One of our clients provides custom-built applications for field service teams across Australia’s mining sector. Their flagship application, originally developed in Xamarin, was rebuilt in .NET MAUI. A critical release for a key client was approaching, and the date had already slipped more than once.
Their development team was small and punching well above their weight, however getting new developers means training them up in a new complex system which was not an option given the deadline. To make matters worse, the team were running into hardware API problems, such as camera and sync failures. All of this made the app unreliable in the field, and limited logging meant these problems were nearly impossible to reproduce consistently. Additionally, their back-end platform was beginning to buckle under load, and performance bottlenecks needed to be addressed. Some early design choices were impacting their critical workflows and required immediate attention.
SSW began with a structured technical audit, conducted by Gert Marx and Ben Neoh, to get a clear picture of the application and map the delivery risks that had built across the environment. The audit found that testing coverage was the biggest gap. There were too many unknowns for the team to feel confident about what was release-ready, and that uncertainty was driving the unpredictability more than any single technical issue.
From there, SSW worked through the issues methodically. Camera crashes and sync failures were resolved, addressing the most disruptive problems affecting field users. Image storage was migrated from SQL Server to Azure Blob Storage, reducing database load and improving overall performance. Testing coverage was lifted so that breaking changes could be caught before reaching production, and logging was improved to make future issues easier to trace and diagnose.
The major release was delivered on time. The application was more stable and performant than it had been at any point previously.
For field workers using the app day to day, the improvement was clear. Photo capture and audit navigation, which had been sources of crashes and frustration, worked reliably. The migration of large data files from SQL to Azure Blob Storage also put the architecture on a more scalable footing, with the separate data stores able to efficiently handle what they were designed for. Crucially, the mobile app performed reliably when being used in remote areas, giving users peace of mind when they really needed it.
“SSW have been our sidekick for many years, so when our latest major project started experiencing problems, we were happy to be able to reach out to them for support. We were experiencing a range of problems which were pushing release dates back and causing strain on the team. SSW carried out an audit on the project which helped to identify a variety of contributing factors, from complicated technical challenges down to basic process issues. The outcome of the audit helped us to shape the support that we received from SSW by allocating the people with the right skills at the right time.
Partnering with SSW over so many years has meant that we did not need to recruit and train a range of technical staff with a diverse skillset. SSW had the right people with knowlesdge of our business who were able to hit the ground running and deliver results from day 1."