About Ivoclar
Ivoclar is an international dental company with a comprehensive product and system range for dentists and dental technicians. Their HQ is located in Liechtenstein.
Through the past 100 years they have been leading in the development of a long line of dental equipment. The newest project is two new machines for dental restoration: a milling machine and an oven.
Ivoclar had decided that they wanted to migrate to Qt and use Linux instead of an old system for these two machines, and quickly realised they needed additional manpower to succeed. The Qt Company were consulted, and they chose their trusted and long-time partner Viking Software to help with the project.
Training
As the Ivoclar team was not used to working in Qt, the first order of business for Viking Software to give a crash course on Qt. We tasked one of our developers with a lot of experience in teaching to train the team. He then spent the first two weeks of the project going through everything the team needed to know about working in Qt. The benefit for Ivoclar of using their development provider for training was naturally to have the teacher on the team afterwards for further training and assistance.
Touch screens
Although the team had a lot of existing software to build the embedded touch screen upon, there was still a lot of work to be done to go from “Hello World” to an embedded computer that easily controls all of the many different controls and functions of the dental machines. Another highly trained developer joined the team along with the teacher, and began work on the infrastructure and architecture of the complex machines.
When work began on the embedded software, the developers were split into two groups: One working on UI and the other more focused on business logic. The Viking Software developers were placed on one team each, with remote pair programming taking most of their working hours. This worked great for knowledge sharing, and for our developers to support and train the Ivoclar team, who were still fairly green in developing in Qt.
A great match
As a small company, it is a very big deal for us to be a trusted partner of The Qt Company. When they asked us to help with this project, we were therefore very happy to make arrangements to make sure we had the developers Ivoclar needed.
It's really motivating to work on a project where you know it's going to benefit a lot of people. I love working with embedded computers, and the Ivoclar machines are incredibly well-designed and innovative.
The two developers we have chosen for the project were a perfect match for several reasons: Both have 15+ years of experience working with Qt; One has been teaching programming for many years, and were perfectly suited to hold the workshop; The other has worked on so many projects like this before, he could easily take charge from day one. It was also a plus for the German speaking company that he speaks natively German.
*Ivoclar quote*