How Mido Lotto quadrupled its product organization and raised its quality bar.
Mido Lotto brought us in for three months to add five people; within two it extended the engagement to a year and handed us Android development and quality assurance outright.
Client: Mido Lotto, San Francisco, a lottery-as-a-service platform.
Industry: gaming and lottery technology.
Engagement: dedicated teams for Android and quality assurance, with staff augmentation for iOS and backend.
Mido Lotto is a San Francisco technology company building a lottery-as-a-service platform: iOS and Android applications for players to buy tickets, check winning numbers and collect winnings, and the cloud database, API and messaging services behind them, sold both direct to consumers and to government agencies that want to digitize their lotteries. It was seed funded by SherpaVentures and other angel investors.
When we met, the product was eighteen months in and heading for its first production release. The server was 80 percent complete and the iOS application 90 percent; Android and web had only just started, with independent contractors in Eastern Europe who did not work well as a team and did not take ownership of the product, so quality suffered. The Android application had also been built without persistent storage: every launch downloaded everything again, which meant latency, data use, battery drain and nothing working offline.
Like most startups, Mido Lotto wanted to move faster at lower cost, and like most startups it found an outsourcing partner appealing financially and daunting operationally. The product owner and scrum master roles were being carried by overcommitted executives, so stories were estimated on developer tasks alone, had no definition of done, and the backlog held only the next sprint, with no view of the release burndown. Finding the right partner mattered for product-market fit, for the user base and for the Series A.
Before and after
What changed.
Three objectives at the start: port iOS to Android, raise product quality, and improve product planning and agile execution. Here is where each one landed.
What was running before.
Android started late, with contractors who did not work as a team or own the result.
A thin-client Android app with no persistent storage or sync.
Test cases in spreadsheets, no quality assurance function, defects found late.
Stories estimated without quality tasks and without a definition of done; a backlog one sprint deep.
What runs now.
A CodeStringers Android team with full responsibility for the application, rebuilt on a persistent storage and sync framework.
A quality assurance function with a test case management system and an automation framework, one engineer inside every development team.
Three-week sprints, estimates against a firm definition of done, and a release plan for alpha, beta and commercial launch.
A three-month trial extended to twelve months after two, and full ownership of Android and quality assurance.
The work
What we delivered.
Mido Lotto engaged us for three months to add five development and quality assurance people as an extension of its internal teams. After two months it extended the relationship to twelve, and over time handed us full responsibility for Android development and for quality assurance. In all, our people doubled the company’s size and quadrupled its product development organization, working as a seamless extension of its staff.
Android, to parity with iOS.
The team reviewed the inherited code, spent two sprints refactoring it onto a persistent storage and sync framework, then built the features that brought Android level with iOS before the commercial launch.
A quality assurance function.
A surrogate quality assurance manager, one engineer each inside the iOS, Android and web Scrum teams, and one on test automation; a test case management system replaced the spreadsheets within the first three months.
Better Scrum execution.
Release and sprint planning, story definition and estimation with quality built in, and a new issue-tracking and agile management tool with a workflow the whole company now runs on.
Alongside the two teams we provided iOS developers, a requirements analyst for user stories and use cases, and a project manager and scrum master for Android. Technologies: Java, Swift and Amazon Web Services.
In the client’s words
“Tangibly, CodeStringers provided Mido Lotto with a team of software development, quality assurance, requirements analysis, and project management personnel at a lower cost than internal resources. Intangibly, CodeStringers acted as a seamless extension of our company and provided deep agile development methodology expertise that improved our entire organization’s productivity and efficiency. CodeStringers raised the bar for our company holistically.”
Darryl WeatherspoonVice President of Engineering, Mido Lotto.
“The CodeStringers team easily rivals the quality of any Silicon Valley software engineering organization. Working with CodeStringers, our software quality improved, our development velocity increased, and our financial runway extended.”
Greg OvalleChief Executive Officer, Mido Lotto.
By the numbers
The outcome.
Within the first three months the quality assurance team had replaced the spreadsheets and expanded the test suite; the engagement grew from there.
350%
More test cases.
The automation framework and tools expanded the list of test cases by 350 percent, each with step-by-step instructions and expected results.
7%
Of test cases automated per sprint.
One engineer automates seven percent of the total test cases every sprint while dedicated testers cover each development project.
4x
The product development organization.
Our people doubled the size of the company and quadrupled its product development organization; a three-month engagement became twelve.
The numbers are Mido Lotto’s, as the case study on the previous site reported them.
The shift
What this work looks like today.
A seamless extension of the client’s team is still how we work; what the team builds has changed.
Business systems are moving from applications that record and route to agentic surfaces that reason and act, a paradigm shift we are driving. The quality function, the definition of done and the release plan you read about here are built into every managed solution we run: the agents do the regression, the routine checks and the reporting, and a person approves what matters.
We are not the right answer if you want seats filled and nothing more: every team on this page carried its own product, quality and project people, and the planning gates came with it. Services by the estimate are available today; the long-term focus is the managed solutions.
How we start
Start with the problem, not the proposal.
Every engagement on this page began with a conversation about what was slowing the business down. Tell us yours and we will say, in plain terms, whether we are the right answer, what it would take and what we would measure.
