Equal Experts was first engaged by Camelot back in 2013, in an engagement that saw us taking on responsibility for the overall development plan and delivery of its new web platform (you can read the case study for that project elsewhere).

With our credentials well established there, we were glad to collaborate with the organisation once again in January 2017, when Camelot Global engaged us to work with its in-house mobile team.

Running lotteries is an undertaking where bugs in software are not just an inconvenience – they potentially have far reaching implications for both business and players. With this in mind, Camelot Global came to Equal Experts to apply our rigour and engineering expertise to its mobile operations (among a number of other business-critical projects).

Establishing best practice

Following a short period of inception, during which our team worked alongside Camelot’s existing mobile team to identify a number of critical goals, we started work on an ongoing engagement.

While this work is predominantly taking place within the mobile space – where mature delivery practices are not always as embedded as in more longstanding programmes of work – bringing proven delivery practices to bear is very much a typical engagement for us.

Working side-by-side with the in-house team, our goals are to:

• Build confidence and trust between product and mobile development. By establishing a repeatable path to production and introducing proven delivery practices, we are able to introduce new features more frequently and reliably. In doing so, the mobile team is increasingly seen as a core partner within the overall delivery.
• Minimise business risk. We have laid the groundwork to strengthen technical disciplines such as Test Driven Development, helping the team to embed them for the long-term. We’ve also increased the use of automation, reducing the opportunity for error and increasing our ability to spot and correct any bugs that do occur. The result is a robust and sustainable pipeline for the ongoing and timely delivery of working software.

Combining the above with the adoption of short feedback loops, thereby providing stakeholders with regular opportunities to see and steer our progress, we’re also ensuring that we don’t just ‘build it right’ – we’re building the right thing.

Together, we’ve introduced the working and coding practices that are raising the bar within Camelot Global, and fostering a burgeoning culture of responsibility, trust and discipline. In turn, the business is anticipating the emergence of greater revenue opportunities in mobile – via a first class app experience that takes full advantage of features like Touch ID and mobile payments.