Week 400

26 October 2011 by Rod McLaren

[Mobbu summer party photo by Áine]

And in the blink of an eye, we turned 400 weeks old – a couple of weeks ago. This is roughly what we were doing.

Will and Tom are putting the finishing touches on a major upgrade to the software product that runs at our police and other customers. Their code has fixed some bugs, improves many small things, and adds a massive new area of functionality is both more specialised for current customers while also being ready for a broader set of future customers with different messaging needs. I’m deliberately being vague about these magic templates so I don’t puncture customer confidentiality, but you should understand that it is brilliant.

Now and then I have been helping them out by barking hex codes at Tom and Will so they can try yet another colour palette to see if it’s slightly better than the last one. It’s hard to get right because there are several dimensions to design for: various messages types, day- and night-time use, BlackBerrys and laptops, projections and wall-screens – and some of these do weird things to colours.

Tom eventually managed to make his phone upgrade to iOS5. Stace has just returned from juggling the important holiday tasks of getting children to playgroups and playing Starcraft 2, and is getting his teeth back into running development things. The coffee machine got a breather whilst he and Adam were away.

And Áine has been making sure that it’s ready to go by performing loads of exploratory QA and a vicious series of automated unit, Selenium and performance tests. After that’s done, we’ll get everyone together and do a few rounds of tests on the streets of Brighton. (Week 402: Áine’s Irish dancing team just won second in the nationals and will be going to the world championships next year!)

Deployment isn’t a simultaneous “push” performed the moment that testing is complete – for security reasons, most of our customers currently run their systems on-premises, and we need to plan a time when they’re not going to be using the system intensely and when we can perform regular system health checks. We usually do the larger deployments on site to keep it all running smoothly. So Emma is getting dates in calendars and being ready to re-plan as needed.

Last week Adam was on holiday – we’re now at the size where, on average, someone’s usually on holiday – and has just returned. He’s punching the BlackBerrys to make their Over The Air updates work to his exacting standards. Matt and Rob are building a new User Acceptance Testing platform for us; after that they’ll upgrade our Development platform. The software moves from Dev to Staging to UAT to our Production platforms, and finally out to customers.

They’ve also been doing something complex with encryption that we can’t talk about yet. They’ve tweaked our Nagios monitoring, which will peep at us as soon as any hardware or services flap. Similarly, on the device side, there are diagnostics to review and update and some warranty returns to handle. Matt and Rob also tell me that they’ve started playing Starcraft 2, apparently to win rapid promotion (and I’m immediately reminded of playing Age of Empires with the others at Football365 in 1998ish – thus the wheel of history turns: the graphics get better but the dried-out eyes and RTS claw-hand remains the same).

But much of that work was interrupted by a massive outage at BlackBerry – the Ops maestros been talking to RIM, our mobile carriers, our customers, and checking whether our test and support devices are working properly. Since the BlackBerry is the only mobile data platform CAPS-approved for to Restricted in the UK, it will have affected a lot of police forces and government organisations. It was a quite a pain, and an important reminder to us of the basics: minimise your single points of failure, and communicate bad news quickly and clearly.

Brad and Emma have been meeting the delivery teams at two large customers to work through several security and infrastructure projects over the next few months. There are multiple organisations involved, so they are juggling scope, budgets, timescales, procurement process and compliance needs. Emma and Jez have been travelling between customers on training, support and account management missions, and getting ready for the software release.

Mark and Alex have been perma-road-tripping around the country talking to the many people in UK policing that we hope to win as customers. We’ve been working on how to package the product so that it can be sold to smaller groups while delivering better return on investment for the customer – it’s very encouraging that there’s a lot of interest. Policing is experiencing seismic change at the moment – budgets are being cut, national bodies are being re-organised (NCA, NPIA, Soca all affected), so we need to stay on the move, keep talking to people.

I’ve been thrashing lots of spreadsheets and looking at budgets. Dawn is locking down a lot of accounting details and managing the building work at our new office. Tyra has just returned from maternity leave – it’s good to have her back. She, Dawn and I are working out how we’ll work together to cover accounting, purchase and sales ledger, HR, payroll, office admin and a few big projects. We’re considering running finance and admin as weekly scrum sprints.

And that’s a flavour of our week 400.

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Weeks 1-399 and 401+

In 2004, we formed the company around a single criminal justice project, which grew considerably, added a mobile dimension, and ran successfully for seven years. Since 2004 then we’ve got a lot done. We focused on mobile and security. We switched some years ago from an offshore development team to a UK-based one that’s orders of magnitude stronger. We’ve built and delivered several mobile/backend products for companies and police forces. We’ve developed our own product on BlackBerry and wrapped infrastructure and ops/support services around it. (Sometimes the consulting work comes back around. If you deliver well with a product that’s wrapped in a service, then customers might ask you to perform bespoke R&D projects for them for speed – we have a small number of these projects at the moment. They may also ask you to wrap your service around other third-party products.) We’ve grown that talented team.

We want Mobbu to provide the best real-time, security-accredited mobile software products and services to the security market. The aim is building something of national importance, something that matters to our customers and particularly the effectiveness and safety of their people, something that we can tell our (security-cleared, ha ha) grand-children about. There’s lots of work to do: building products, delivering support services, doing deals, growing the team, constantly improving.

Doing this is never easy, and we’re very fortunate to have a brilliant team of development, testing, ops, training, account management, sales and finance people, and without whose skill, effort and passion we’ll fail. It’s a privilege to work with Jez, Mark, Emma, Rob, Matt, Adam, Áine, Tom, Will, Stace, Tyra, Dawn, Brad and Alex on this.

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