Drone Base
Drone software development
Team
3 Full-stack developers
2 QA Engineers
Timeline
Since 2018
Location
Santa Monica, CA
Industry
Drone Industry
Noticeable Results
Drone Base is a professional provider of aerial images and videos for companies from multiple industries including Real Estate, Insurance, Property Management, etc.
Finalists of TIMMY 2019 Awards
50%
Admin dashboard 50% speed improvement
150%
150% development speed growth
Key features
Client analytics solution
ESRI integration
Orthomosaic Stitching
Direct Admin Support
Style Guide
Challenge
Drone Base is a successful and rapid growth startup with its HQ located in LA. They realized that to be at the top of the industry and compete with other companies, they have to implement new features fast and regularly.
Their main problem was the performance of their internal development team since it was not big enough to complete the huge backlog of tasks needed to be done. At this moment, the founders of Drone Base came to Rubyroid Labs.
Solution
When Rubyroid Labs team started to work on the project, we had some communication issues because of the time difference. However, within a short time the development teams got used to each other and found the perfect solution for business hours and working together.
In collaboration with the Drone Base development team and under the management of their CTO, our developers were provided with a number of features in the product pipeline and started the drone control application development.
Orthomosaic Stitching
We work with the system that passes images from drone pilots to the customers. In addition, we offer post-processing of that images - we glue them into a panorama, or compose them into an orthomosaic image. Orthomosaic image means making a picture that can be superimposed on the map.
Client Analytics Page
We developed the customer personal page, where they can see their orders analytics: the total number of orders, mission completion time, statistics on the service packages used, etc. To implement this functionality, we used ElasticSearch to build sample and aggregating functions. On the front-end part, we used the highchart.io library.
Organization Structure
Initially, each customer could create orders and work only within the personal instance. Our team added the structure of organizations and corporate instances. Now, customers who are in one organization get access to custom packages, and an owner of the organization has access to the orders of all customers in this organization, sees statistics and information of all employees.
Direct Admin Support
In case one of our customers gets any questions or problems regarding the work process in the system, it’s possible to create a temporary private session (10 mins) with the administrator from the Drone Base. Admins are logging in via the current user (using the authentication and security token), and able to see the problem first hand. This helps provide support in a much more effective way.
ESRI Integration
We created an integration of Drone Base with ESRI company (ArcGIS system). Now users can see the new “Integrations” menu on the dashboard, where they can move over the native ArcGIS’s 2-factor authentication. We create the independent layer on customer’s map, which shows the photos for the particular orders. As a result, a user receives an email with a direct link to the updated layers.
Style Guide
The company did not have a common style guide, so we sometimes had to re-create front-end elements in order to match them with the updated design. In collaboration with our in-house UI/UX designer, we created a style guide that included all common elements of the website and recommendations on how to use them. Using this document, we have brought drone app development processes in a single style and cleaned up the project from legacy artifacts.
Technology
Communication
This is the long-term planning project. At the beginning of the year, there is a meeting with the company executives, where they talk about the goals of the project for a year, and the drone software development team can do some high-level estimates.
Each quarter we also have a meeting where we discuss and estimate tasks in details. The development process is split into 2-week sprints. We have daily stand-ups with the team where we discuss progress, plans, and questions. At the end of each sprint, we have a detailed demo session with the operational management of the Drone Base.
Task tracking: Jira, Redmine
Calls: Google Hangouts
Main communication: Slack
Meetings time: 10am PST
Results
Drone Base is the ongoing drone software project, where Rubyroid Labs team has been working for several years now. We constantly improve existing functionality, add extra features and maintain the legacy code. Four times a year we have clean-up sprints, where we close all the technical debts (perform refactoring, make some staff that will not bring a benefit from the business side, but will be useful for the development process). Thanks to that, the client always has a clean, secure and maintainable code.
Our team is proud to be a part of this project, and we predict a long and stable partnership with the Drone Base team. This year, Drone Base was a finalist of TIMMY 2019 Awards as one of the best Tech in Motion startups in Los Angeles.
ResultsHow It Looks
Hear from the Customer
Tomas Becklin
CTO Drone Base, CA
The most impressive factor about Rubyroid Labs has been how excited the team is to work with us. They even visited us for two weeks in our HQ. Their enthusiasm has been much appreciated as Rubyroid Labs has helped us build the company.