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Recently Posted
- Mobbu needs a smart person for QA/testing
- Job opening: Mobbu is hiring an IT/infrastructure maestro
- Job opening: Mobbu is hiring a graduate/junior developer
- Airwave's £39m Olympics deal
- BlackBerry cost savings at Bedfordshire and Thames Valley
- Support as a metric for technical debt in scrum sprints
- Jira, Greenhopper, Lighthouse: tools vs practice in Scrum
- Job opening: Mobbu is hiring a great QA/tester
- 27 police forces get £30m phase two mobile funding from NPIA
- Job opening: Mobbu is hiring a BlackBerry/.Net developer in Brighton
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Links in brief
TXP.icio.us requires MagpieRSSMobbu needs a smart person for QA/testing
21 April 2010 by Rod McLaren
Update: this opportunity is closed now, thanks.
Mobbu is a leading provider of real-time secure mobile applications to the UK policing and public safety sector.
Our mobile software products provide customers with increased real-time situational awareness capability whilst tangibly reducing operational cost – the first of these products is successfully rolled out at UK police forces, and more are in development. We also provide consulting services – planning, designing and building mobile/backend systems – for companies like Airwave and G4S.
Our product development and consulting businesses are growing, driven by our public sector domain expertise, our product design and development knowledge, and your skills as a QA/tester.
About the role
We’re looking for a talented, motivated person who will take responsibility for the quality of our software products and projects.
In this role you will be required to support the development team working as QA on a variety of internet and mobile application projects developed in .Net/ASP.NET, Java, and BlackBerry technologies.
We want you to be involved up-front with internal and customer product owners. You’d define and document requirements (user stories) and write test cases from business requirements. You will need to be involved with our development team, ensuring that what is released is of sufficient quality and passes critical regression testing.
The role is based in our shiny office in the heart of Brighton’s mobile community. We want to hire for it as soon as possible.
About You
You are smart, you get things done, and you can communicate effectively. You can approach a problem methodically and analytically to track down the root cause of a problem. You’re comfortable being customer-facing and will sometimes run acceptance testing on a customer’s premises.
Ideally, you’re great at finding those critical edge cases in systems, at breaking those systems in, and you’re even better at explaining why they need fixing. You keep developers sharp, and you’re all about attention to detail. Experience of mobile application testing, agile (Scrum) testing methods, load or performance testing and test automation would be a useful added bonus.
You are entitled to work in the UK and a UK resident: we’re going to have to get you security-cleared for some of our work.
Mobbu and technology
Our technology choices are pragmatic – we develop using the technology set appropriate for the product and the customer’s environment. In our past projects someone in your role might need to:
- Take a high level requirements document and extract the meaningful user stories and test cases
- Produce a customer-facing functional specification document
- Produce and run a critical regression test pack for each software release
We are an agile/Scrum-oriented company and we favour running software developed and tested by talented, well-organised people. The successful candidate will be a very important member of the Mobbu team, with the responsibility of ensuring that what is developed each sprint is of great quality.
If this role sounds interesting, please send a cv to Brad Legge at hello (at) mobbu.com and tell us why you’re the person for the job; no agencies or phone calls, please.
Job opening: Mobbu is hiring an IT/infrastructure maestro
5 January 2010 by Rod McLaren
Update: this opportunity is closed now, thanks.
Mobbu designs, develops and delivers mobile and internet data services, principally for police forces and the public safety and security sector. Our consulting and product development businesses are growing, driven by our public sector domain expertise, our product design knowledge, and your skills as an infrastructure person. The majority of our work is building custom solutions for the BlackBerry mobile platform. We are an Agile/Scrum-oriented company and we favour running software and services developed and delivered by talented, well-organised people.
Job Description
Mobbu is looking for an intelligent and self-motivated individual to gradually take on the responsibility of installing and maintaining our solutions and internal infrastructure. The role will require the person to travel to client sites across the country and stay
on site for days at a time. When not on site, you’ll work from our office in Brighton, and your responsibilities will be to maintain and upgrade the existing infrastructure and solutions.
We expect the first few months of this role to be a steep learning curve, both in terms of being mentored and hands on experience, leading to you being able to independently handle client installations and our internal infrastructure.
Key Responsibilities:
- Installing Hardware/Software solutions at client sites
- Maintaining existing office network/infrastructure
- Architect and improve existing infrastructure solutions (internal/external)
- Initiative to learn and be up to date with hardware/networking technologies
About you
You are smart, you can get things done, and you can communicate. You’re great at dealing with customers and will bring a new dimension and great ideas and approaches to our internal and external infrastructure requirements. You are methodical in your approach to systems installation and maintenance and have great attention to the finer details of your job.
Due to organisational requirements you must be a UK resident and passport holder: we’ll need to be able to get you government security-cleared for some of our work.
Key Skills:
- Professional client facing persona
- Excellent communication skills
- Linux(Debian/Ubuntu)/Windows – OS
- Linux/Windows – Networking
- Networking knowledge – Routing, Firewalls, etc.
- Virtualisation/VMWare
- Scripting Language : Bash/Python/etc.
- Driving Licence – Willing and able to travel long distances.
Additional Skills:
- Security
- Advanced Networking – DNS/Monitoring/SNMP
- High Availability/Failover
- Backup/Recovery
- Email/SMTP/Exchange
- BES/MDS 4.x – 5.x
If this role sounds interesting, please contact us at hello (at) mobbu.com; no phone calls, please.
Job opening: Mobbu is hiring a graduate/junior developer
5 January 2010 by Rod McLaren
Update: this opportunity is closed now, thanks.
Mobbu designs, develops and delivers mobile and internet data services, principally for police forces and the public safety and security sector. Our consulting and product development businesses are growing, driven by our public sector domain expertise, our product design knowledge, and your skills as a developer. The majority of our work is building custom solutions for the BlackBerry mobile platform. We are an Agile/Scrum-oriented company and we favour running software developed by talented, well-organised developers.
Job Description
We’re looking for an intelligent and self-motivated individual who will become an integral part of our development team. Working alongside your mentor, you’ll need to show an aptitude in and constantly improve your understanding and knowledge of working high quality code in an Agile-Scrum environment.
Key Responsibilities:
- Implement specifications drafted by senior members of the team
- Design and build test-cases to prove acceptance criteria
- Iterate over and improve designs while implementing actual solution
- Version and Document implementations to company standards
- Manage multiple code bases at once
The role is based in Brighton, and some travel around the UK may occasionally be required.
About you
You are smart, you get things done, and you can communicate well. You understand that perfect is not as important as robust and stable. You keep up with new work in your field and participate in communities of practice online and elsewhere.
Due to organisational requirements you must be a UK resident and passport holder: we’ll need to be able to get you government security-cleared for some of our work.
Key Skills:
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills on all aspects of our working and process
- An affinity for programming/technology
- Willingness and initiative to constantly improve yourself and your team
- Java/C# intermediate level (majority of code base is in Java)
- Excellent OO concepts and understanding
- SQL
- Linux and Windows OS knowledge
- UML/Documentation
- Unit Testing/Test-Driven Design
Additional Skills:
- SVN/Versioning
- J2ME/Mobile experience
- OO Patterns
- Threads
- Networking
- Other language knowledge – we’d like a well-rounded programmer
- IDE (Eclipse/Netbeans)
If this role sounds interesting, please contact us at hello (at) mobbu.com; no phone calls, please.
Airwave's £39m Olympics deal
9 November 2009 by Rod McLaren
Friday 23 October 2009: Airwave announced a £39m Home Office deal to enhance their radio communications service for the 2012 Olympics, and add capacity for several thousand police and emergency service officers simultaneously. From the Home Office’s press release:
A summary of the overall requirements:
- capacity to support the additional policing requirements at all Olympic venues
- coverage within Olympic venues
- capability to support public order operational activities involving several thousand officers within confined geographical locations
- capability to ensure business as usual activities are not compromised
- capability to address the risk of a spontaneous major incident whilst continuing to support business as usual and Olympics requirements.
“Several thousand officers within confined geographical locations” is likely to be the most challenging goal. We’d expect the Olympics to be a story of both radio and mobile data use for Airwave. This deal is a big boost for Airwave, and shows that BlackBerry isn’t the only platform vendor with momentum.
Previously: Airwave named as London 2012 supplier.
Other Airwave news:
- Police body could lead FiReControl – “A consultation on the Fire Service’s resilience programme – which includes FiReControl and Firelink – has proposed that responsibility for the programme pass [to] NPIA” – FiReControl is the beleaguered semi-centralised control centre project supplied by EADS, Firelink is the secure radio service supplied by Airwave. This may suit Airwave, perhaps less so EADS. There’s increasing appetite to interoperate services and even run programmes across blue and orange light, catalysed by both 2012 and a desire to achieve cost efficiencies.
- Airwave’s health division has won a deal to supply radio to the Dept of Health’s Hazardous Area Response Teams (HART) by 2010.
Disclosure: Mobbu develop software for vendors in the UK policing market, including Airwave. We also develop and sell our own software products for police services.
BlackBerry cost savings at Bedfordshire and Thames Valley
4 November 2009 by Rod McLaren
In early October 2009, RIM organised a round table event with Tory MP David Davies, Bedfordshire Constabulary, Thames Valley Police and NPIA.
Bedfordshire’s case study records time-in-station dropping from 46% to 36% for 1,100 officers, and Thames Valley reports time saved equivalent to 100 extra officers on the street – both stats indicate a significant cost-saving.
NPIA’s Gary Cairns said “When Airwave [the police radio network] expires in 2015, we are looking at whether we can have just one device”, and RIM’s PR will be happy that some media interpreted that as all UK police officers will be handed BlackBerrys.
Davies (this one, not that one) is a Special with the BTP and sits on the Home Affairs Select Committee, and offered an indication of Tory thinking on mobile data:
“There will almost certainly be cuts on public spending and so if forces can make a business case that a particular device can save money in the long term then it would have a very good chance of being taken up but we can’t just spend money left right and centre on technologies – it won’t happen. From my own experience I have seen the benefits of mobile data and it is something I would want to support if we there is to be a change of government.”
It won’t happen – the need for public sector IT programmes to measurably deliver both cost-efficiencies as well as capability enhancements.
(The background: The Cabinet Office has handed NPIA £80m since 2008 to achieve an additional 30,000 mobile devices in officer hands by 2010, taking total mobile devices in use to near 45,000. Some sources suggest that there are around 39,000 devices in UK policing, “with an even split between forces that have chosen BlackBerrys and those that have plumped for other mobile data devices such as Windows Mobile phones”, though I’m sure RIM would dispute that “even split” because they were reporting 20,000 devices over a year ago.)
Disclosure: Mobbu has stakes in this: we develop software for vendors in the UK policing market, including Airwave. We also develop and sell our own software products for police services, mostly on the BlackBerry platform.
Support as a metric for technical debt in scrum sprints
7 October 2009 by Rod McLaren
Israel Gat has an interesting post on technical debt as a measurable metric in agile software development, and cites a Sonar plugin which gives debt a financial value (how? “the debt is first calculated on the basic axis: Duplication, Violations, Complexity, Coverage and Documentation”). Gat:
Monetizing technical debt can have two far reaching implications, as follows:
- A credit limit on technical debt can be established. For example, when the technical debt reaches a certain level (say 25 cents per line of code), new functionality is put on hold. The team applies itself to aggressive refactoring to reduce the debt to an acceptable level.
- For companies who capitalize software, technical debt could become a line item on the balance sheet. It will simply be listed as a liability.
From a customer perspective, the monetized technical debt on the balance sheet of a software vendor is a proxy for the technical risk involved in licensing software from this vendor.
We don’t track debt in this detail, but we do something else.
Our talented development team both creates the products/services we provide to our customers and supports them. Because time spent working on support can be an opportunity cost and a disruptive interruption to the team and sprint, we track the support work required during sprints.
We track a rolling average of support work across the last few sprints, and use that to set a support “budget” at the start of each sprint. Support calls during the sprint draw against that budget. We then try to hold – or better, reduce – the amount of support work from one sprint to the next, even though the number of customers we support is increasing. Estimating and tracking support work is thus a proxy for measuring technical debt. This is admittedly a pretty indirect way of keeping visible technical debt, but it has the virtue of a low measurement burden.
This supportability principle also makes us wary of pushing features out too quickly or with insufficient quality, and keeps us focused on important business factors – reduced support activity obviously being good for customers’ continuity or service and confidence in the products and our bottom line.
Jira, Greenhopper, Lighthouse: tools vs practice in Scrum
31 July 2009 by Rod McLaren
We switched from Lighthouse to Altassian’s Jira for our ticket-tracking/sprint planning shortly after starting to adopt scrum seriously. We used Greenpepper’s Greenhopper extension, which makes Jira a bit more scrum-like. We tried it for about 3 months in a team about 5-6 strong. Here’s what happened.
The good:
- JIRA is an powerful project management/ticket-tracking tool, and can be configured and customised significantly.
- the Greenhopper extension hides some of Jira’s complexity
- Greenhopper offers useful views for product planners and scrum masters: a planning board with draggable priority; a task board with draggable story status (we had ours set to todo, in progress, in testing, complete); chart views including velocity
- tasks/stories and sub-tasks/stories can be useful
- It’s definitely a good, powerful tool for some teams, but…
The bad:
- our biggest problem with Jira/Greenhopper was that it isn’t as well-aligned to our developing practice of scrum as we needed it to be. The tool got in the way of our learning the practice, and started behaviourally skewing our view of scrum (‘The chosen tool becomes a factor of the first order in determining not “only” how Agile (or any other software method) will be practiced, but what mindset will evolve in the course of the rollout’). We were trying to fit scrum to the tool we had, and were talking more about how to use the tool well than we were about whether the sprint was going well.
- you can see that Altassian and Greenpepper had very good reasons for making every design decision they did, but the end result is a tool that’s massively complex and feels really unforgiving, even with the Greenhopper extension. Because you can do so much with it, it makes you set up huge amounts of stuff. You feel like you need an expert to set it up; you feel like you have to be an expert to use it well.
- many of the good features in Jira/Greenhopper required a high degree of ritual – we felt like these were activities that should have been secondary to the primary activities of estimating tasks, committing to a sprint plan, and delivering the sprint.
- the development team didn’t use Jira’s hooks to source control and release management (they just preferred to use Subversion directly)
- Greenhopper has some truly horrible user experience. My particular bugbear was that double-clicking in a text input field toggled the field back to a read-only view instead of selecting the word – a small thing, but incredibly interruptive because it’s at variance with the every other software/website I use.
- Greenhopper is pretty slow to use, which can be annoying – probably because it has massive amounts of javascript
- we found it hard to identify our success criteria and we were constantly putting off making a decision to commit to Jira/Greenhopper for the long-term. (Which was one of the signs that we should have been focussing on the practice rather than on the tools.)
- it’s also a bit expensive against the competition.
Many of these downsides aren’t fundamental problems in the product itself, but gaps between it and how we behave as a development team. For your team it might be different.
For now, we have gone back to the simplicity of Lighthouse for the detail in stories and tasks, and to the speed and visibility of a large whiteboard with post-it notes for the bigger picture. That’s working better for us. In future we make look at using or making a scrum extension for Lighthouse, but for now we’re staying focused on trying to improve our practice of scrum rather than on optimising tool use.
Job opening: Mobbu is hiring a great QA/tester
15 January 2009 by Rod McLaren
Update: this opportunity is closed now, thanks. Another update: we’re hiring for a QA again! .
Mobbu designs, develops and delivers mobile and internet data services, principally for police forces and the public safety and security sector.
We plan, design and build mobile/backend systems for customers like Airwave and G4S. We also create and sell our own mobile software products for the same sector, the first of which is now successfully rolling out at UK police forces.
Our consulting and product development businesses are growing, driven by our public sector domain expertise, our product design and development knowledge, and your skills as a QA/tester.
About the role
We’re looking for a talented, motivated software QA/tester who will take responsibility for the quality of our software products and projects.
The role is based in our new office in the heart of Brighton’s mobile community. We want to hire for it as soon as possible.
In this role you will be required to support the development team working as QA on a variety of internet and mobile application development projects developed in .Net/ASP.NET (web) and .Net Compact Framework/Blackberry (mobile) technologies.
We want you to be involved up-front with internal and customer product owners. Defining and documenting requirements (user stories) and writing test cases from business requirements. You will need to be involved with our development team, ensuring that what is released is of sufficient quality and passes critical regression testing.
About You
You are smart, you can get things done, and you can communicate. You’re great at finding those critical edge cases in systems, at breaking those systems, and you’re even better at explaining why they need fixing. You keep the developers sharp, and you’re all about attention to detail.
You understand acceptance, integration and performance testing, and will have good ideas about how to improve our testing methods and those of our customers. You keep up with new work in your field and participate in communities of practice online and elsewhere. You’re comfortable being customer-facing and will sometimes run acceptance testing on a customer’s premises.
Experience of mobile application testing, automated functional testing, load or performance testing and testing an agile (Scrum) environment will be useful.
You are a UK resident and passport holder: we’re going to have to get you security-cleared for some of our work.
Mobbu and technology
Our technology choices are pragmatic – we develop using the technology set appropriate for the product and the customer’s environment. In our past projects someone in your role might need to:
- Take a customer requirements document with very little useful information and extract meaningful user stories and test cases.
- Produce a critical regression test pack for each software release. Possibly and where appropriate producing automated tests from this regression pack.
- Work with the development team to deploy and configure a software release and run the relevant test cases and/or critical regression test pack.
- Produce a customer-facing functional specification document.
We are an Agile/Scrum-oriented company and we favour running software developed by talented, well-organised developers. The successful candidate will be a very important member of the Mobbu team, responsible for the technical and architectural leadership of the MFO product.
If this role sounds interesting, please contact us at hello (at) mobbu.com; no phone calls, please.
(PS: If you’re not a tester… we’re looking for a Java developer too!)
27 police forces get £30m phase two mobile funding from NPIA
5 January 2009 by Rod McLaren
NPIA’s 30 Dec 2008 press release (and news coverage since) indicates that the £30 million “will build on the existing investment to provide a total of 30,000 handheld computers by March 2010” (see the numbers, below).
“The following 25 forces were successful in their bid for a portion of this money: Avon and Somerset Constabulary, City of London Police, Cleveland Police, Cumbria Constabulary, Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, Dorset Police, Durham Constabulary, Dyfed-Powys Police, Gloucestershire Constabulary, Greater Manchester Police, Gwent Police, Hampshire Constabulary, Merseyside Police, Norfolk Constabulary, Northumbria Police, North Wales Police, South Wales Police, South Yorkshire Police, Suffolk Constabulary, Surrey Police, Sussex Police, Warwickshire Police, West Mercia Constabulary, West Midlands Police and Wiltshire Constabulary. The two agencies who have received funding are ACPO Terrorism and Allied Matters and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).”
Back in June 2008, NPIA announced phase one of the same programme, in which 27 police forces got £50m for 10,000 mobile devices – that funding was directed to both force-planned projects and “green-field” projects that used NPIA’s accelerator programme, which has two vendors, Airwave and C&W/Beat.
NPIA’s intention is that “all forces across England, Scotland and Wales will be given a portion of funding to roll-out the mobile information programme” – every “geographic” force has now received some funding, though some non-geographic forces and agencies haven’t received funding (see below). No forces have been funded twice yet.
See our previous post for commentary on the effectiveness and value of the programme and responses to media criticisms around cost per device, device security.
The numbers
Where police forces have disclosed numbers publicly there’s a citation, and we’ll update this post if we find more details; otherwise it merely says “funded” based on the NPIA release above. (Police force sources: UK Police Service and Wikipedia.)
ACPO London Region:
| police force | phase 1 | phase 2 |
| City of London Police | 0 | funded |
| Metropolitan Police Service | funded | 0 |
ACPO Eastern Region:
| police force | phase 1 | phase 2 |
| Bedfordshire Police | funded | 0 |
| Cambridgeshire Constabulary | funded | 0 |
| Essex Police | funded | 0 |
| Hertfordshire Constabulary | £1.9m to add 1,000 PDAs and 300 MDTs | 0 |
| Norfolk Constabulary | 0 | funded |
| Suffolk Constabulary | 0 | funded |
ACPO South East Region:
| police force | phase 1 | phase 2 |
| Hampshire Constabulary | 0 | funded |
| Kent Police | £1.9m for 1,100 PDAs and 150 mdts | 0 |
| Surrey Police | 0 | funded |
| Sussex Police | 0 | £456k |
| Thames Valley Police | £637k for 1,100 BlackBerrys | 0 |
ACPO South West Region:
| police force | phase 1 | phase 2 |
| Avon & Somerset Constabulary | 0 | funded |
| Devon & Cornwall Constabulary | 0 | funded |
| Dorset Police | 0 | funded |
| Gloucestershire Constabulary | 0 | funded |
| Wiltshire Constabulary | 0 | funded |
ACPO East Midlands Region:
| police force | phase 1 | phase 2 |
| Derbyshire Constabulary | All five forces funded as East Midlands collaboration: £8.3m for 4,000 devices, training, infrastructure and other costs – BlackBerrys, PDAs and Mobile Data Terminals (MDTs) in cars; of which Northants police to get 700 BlackBerrys | 0 |
| Leicestershire Constabulary | 0 | |
| Lincolnshire Police | 0 | |
| Northamptonshire Police | 0 | |
| Nottinghamshire Police | 0 |
ACPO West Midlands Region:
| police force | phase 1 | phase 2 |
| Staffordshire Police | £3.7m for 1,200 mobiles, ‘and 300 working with the Central Motorway Police Group [MDTs?] and the region’s counter-terrorism unit’ | 0 |
| Warwickshire Police | 0 | funded |
| West Mercia Constabulary | 0 | funded |
| West Midlands Police | 0 | funded |
ACPO North East Region:
| police force | phase 1 | phase 2 |
| Cleveland Police | 0 | £830k |
| Durham Constabulary | 0 | £840k |
| Humberside Police | £1.5m funded with NYP and WYP as Yorkshire collaboration | 0 |
| North Yorkshire Police | Yorkshire collaboration | 0 |
| West Yorkshire Police | Yorkshire collaboration | 0 |
| Northumbria Police | 0 | funded |
| South Yorkshire Police | none | £1m+ , 600 BlackBerrys announced |
ACPO North West Region:
| police force | phase 1 | phase 2 |
| Cheshire Constabulary | funded | 0 |
| Cumbria Constabulary | 0 | funded |
| Greater Manchester Police | 0 | £815k for 1,500 devices |
| Merseyside Police | 0 | funded |
| Lancashire Constabulary | £3.36m for 2,200 devices | 0 |
| Police Service of Northern Ireland | PSNI is separately funded? | |
ACPO Wales Region:
| police force | phase 1 | phase 2 |
| Dyfed Powys Police | 0 | funded |
| Gwent Police | 0 | funded |
| North Wales Police | 0 | funded |
| South Wales Police | 0 | funded |
ACPO Scotland Region:
| police force | phase 1 | phase 2 |
| Central Scotland Police | All eight forces were funded centrally through ACPOS: £2.5m | 0 |
| Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary | 0 | |
| Fife Constabulary | 0 | |
| Grampian Police | 0 | |
| Lothian and Borders Police | 0 | |
| Northern Constabulary | 0 | |
| Strathclyde Police | 0 | |
| Tayside Police | 0 |
Special Police forces:
| police force | phase 1 | phase 2 |
| British Transport Police | almost £2m to fund 800 PDAs and printers | 0 |
| Civil Nuclear Constabulary | No NPIA-managed funding to date | |
| Ministry of Defence Police | No NPIA-managed funding to date | |
| Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency | No NPIA-managed funding to date | |
Other UK Non Geographic forces, and other agencies:
| police force | phase 1 | phase 2 |
| Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) | 0 | funded |
| ACPO Terrorism and Allied Matters (TAM) | 0 | funded |
| UK Border Agency | No NPIA-managed funding to date | |
| Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) | No NPIA-managed funding to date | |
| Ports Police groups | No NPIA-managed funding to date | |
| Various others… | No NPIA-managed funding to date | |
.
Disclosure: Mobbu has two stakes in this, so we’re not unbiased. We develop software for Airwave, one of the large vendors of software and telco services to policing. We also develop and sell our own software products for police services in the UK, mostly on the BlackBerry platform.
Job opening: Mobbu is hiring a BlackBerry/.Net developer in Brighton
22 December 2008 by Rod McLaren
Update: we have successfully hired for this role now.
Mobbu designs, develops and delivers mobile and internet data services, principally for police forces and the public safety and security sector.
We plan, design and build mobile/backend systems for customers like Airwave and G4S. We also create and sell our own mobile software products for the same sector, the first of which is now successfully rolling out at UK police forces.
Our consulting and product development businesses are growing, driven by our public sector domain expertise, our product design knowledge, and your skills as a developer.
About the job
We’re looking for a pragmatic and flexible software developer who will take technical leadership of our MFO product – it’s a BlackBerry J2ME mobile client and an ASP.Net/AJAX web/backend system. The developer will work with product owners and designers to maintain and improve the resilience and functionality of both the product suite and the underlying technology framework. It may also involve helping build and lead a small team of developers and test engineers.
The role is based in our new office shared with Ribot Design in the heart of Brighton’s mobile community. We want to hire for this role in early 2009.
About You
You are smart, you get things done, and you can communicate well.
You understand that perfect is not as important as robust and stable. You can coherently discuss the finer points of JAVA/ASP.Net, API programming, HTTP, XML/Schema, Web services, AJAX… You keep up with new work in your field and participate in communities of practice online and elsewhere.
You’re a UK resident and passport holder: we’re going to have to get you security-cleared for some of our work.
Mobbu and technology
Our technology choices are pragmatic – we develop using the technology set appropriate for the product and the customer’s environment. In our past projects someone in your role might need to:
- design and develop (including full unit test coverage) a BlackBerry client application that integrates with the BlackBerry JDK
- design and develop a web application and messaging server that integrates with BES/MDS and deals with the sending and receiving of messages and photos
- design and develop a web mapping application using Mapstraction to overlay GPS data captured by user activity on the BlackBerry client application
- Work with product owners to produce estimates for the sprint plan and be involved in daily stand-ups to ensure the sprint burndown chart is up-to-date.
We are an Agile/Scrum-oriented company and we favour running software developed by talented, well-organised developers. The successful candidate will be a very important member of the Mobbu team, responsible for the technical and architectural leadership of the MFO product.
If this role sounds interesting, please contact us at hello (at) mobbu.com; no phone calls, please.
(PS: We’re also looking for a QA/tester.)