Commercial grade IoT solution rebuilt in record time

When the client engaged us, he didn't have visibility into all the underlying issues. He only saw the symptoms, but the root causes were not clear.

Assessment: 

We first engaged the existing vendor delivery team to understand why the project is falling behind. A few days were spent engaging the vendor resources, and one of the main issues became clear. The team didn't have the required seniority and experience to deliver on a large scale IoT project.

Project audit:

Our second step was to conduct a full project audit, reviewing the hardware designs, schematics, final PCBs, and the software deliverables involved. Upon inspection it became clear that critical technical decisions were differed to junior team members. The client was provided with an audit report that highlighted critical issues.

• Hardware design flaws were identified (ex. poor noise filtering)
• Firmware design flaws were identified. Ex.  firmware was implemented using 3 different technologies, with multiple processes, with poor inter-process communication.
• Architectural and implementation flaws were idenfitied. The vendor went down the path of implementing their own in-house fleet management and cloud communication, instead of relying on industry standards such as MQTT, and using AWS IoT Cloud for Fleet Management and Communication capabilities.

Remediation Plan:

• Our last step was to propose a plan of action. We clearly identified which parts of the system and implementation were usable, and which parts needed to be rewritten, and provided the client with a proposal for both a quick fix to meet his delivery timelines, as well as a longer term roadmap.
• Based on the findings and action plan, the client decided to terminate the vendor , and hand-over the project to BitLab for implementing the remediation plan.
• The vendor team pushed back, and at times withheld information and source code. However using our reverse engineering practices, we clearly identified the information and source code gaps that were missing, and through negotiations with vendor managed to free-up the necessary artifacts for the team to execute.