CASE: Full-cycle development of IT platform in Real Estate

Challenge

EasyBusy Sàrl (www.easybusy.ch) is a start-up company that “digitalizes” traditional methods of buying/selling property in Switzerland. The main aim of the startup is to provide a technology that enables property transactions, erasing the need for broker involvement and associated commission fees.

The challenge was around the development of a Do-It-Yourself solution to provide smart, AI-based assistance to both sellers and buyers of real-estate property, that is tailored to the regulations of Switzerland, organized in 5 simple steps:

• Registration
• Plan on selling a property
• Market the property
• Handle negotiations
• Closing a deal

Solution

As a solution, we suggested developing a modern, easy-to-use, multi-language web platform with a cross-browser and adaptive interface, that makes it work on both web and mobile.
Also, we suggested to split the project into phases and start from an MVP, to speed it up to the market.

Edgica provided full-cycle software development services. We started from the concept elaboration, discussions, workshops, together with the client representatives. As a result, in 3 weeks we had a full understanding of the business process, requirements, and the scope to be developed.

One of the critical issues was to scope the MVP: it was too big. On the other side, the client insisted to cover the complete business process from the right beginning. After discussions, our experts helped to reduce the scope of the MVP twice and still cover the whole business process: posting an ad, market it, negotiate, and closing the deal.

Then we continued to the UI/UX design. We involved one of our UX/UI designers, who used tools like Adobe XD. After several iterations, the basics of the UX/UI design was approved, and we started the software development iterations.

It was decided to stay with a single-page app based on Angular with REST API based on Python/Django. We had several iterations using agile techniques. The client reps were involved in the process, communicated with the team members. Also, we had several 2-day workshops on our premises in Kyiv, with the client and our team members participation. That was an important idea to get closer to the expectations and to keep everyone on the same page. The development and most of the communication was done remotely though, using Skype calls, Google docs, Github, and JIRA.

During the iterations of the MVP, the business process and the backlog was revised three times. That helped to stay closer to the expectations.

The platform has been deployed in the Swiss-based cloud provider with the usage of some of the AWS cloud services. Our DevOps took care of both deployment and support using Docker, Dockerhub, other tools.

After the MVP, we had more phases of the project, several versions delivered during more than a year, with further maintenance and support.

Technology
Python, Django, PostgreSQL, Angular 2, HTML5/CSS3, RabbitMQ, Celery, Amazon AWS, Web, Mobile, PDF, Docker, Git