Wayfarer Transit Systems (Parkeon Group company) has been developing new e-ticketing product platform utilising Microsoft .NET technologies. The amount of work made it difficult to develop all the components in-house. After considering a number of options Wayfarer looked at outsourcing some of its software development to Poland and chose Future Processing as one of the main suppliers.
Wayfarer is the UK market leader in bus systems and ticketing machines market. The company produces hardware and software and it came to Future Processing because of its increasing development needs related to new products and large scale installations. Wayfarer looked for high quality service and appreciated not only our software development but also quality assurance expertise.
eBus is Wayfarer's new generation hardware and software platform aimed at the bus industry. One of its key features is support of a number of Smartcard types defined by the ITSO standard. The standard allows passengers travelling across the UK using the same card with various ITSO-compliant service providers.
The eBus project required a combination of dedicated hardware and bespoke Windows CE run-time with low level hardware drivers and high level .NET Compact Framework application around it. The built in Wi-Fi card automatically communicated via Web Services with the Back Office server which was another important development area.
Future Processing was involved in a few key project tasks including the Smartcard related development, especially low level operations on MiFare, Desfire, London Oyster and other types of cards as well as high level .NET Compact Framework component development.
The project nature required extensive testing in order to satisfy the ITSO standard requirements. Future Processing's quality assurance team designed hundreds of test cases performed both manually and automatically depending on the testing level.
As the development team worked in the on-shore/off-shore arrangement and the project complexity was relatively high special project management measures had to be taken. The project was divided into several parts and a team leader with dedicated development and QA resources was assigned to each of them. An emphasis was put on communication between the team leaders and within each project team.
Future Processing development and quality assurance team has played an important role in achieving Wayfarer's development objectives and sped up the overall development progress.
"Future Processing and Parkeon have been engaged on a key project for some months now that has involved a significant amount of development and testing in the UK and in Poland working within the .NET environment. It has proved Future Processing's ability to integrate with our software and systems and provide high quality on time deliveries."
Christopher J Octon
Product Development Manager
Parkeon
