Companion apps for smart dashcam & tyre inflator

Osram operates under three distinct brands in different parts of the world Osram, Ring and Sylvania. Each brand was maintaining a separate app written in Xamarin. They were experiencing increasing costs maintaining and adding new features to the separate code bases.

Coderus offered to combine these apps into a single codebase while maintaining the separate branding. This included company information, colour palettes, product photography as well as other items like legal terms and conditions.

The Ring and Sylvania app required support for both the Dash Cam and Tyre Inflator, while Sylvania only required Dash Cam support.

The documentation provided for the dash cam was incomplete and inconsistent from the behaviour observed from the device, so we had to reverse engineer the existing Xamarin app in order confirm how the Dash Cam API worked. The client had a strict budget and go-live which had been communicated with Osram’s internal stakeholders. The resource applied to the project must be carefully monitored to keep the project within budget.

At the start of the project, a workshop session was held with the client so that Coderus to develop a clear understanding of the project requirements, build a high level design overview and create a task breakdown. The project used scrum methodology, working in 2 week sprints to deliver incremental releases. Daily stand ups discussed progress towards the sprint goal, which the client would attend twice a week. This ensured that the client had visibility across all stages of the project and was able to answer any questions to clarify requirements. Each sprint held a backlog refinement session to ensure tasks for the next sprint had enough detail. As well as a review session to look at new features added to the app. Retrospectives were completed at the end of each sprint to identify areas of improvement in the way that the team worked.

As this was a large project we looked for opportunities to break the project down into smaller phases. When capturing requirements we had identified that the Sylvania only required dash cam support as the tyre inflator was not sold in that region. We focused on the Sylvania app first, implementing the smallest scope possible to provide a working product which could be released to production. This helped to reduce project risk and allow Osram to begin capturing customer feedback. The next phase was to produce Osram and Ring branded dash cam apps so that each brand had it’s own production ready dash cam app. Before finally adding support for the tyre inflator.