with Front-End React, QA and UX engineers joining the delivery team right after the discovery phase concluded.

mSDS included a new set of intriguing features to access real-time sensor data and diagnostics. A few worth mentioning included the ability to select and group different data points where users can access sensitive power plant data, create local alerts and receive mobile notifications when specific nominal values fall between a customized range. Groups and data points can be customized and classified by administrative users, who can also create global alerts to notify all users at the same time.

A dealbreaker for the mSDS version 1.0 would be time to market and adding immediate business value. With this in mind, the team decided to create a Progressive Web Application (PWA) as an MVP in order to use the same codebase for both web and mobile versions, retaining the benefits of a native-like app while achieving faster time to market. Once the MVP was complete, BairesDev led a successful onsite knowledge transfer.

During the initial phases of MVP development, a proof of concept was developed using React. After finding several restrictions with iPhone notification support as well as taking into account major objectives going forward, our team made the decision to develop the application in Xamarin instead. As a result, engineers were able to utilize the same codebase across web and mobile versions, while offering a seamless experience to the end user. As mSDS evolves in the future, native versions for releasing 2.0 using React Native will be implemented.