Making Software development a smooth process.

What makes App development a success

All application development is painful. Come to think of it any consultation from a vendor company can go wrong. That’s the reason why you ask the vendor company to give details about what to expect at the end of the consultation. The work inherently has anticipation, doubt and a bit of culture difference. The so called client consultant relationship.

I’m not talking about the application success in this post. There are a lot more factors effecting that outcome in addition a good developer. Of course with a wrong one, you are stuffed!

Successful Development?

The one where you are not aggravated, where you don’t doubt time and again if you have the right company working for you. You should be sure that the company has done the best work anyone can. Where you sail through the development as smooth as possible. Once the development is over, application success or failure, you still like him enough to return a call or reply to his email.

As far as I can tell there are only about a couple of things than can make a development successful.

Specifications

This is what we go by. This is how we communicate what needs to be built and how. I spend a good amount of time getting it right before the development and having my team go over it during.

Be sure to your specs through with a good amount of detail and have any changes updated to that document. The document must be write accessible to both parties. Google docs works in the absence of a project management system.

You should also get a schedule of development and delivery. This helps your app be on time.

Communication

This one’s a no brainier. I don’t need to tell you about this. There are infinitely many number of sites that put communication as the prime factor for success in any given situation. Hmm.. but people still don’t seem to get it. There are just as many horror stories about consultation gone bad.

I send out daily digests to my clients, give sitrep on milestones and deadlines and heads up on incoming problems. I also drag my client in to meeting at least a couple of time a week. Believe me, there would be enough reasons to do so.

If there is no default line of communication or if you are not hearing from your developer, Run – if you can. If you can’t try talking your guy in to being responsive.

Easy to say, quite a task to get in to the habit.

March 1, 2017 Satwik Idea To App, Management No comments yet

Agile Development

As you have read by now, the usual process of software development involves making detailed plans about whats going to be built and when. And once the ground work to develop the system is done, we’ll be ready to start developing more advanced features.

The specifications gives us a list of things to do and we proceed to complete them in the order of implementation or urgency mentioned by the client.

But Plans Change..

and surely for the better. This only means that you are thinking about the app and trying to make it better. You may have realized a feature developed and published faster is in your interest or your client has given a new requirement superseding current work in priority. The development schedule must allow changes and be ready to adapt to it. – Agile Development.

Plan to be flexible

Agile Development is about being able to adapt to changing plans and focusing on delivering a working application in the least amount of time. This still needs us to have specifications and development requirements as with anything else. What changes is how my team and I go about building what’s been selected to be delivered by the end of this milestone. That’s right you get to choose what goes in to the current milestone if you wish to.

Start with tiny steps. Plan, build and test tiny steps. This yields a bug free, ship ready working application in the shortest time. The improvements are also in tiny steps.

Having an adaptive development process should make you stay competitive and respond to changes to the product variables. Be it early release, prioritize, budget cuts etc.