When you are surrounded by something in abundance, it starts to lose its value in your mind. What used to feel like a luxury becomes a commodity. We have seen so many technologies follow this path to ignominy. Mobile apps are another such technology that has become a commodity. There are just too many of them. It is common to hear someone say that mobile apps are very easy, because somebody they know has also developed one. What usually gets missed is that even though it may have been a great feat for the poorly regarded relative or friend to develop a new app, it undoubtedly would not have been an enterprise class product.
This is a fact of a developer’s life that a lot of people do not realize. It takes a lot more than a few lines of code to create an enterprise app. There are multiple steps involved in the creation of an enterprise application.
1. Design: As the old adage goes, “well begun is half done”, design is the most critical part of the entire process. There are multiple stages to this process too. First, the process flows are decided. This is where different use cases and the outcomes are frozen. The entire functionality of the intended product is mapped out in visual diagrams. The next phase is the wireframe models, where the actual screens start getting designed, along with the positions of the different components, branding, and color schemes. Lastly, you do storyboarding, where the actual interfaces are created and reviewed.
Other critical components to be covered during the design phase are finalizing the underlying infrastructure and integration requirements for the go live. This is a common mistake made by the developers, where they are too focused on the code, that they ignore the infra components.
2. Development: Once the application specs are finalized, the development takes place. This is primarily coding, followed by deep testing, QA checks and rollout. Typically the rollout happens in two stages – a controlled launch for a pilot user group, followed by a general availability (which happens in the next phase). An important aspect of the development and testing is the infrastructure readiness and integrations with the internal IT systems.
3. Deployment: In order to make the application available, it has to be hosted at either the enterprise datacenter, or in the cloud. Also, the distribution mechanism can be either the internal app store, or a commercial one. Once the app is ready and tested, it needs to be deployed and made available through the chosen distribution mechanism.
4. Documentation: All design documentation, user manuals, administration guides and troubleshooting guides need to be prepared as a part of the development lifecycle. The documentation is often not given its due importance, even though it is critical for the future sustainability. It is not necessary that the development team will forever be a part of the same team that owns the application. Therefore, it is important to document well, so that the support, maintenance and enhancement teams are able to run with it.
5. Support and Maintenance: Once the product goes live, and starts being used, you need a team to support it. The support includes bug fixes, customer service desk calls, and most importantly, upgrades. You will typically not have the entire feature set launched in one go, and even if you do, you would want to add functionality over a period of time. It is the support team that is responsible for all that work, and each upgrde needs to go through the entire development cycle again.
Copper Mobile is one of leading Dallas mobile application development firm. With best in class app developers in Dallas, the company is regarded as one of the top app development Dallas firm
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