Railway mobile technologies

Client Background

European Train (the real company name is hidden by an NDA) is one of the world’s TOP-3 railway companies providing continuous railway communication between cities and countries for more than 17 years. In 2018, EU Train took 2nd place in the ranking of global competitiveness in freight turnover, 4th place in passenger turnover, 1st place in traffic safety, energy efficiency and environmental protection. In 2019, EU Trains carried 1.2 billion passengers and 1.28 billion tons of cargo

EU Train successfully develops the partnership with leading global vendors and has offices in Hungary (Budapest), Germany (Berlin), China (Beijing), North Korea (Pyongyang), Poland (Warsaw), Slovakia (Bratislava city), Ukraine (Kiev), Finland (Helsinki), Belarus (Minsk), Estonia (Tallinn), France (Paris).

Product Overview

Fayrix’s team implemented a range of mobile services for one of the world’s TOP-3 railway companies. Among them, two mobile applications for iOS and Android OS have a combined monthly audience of 3 mln users.

The mobile application enables passengers to:

• review long-distance train schedules;
• select trip parameters;
• choose available seats and purchase digital tickets directly from their mobile devices;
• comment on various topics and track the processing status;
• get an online consultation.

The application launch provided passengers with the most essential services conveniently and improved overall company efficiency.

On the foundation of the applied technologies mass services in other areas were launched — reference and information, railroad facilities communication, multimodal transportations, in-train entertainment portals as well as others.

Business Challenge

In order to accomplish the scope of European Train tasks, the company needed to scale its IT department with outsourced professionals to implement new and improve current mobile technologies. In this way, European Train has strengthened its own in-house team with several dedicated development teams, including the Fayrix team. The development process has encountered a number of difficulties:

1. Constantly changing product requirements.
2. The set of integration with third-party services,  interaction with their teams.
3. The need for regular system testing (full testing/ regress testing) after every small system update.

Team

At the first stage of the cooperation, the Fayrix team had the task to develop a mobile application using an existing backend. For this purpose, Fayrix formed two mobile development teams for just a couple of weeks with high-quality Team Leads on the Fayrix side. At the second stage, it was decided to develop a separate backend for mobile applications due to the large number of external services with which it was necessary to interact. Each team member completed the test task and went through an interview with the customer.

Team building steps:

1. Search for high qualified Tech Leads.
2. Formation of several small teams under the direction of Tech Leads.
3. Complete team formation (merging of the existing ones).

Task Trackers vs Communication Tools

The team has become a full-fledged European Train unit working by the FTE model, which was managed by the project manager on the client-side. The work process is based on the usual for the client communication environment.

Communication:

• Microsoft Outlook
• Discord
• Telegram

Software Infrastructure:

• Jira – task tracker for internal tasks, YouTrack – for global tasks
• Gitlab – version control
• Confluence – knowledge base

Hardware Infrastructure:

• Fayrix test servers
• Test mobile devices – around 20 units

Project Results: Team Deliverables

A team of 21 qualified developers significantly reduced the load on the European Train team and accelerated the development of the main product by 15%. For now, all of the necessary customer’ railway services are managed through the mobile app:

• the full cycle of the ordering process (selecting, booking, purchasing, ticket cancelation);
• online consultations;
• filing complaints and tracking application status
• ordering additional services.

Team Responsibility Area:

Back-end development:

• Server side based on PHP
• Debugging work
• Unit testing

Mobile development:

• High loaded mobile apps based on Kotlin, Swift
• Adaptive UI

QA:

• Load testing
• Regress testing
• Manual testing
• API testing

Sprint Tasks:

At the moment, a sprint contains an average of 520 tasks which allows the team to follow European Train’s backlog and issue releases on request of the customer, according to the project release plan. The Fayrix team works in constant interaction with the other external teams and quickly responds to any changes. We are flexibly working on our backlog to prevent team downtime due to the unavailability of third-party services. We reduce the development and production time of new mobile modules by sharing knowledge with other dedicated teams.

How We Did It:

• One-month sprint.
• Planning all upcoming work for the team every 6 months.
• Constant cooperation with other external teams.

Sprint Results

Customer savings have reached 30% in comparison to the in-house team’s solution:

• 20% Growth in the number of tasks finished in time
• х3 Reduced team downtime due to unavailability of third-party services.
• 15% Faster product development