Developing a great application is no easy task. It not only takes a lot of developer talent to do the job, but it also takes a lot of planning on your part. When the average cost of a developer is over $100,000, you can’t afford to waste time or money during the process.
There is a lot to the application development process that you need to know before you start. Below are four strategies that will help improve your application development pipeline to produce quicker and more reliable apps.
- Talk to Potential Customers First
Even if you have a great app idea, that doesn’t mean people are willing to pay for your product. If you spend a lot of time and money developing a product and nobody wants to buy it, the chances are good that you’ll have to spend just as much to pivot your idea.
You can avoid this hassle by talking to potential customers upfront. Let your potential customers know what your idea is, the problem it solves, and if they believe it can fit into their workflow. They’ll tell you if your idea is worth buying and what changes you can make to make it more appealing.
- Create Wireframes
The last thing you want to do in software development is jump straight into the design and programming of your app. If you don’t grasp how your app workflow is supposed to work, you’re going to keep changing things until you get it right.
You can remove some of those changes by creating an app wireframe in the beginning. You can map every app screen you have and your whole customer journey with your wireframes. Doing this when starting app development will help you speed up the development process and better understand what your product will look like when finished.
- Use Source Control
No matter how great your app developers are, the chances are good that things will go wrong at some point in the app development process. The question is, do you have a quick way to revert to previous app versions to solve any problems that come up?
Source control will let you do this easily. A source control program creates copies of all the changes for your app and allows you to branch to different versions. If you ever need to roll your app back to a previous state, you only have to revert to a previous version in your source control software.
- Automate Deployment
It doesn’t only take time to create new software versions when you’re developing an application. Depending on the complexity of your app, it can also take a lot of time to deploy your app to testing and production servers.
The question is, how much of this work do your app developers need to do manually?
Automated deployment scripts will help you test and launch your app more quickly. Doing this frees up your team from deployment tasks and lets them quickly get back to other projects or testing your current app builds.
Keep Up to Date on Application Development Strategies
There are many ways to develop apps, but not all of them will suit your specific needs. Make sure you keep up to date on the latest application development strategies to see if there are any tips that you can use to improve your process.
Of course, you’ll need to manage your project correctly if you want it to be successful. Check out the blog to learn more about taking your project to completion.
