Case Study

This project emerged in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the following needs arose:

• For public safety reasons, limit the access of large crowds to the same store.
• Allow for counting the number of people visiting the stores. With that information, stores can know which are the busiest times and how to boost their business.
• Present various statistical information that allows stores to define marketing strategies, such as:
  
  • Which store has the most visitors?
  • What are the days in which a particular store has the highest number of visitors?
  • What is the most visited area of the store?
  • What age groups visit the store?

The solution involved the development of 4 major components with well-defined purposes:

• SOAP: a service that allows capturing the data from the stores' sensors in real time. With the sensor data it is possible to know how many people entered/exited the stores, as well as other data;
• REST API: a server that connects to the SOAP service in order to save the sensor data in the database;
• Dashboard: a counting panel that allows you to check how many people entered and exited a given store. In practical terms, this dashboard would be in front of the store;
• Customer application: a web application that allows access to the application's settings and various dashboards. This is where clients can configure stores, clients, panels, sensors, and have access to a set of useful information for the business analysis of the store itself.

A combination of several Agile methodologies was used. It involved the values of Scrum and XP.