Today, apps are an important part of our everyday life. That probably explains why thousands of mobile apps are hitting the market every single day. One of the factors worth considering in the development of any app is the strategy you should use. The reason is that a software development methodology dictates how a software team handles agile app development. Agile application development is one of the strategies you can opt for when developing apps. Before delving into details about agile app development, here is some insight into the basic steps to constructing an app.
Conception
Decisions regarding the scope, audience, and fundamental value of your application happens at this point. Conception is the stage that dictates your focus in each of the steps that follow.
Initiation
Setting in motion the preparatory steps of making your app's concept a reality occurs at this stage. That entails hiring a team and proposing several deliverables and clear objectives.
Analysis
Also known as a feasibility analysis, entails the validation and determination of the feasibility of the objectives and deliverables you propose during the initial preparation.
Design
At this point, the app's structure and skeleton will emerge through mock-ups, wireframing, and storyboarding. Additionally, the honing of the app's overarching design takes place, basically through multiple revisions and reworking.
Construction
Committing an app's design to code happens here. That involves constructing different parts or features within an app, either one after the other or in tandem.
Testing
The key to good testing is through quality assurance and incremental tests throughout the steps above. As much as that is the case, once you construct a feature, it is advisable to do a final testing round.
Deployment
The rolling out of your app takes place at this point, and that will be either to a closed group of testers, the wider public, beta users, or a combination of the three.
Insight into Agile Methodology
The blueprint's evolution for agile methodology is due to the need for addressing several challenges in the conventional waterfall development procedure. Using the agile approach to mobile app development allows you to adopt a different strategy for tackling the steps above. So, instead of finishing one step before taking on the next one, agile app development allows teams to set and pursue incremental goals in each area simultaneously. Also, understand that the meeting of incremental goals is through sprints. A sprint implies that team members have a clear goal and a strict deadline for achievement, usually about a week.
Here are some of the core principles that the agile development process focuses on enabling. a) Ensuring the distribution of equal time to every step in the process. Adopting the agile methodology implies that you do not need to redo your app's construction or design. That is necessary when there is a fundamental flaw in testing. Also, if users identify an issue after launch, especially due to insufficient time for testing due to several reconstruction delays, redoing your app will be critical.
All that is unnecessary when you adopt agile app development. b) Promoting a more organic, cost-effective, and adaptable approach to mobile app development. That implies that your team can shift and adapt to challenges in any step of the process, including when you get to the testing or construction stage. c) Offering flexibility while maintaining process organization. Adapting an organized plan is difficult, while a flexible one promotes or allows room for missed deadlines and procrastination. That is possible by relying on sprints, which allow developers to adapt by shifting targets and goals while maintaining a deadline-centric organization.
The Agile App Development Procedure
Your app development team can begin developing your app in short time sprints that simultaneously apply each step for designing your app. So, after the conceptualization of your initial app idea, you will move onto initiation, analysis, design, and testing, among other things. You also need to understand that the process of developing apps is messy, and it rarely happens in discrete, isolated project development phases.
The implication is that there should be a close connection between your app design, construction, and testing. In case issues or a design flaw sets in during the app development procedure, your team may have to make tough choices. That will call for adapting or adopting new construction elements or design facet. The best part is that such an adaptation or pivot is not a mistake or even a setback when you opt for an agile approach. It only becomes an intentional part of the design procedure. On the other hand, the agile process handles each design step simultaneously. That suggests that making changes and pivoting your app's design, construction, and deployment will be more cost-effective.
So, you do not have to invest your entire construction budget in a full-fledged, feature-rich near-final iteration of your app before testing. The reason is that agile app development allows your team to test smaller incremental iterations from time to time. That way, you can make revisions, changes, and improvements on the go. The result is an app with greater usability, a better design, and fewer bugs or flaws.
6 Benefits of Adopting the Agile App Development Methodology
Cost-Effectiveness
If saving money is a priority, you should consider agile app development. Beyond attracting savings, agile app development ensures that you invest funds wisely. That means you can reduce technical debt, which refers to the maintenance tasks necessary for supporting the existing product. These tasks include testing, defect resolution, and refactoring. Technical debt can accumulate quickly in the case of a conventional project methodology.
The reason is that your team's focus is on the development of new features to ensure that they keep pace with the project timeline. Adopting agile app development allows you to realize a significant reduction in technical debt. On the other hand, any feature changes, defects, or other maintenance tasks will become part of a product backlog. In turn, your team will review the backlog during each sprint planning session to identify what they should address next. In that case, every sprint presents a new opportunity to fix defects by developing new features.
Yields A Higher Product Quality
The common approach in any app development exercise is testing what one is building before launch. On the contrary, agile app development integrates testing throughout the different development stages to enhance the quality of the end product. That is possible since continuous testing allows room for adjustments, and identifying bugs and issues before they manifest will not be a problem. It is worth mentioning that the waterfall option can negatively impact the quality of the end product.
Since the waterfall methodology may be full of features that require developers to rush to complete the same, time for testing will probably be insufficient. Your team does not attempt to develop all features at once when you opt for agile app development. Instead, the team will assign a smaller subset of features to each sprint to give developers more time to perfect items before release. As such, working on apps in small incremental releases ensures that each sprint yields a fully tested and functional product.
Speed to Market
Sprints play a pivotal role when working agile. The reason is that they allow teams to deliver rapidly and frequently on any project. Since speed is essential for startups, agile app development will prove an ideal strategy because it facilitates speedy marketing.
Promotes A Better Working Environment
Teams and clients do not have to work in complete isolation for hours when you opt for agile app development. The reason is that the strategy allows individuals to work together to deliver a quality end product. Meaningful conversations, workshops, and brainstorming sessions promote a better working environment, and they are part of the agile app development process.
It Creates Total Transparency and Alignment
A traditional waterfall project does not avail the level of collaboration and involvement that an agile app development process provides. The waterfall app development strategy involves a particular set of individuals with expertise to accomplish the task for every phase, which is not the case with the agile option. The agile app development strategy allows your entire team to agree on the user stories to assign each sprint after reviewing and validating those stories.
After that, the product owner, developers, testers, and analysts collaborate to accomplish the items in the sprint. That happens by keeping every team member on the same page through daily meetings. Also, every team member works closely with developers to meet client requirements, and they also verify each feature. All that happens throughout the sprint.
Enhances Customer Satisfaction
The active participation of a product owner in the sprints during the agile development and testing process fosters the kind of engagement that results in the realization of a desirable outcome. Beyond that, a product owner can see a working product at the end of each sprint, and they are glad to know that their team can deliver releases frequently and without unnecessary delays.
Conclusion
Agile app development and testing follow a procedure that helps teams deliver a usable product that offers value at the end of each sprint. That is achievable since embracing change is a core tenet of agile app development. As such, teams using this approach can quickly adapt to a shift in requirements without affecting release dates. If you need more information on agile app development and its benefits, contact us today!
