Daif Platform - One of the biggest 2018's challenges achieved

During the first three days of August 2018, I have participated in the Hajj Hackathon 2018 with a team working on an idea called Barq, a bilingual interpretation service that helps doctors or physicians to provide a better medical experience for pilgrims and patients visiting the hospitals and emergency clinics during the period of the Hajj.

The main value proposition of such idea was to select the best translator/interpreter that could understand the history of the patient, his/her complains and transfer such info from/to the direct physician in the clinic.

Although, Barq was nominated as one of the best 10 ideas that will be presented in the final stage, unfortunately our idea was not selected to win any of the first three prizes.

In that day, despite having a broken heart, I remember my inner voice was shouting at me "Now it's the time to focus in your real Hajj Hackathon/Challenge, now it is all about Daif"

What is Daif?

Daif is the main technical platform for The Saudi General Car Syndicate - Naqaba that manages, schedules and tracks about ~ 17000 buses which serve and regiment more than 2 million pilgrims during the Hajj.

Daif is aligned with the Saudi 2030 Vision under the supervision of the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah to automate the process of regimenting pilgrims during the whole Hajj and Umarh period.

Why Daif?

Serving the pilgrims is an ultimate honor for anyone, especially being a muslim, from the early call of Prophet Ibrahim (peace be upon him):

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till Our Prophet Mohamed (peace be upon him), performed the first Hajj in Islam, and asked every muslim to perform the hajj if he could so, and He (peace be upon him) defined its steps and timing for its rituals

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What does Daif do?

Daif is the gateway for a better Hajj experience, through optimizing the transportation operations provided to the pilgrims provided by the Saudi General Car Syndicate - Naqaba team.

If you think about only one feature like "reporting Buses' SOS and incidence", It helps to shorten the time needed to have a fix or provide an alternative bus carrying out the pilgrims to their destination compared to the traditional way of reporting the incidents, that was taking traditionally hours!.

Daif, The challenges?

We have received the green light to start the development by mid of May while the actual hajj date was about the mid of August 2018, this obliges a tight schedule over the project delivery, and for sure the harder question was how to allocate the required resources just on spot to start.

This is the first time which Daif have to cover a complete cycle for the General Car Syndicate - Naqaba's operations on-field.

The nature of the Hajj that it is once a year which starts and ends within 10 days, and there is no way to simulate the number of orders, neither the bus movement happening before the Hajj to test the whole platform.

Daif, The technical challenges?

In a period of three months to deliver such project, with a complete risk analysis, we start prioritizing the feature list required based on the importance to the client, operations workflow, and how it would facilitate the development process between the team members.

Elasticity to adapt the "change of requirements"

Agile it!

We decide to go with 1 Week - Scrum sprint, to be more fixability for the change requests, and to measure our speed of development on the new project, then during the testing and Hajj simulation phase we decide to switch for Kanban sprints as it turned out being a priority queue of tasks/goals.

Ensure the quality cycles within the sprint

Just Automate it, We decide to go for continuous integration by using fastlane for app deployment to maintain fast QA cycles, in addition to peer code reviews between the team members to maintain higher code quality and share a common knowledge about developed feature between team members.

Revamping the UI

It was required to totally enhance the UX/UI of the applications, and It was almost 8 Rules within published three apps on the store, this is just one screen, .. can you feel it?

FROM

TO

Code Architecture

We have to go through a lot of refactoring especially in the level of code architecture, and database handling.

UML and Documentation

We have covered the code classes via JavaDoc, and implemented different UML diagrams for better describing the code components and main workflows, like Activity Diagrams, Sequence Diagrams, ..etc.

What I need to Say?

Thank you for anyone who had a contribution in make Daif comes true, JAK. It was a really tough challenge that we AHL had achieved during 2018.

All what I mentioned here, was a result of a real hard-work done by all team members that I really appreciate their commitment and work fulfillment.

Being the "Technical Team Lead" of such a project, It was not an easy task at all. We all spent days and nights working together, may be without sleeping, just to succeed not only in the app development but also in automating the operations and facilitating the Hajj Journey to all pilgrims in the endpoint.

I hope that through 2019, it goes better and better through its operations, and always to carry easy life for all pilgrims and Hajj operators in the next Year, ..

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