The Challenge
Market research, performed by ‘Sporza', indicated a considerable demand for specialized sport-related mobile apps. Since football is Belgium's number one sport, a football app would be developed first.
Sporza opted for a 'Lean Startup' approach where an MVP (minimum viable product) should be developed first, containing only the most important functionalities, such as:
- Competition calendar
- Rankings
- Favorite team choice
- Push notifications for match events
Our Solution
Together with VRT, we first helped to define the MVP. Our strategic UX experts used techniques such as “buy a feature” and in depth interviews to capture the needs and expectations of the future users. These were translated into wireframes and designs for the Sporza Voetbalapp and used as input for development.
The app was developed by two dedicated mobile development teams (iOS & Android), both consisting of a mix of AppFoundry and VRT in-house expertise.
Thanks to the experience within these teams and a top-notch mobile software factory, VRT’s ‘Digital Production Centre’ was able to release the first version of the Sporza Voetbalapp for both iOS & Android in a 6 month development period.
The project was managed using a Kanban approach, in close collaboration with the Sporza staff.
A strong focus was put on Test Driven Development (continuous integration, automatic testing) and Quality Assurance (dedicated QA testers), resulting in 99,5% crash-freeapps.
After noticing the initial success of the first version, Sporza decided to continue adding new features to the app. New versions are released every time such a feature is developed and tested (‘continuous release‘). In consecutive short release cycles the app gained match detail information, video, comments, match events, general football news & videos, etc.
Especially for the ‘2016 UEFA European Championship‘ a themed version was released, containing additional features such as live-streaming, game lineup & statistics.
Technical Details
- Functional Reactive Programming
- Test Driven Development
- Continuous Delivery
- iOS frameworks: Reliant dependency injection, Reactive Cocoa, AFNetworking, JWPlayer, …
- Android frameworks: RXJava, Retrofit, Dagger, Picasso, Butterknife, JWPlayer, …
- Integration with a mobile middleware layer on top of a sports database
The Result
The result is a compelling interactive total experience for iOS and Android football fans, with a continuously growing feature set.
At the time of writing (august 2016) the app was still 99,5% crash-free after 290.000 app installs!
More info at sporza.be.
