The traditionally accepted ‘waterfall’ model of mobile app development has its limitations as the requirements of the development process need to be listed beforehand. This resulted in reviewing and documentation being subsequent processes rather than a part of app development requiring the developer to work on the UI screens and Server APIs as the user experience changed during the review process.
While ‘waterfall’ model is a common practice for limited functionality small budget apps, it falls short of cost and time-to-market expectations for enterprise and consumer mobile apps. However, this can be overcome by implementing the Agile Methodologies in mobile app development by breaking down the process into smaller steps and integrating the testing, documentation and review into these steps.
The steps that most of our customers adhere and agree to are:
- Entrepreneurs create the entire look and feel, using our designer or his/her favorite designer.
- Mobile Developers create the app with the entire screen workflow, canned data. App can be reviewed by selected people.
- Mobile developers work with server team to discuss and finalize Server APIs based on screen workflow
- Mobile developers complete the app data structure and server interface with canned data, while server APIs are being developed.
- Mobile developers do the server Integration, once the server APIs are available.
- Unit testing and documentation to happen at every stage.
- Complete app goes through integration testing.
Argument still exists that the Agile model fails for enterprise app development as companies use Mobile Enterprise App Platform (MEAP) such as Sancha Touch, PhoneGap (Apache Cordova), Appcelerator, Titanium Framework, Telerik, Kony, Xamarin, etc. forcing developers to go through the straight-line app building process which lock the developer into their tools, making it a difficult process.
At Softtrends, we find this a perception that is just casted to the mindset of most people who want their enterprise mobile apps developed. We have not only successfully applied Agile to Native mobile development but also the enterprise mobile app development using these MEAP tools.
