About Smile Open Source Solutions

With daring and beautiful projects, add a pinch of visionary culture, a good dose of innovation, sprinkle everything with a multidisciplinary technical expertise and you get Smile, the European leader in integration and outsourcing open source solutions. They offer their customers a flexibility to go along with the cooperation model that best meets their aims, resources, and timeline.

Services

Mobile App Development IoT App Development UI-UX Design E-commerce Development Cloud Solutions

Smile Open Source Solutions Reviews

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Test automation suite that gives our team confidence to deploy on a Friday

Ethan Beauchamp / VP of Product - Rideau Tech Solutions
Verified
Jun 15, 2025

Project summary: Claims fraud detection had been rule-based for years and we were losing ground to more sophisticated patterns — we needed a machine learning model built on our own historical data.

I am a demanding client. I have a technical background, I review code, and I have high standards for documentation and testing. This team met all of those expectations without ever seeming defensive about scrutiny. Peer code reviews were welcomed, unit test coverage was genuine rather than performative, and the API documentation was thorough enough that our own developers integrated against it without a single clarification call. That level of craft is what I look for and rarely find.

PROS

Domain knowledge that went beyond generic expertise into our specific industry, willingness to push back constructively, automated test coverage that gave us deployment confidence

CONS

Time zone difference required some adjustment to our internal communication habits but the team managed the overlap window efficiently and it never affected momentum

5.0
Overall
5.0
Quality
5.0
Schedule
5.0
Cost
5.0
Communication
Project TypeQuality Assurance & Testing
IndustryInsurance
Project Cost$150,000 to $499,999
DurationDec 2024 – Aug 2025

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
As VP of Product at Rideau Tech Solutions, I manage a cross-functional technology team serving our Insurance clients from Toronto, Canada. We are a commercially focused organisation and every technology decision we make is evaluated against a clear business case. We needed a partner who understood that context, not just the technical brief.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our Insurance regulatory environment had changed and the compliance timeline was non-negotiable. We needed to rebuild specific components of our system to meet the new requirements and our internal team was already fully committed to the core product roadmap. Bringing in a specialist Quality Assurance & Testing partner was the only realistic path.
What services did the company provide for your project?
End-to-end Quality Assurance & Testing delivery with a particular emphasis on the integration layer that connected the new build to our existing Insurance infrastructure. They also provided UI/UX input that was not in the original scope but which they offered proactively because they could see it would affect adoption. That kind of initiative was characteristic of how they approached the whole engagement.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
A direct referral from a peer who had used them for a comparable Quality Assurance & Testing engagement in the Insurance space. That peer's experience had been excellent and their project profile was similar enough to ours that the recommendation carried real weight. Everything we found during our own evaluation reinforced that this was the right decision.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Thorough and precise. They translated our business language into technical requirements without losing the intent, which is a skill that sounds straightforward but frequently goes wrong. Every user story they wrote was reviewed against the original business objective before it entered the sprint and the acceptance criteria were specific enough to remove subjectivity from QA.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Professional and efficient. We used a shared project management tool that gave our stakeholders visibility without requiring them to attend every meeting. The project manager had a clear escalation path and used it appropriately. The only time I needed to intervene directly was when I chose to, not because something had been missed.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
The project landed on the agreed delivery date and within the approved budget. We did add scope during the engagement — two features that became apparent as essential during user testing — and those were quoted, approved, and delivered without affecting the original scope timeline. That kind of clean change management is not something you can take for granted.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The ROI case we presented to our board assumed a payback period of eighteen months. Based on current trajectory we will hit that in under a year. The efficiency gains in our Insurance operations have been more significant than the model projected, partly because the quality of the data coming out of the new system is enabling decisions we could not make before.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their ability to hold the business objective in mind alongside the technical task. I have worked with technically excellent agencies who lost the thread of what we were actually trying to achieve. This team never did. Every architectural decision, every trade-off conversation, every prioritisation discussion was anchored to the outcome we had agreed at the start.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Unreservedly. We are in active conversation about the next phase of work and I expect this to become a multi-year partnership. For any organisation in the Insurance space looking for a Quality Assurance & Testing partner who combines technical rigour with genuine commercial awareness, I would put this team at the top of the shortlist.

Polished iOS and Android delivery that hit every milestone without drama

Harry Drummond / IT Programme Director - Northgate Insurance Group
Verified
Jan 29, 2023

Project summary: Post-pandemic recovery meant rebuilding our booking infrastructure from scratch with a focus on flexibility, cancellation handling, and real-time inventory across multiple GDS providers.

Twelve weeks from kickoff to live production deployment for a project of this complexity. I would not have believed that was achievable if I had not watched them do it. The velocity came from genuine engineering discipline — clear requirements, short feedback loops, automated testing, and a team that communicated internally without the overhead that slows most agencies down. The product has been live for four months with no critical bugs and one minor patch. We are already in scoping conversations for phase two.

PROS

Domain knowledge that went beyond generic expertise into our specific industry, willingness to push back constructively, automated test coverage that gave us deployment confidence

CONS

Time zone difference required some adjustment to our internal communication habits but the team managed the overlap window efficiently and it never affected momentum

5.0
Overall
5.0
Quality
5.0
Schedule
5.0
Cost
5.0
Communication
Project TypeMobile App Development
IndustryTravel & Hospitality
Project Cost$10,000 to $49,999
DurationNov 2024 – Mar 2025

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Northgate Insurance Group operates across the Travel & Hospitality sector with offices in Birmingham, UK. In my capacity as IT Programme Director I oversee both the strategic and operational technology agenda. We are a growth-stage business that needed a development partner capable of scaling with us rather than constraining us.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our existing Mobile App Development capability had accumulated years of technical debt that was slowing every new feature to a crawl. Incident frequency was rising, developer confidence was falling, and we knew a rebuild was overdue. We needed a partner with the depth to do it properly rather than apply another layer of patches.
What services did the company provide for your project?
End-to-end Mobile App Development delivery with a particular emphasis on the integration layer that connected the new build to our existing Travel & Hospitality infrastructure. They also provided UI/UX input that was not in the original scope but which they offered proactively because they could see it would affect adoption. That kind of initiative was characteristic of how they approached the whole engagement.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
Honestly, the quality of the questions they asked during the briefing process set them apart. Most vendors listen to the brief and come back with a solution to exactly what you described. This team came back with a solution to what we actually needed, which turned out to be somewhat different. That kind of consultative instinct is what we were looking for.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Better than we did at the start, which sounds like an exaggeration but is genuinely accurate. The discovery workshop they ran surfaced assumptions we had not examined and contradictions in our requirements that would have caused real problems mid-development. The functional specification they produced was the clearest articulation of our product that we had seen written down.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Communication was handled primarily asynchronously given the time zone difference between Birmingham, UK and the team's base, but it was managed so well that the gap rarely felt like a constraint. Written updates were clear and timely, escalations were handled promptly, and we never had to chase for a status update. The cadence was exactly right — enough to feel informed, not so much that it created overhead.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
The project landed on the agreed delivery date and within the approved budget. We did add scope during the engagement — two features that became apparent as essential during user testing — and those were quoted, approved, and delivered without affecting the original scope timeline. That kind of clean change management is not something you can take for granted.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Hard to isolate precisely because several factors changed simultaneously, but the data we can attribute directly to the new Mobile App Development platform shows a meaningful improvement in the metrics that matter to our Travel & Hospitality business. Our account managers report that the new capability is coming up positively in client conversations, which was one of the strategic objectives we started with.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The continuity of the team. The engineers who scoped the work were the engineers who built it. That sounds like it should be standard practice but in my experience it often is not. The institutional knowledge that comes from that continuity pays dividends at every stage, particularly when you are dealing with a complex Travel & Hospitality domain where context takes time to build.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Absolutely. I would recommend them with a specific note that the quality of the discovery process is where the value starts. Clients who invest properly in that phase will get the most out of the engagement. We made that investment and the returns are evident in the quality of what was delivered.

Company Info

Founded 1991
Employees 1000+
Hourly Rate $100 - $149
Client Rating 5.0/5 (2 reviews)

Rating Breakdown

Quality
5.0
Schedule
5.0
Cost
5.0
Communication
5.0