The proof of concept furniture leveraged a simple iOS app for basic controls, but needed a cloud infrastructure along with firmware to streamline the experience. Ippon helped identify and prioritize building this infrastructure to allow for scaling the product and accelerated beta user validation. Another advantage, this would build intellectual property while positioning the company for rapid expansion even beyond beta users.
First, we coordinated with a team of partnering consultants to design and develop the beta product vision, then shared our learnings with the planned manufacturing partner. Our Ippon team included experts across devops, cloud infrastructure, technical architecture, and product management. We would build the cloud infrastructure, pipelines, and framework needed to bridge the gap between the iOS mobile app and the hardware it was built to control.
Before our multi-disciplined team went to work, Ippon established the processes for an effective build; introducing standard agile ceremonies and a shared roadmap visible across all engineering consultants. This provided a clear and consistent framework for translating leadership goals and keeping priorities on track.
We applied a kanban format to the six-month target dates. Ippon leveraged the performance capabilities of the embedded system and implemented a modern service pattern to avoid getting bogged down by more rigid and inflexible patterns used in classic embedded system designs. Ippon’s contribution included cloud infrastructure for applications and pipelines, supporting back-end microservices and a data platform, packaging custom local services and APIs, and creating standard pipeline frameworks to build the firmware.
As our engineers hit delivery milestones, it was critical to integrate testing processes coordinated with all partnering engineers to ensure new changes were vetted before hand-off to beta users. We established separate testing environments (dev, uat, prod), updates when new features were ready to be tested by product, and a feedback loop for bugs and enhancements required to be incorporated before a build could be released to the public.