8 Essential Steps of the App Development Strategy

The process of building an app can be broken down into eight stages. Read this article to get to know about the consequence of the phases and the essence of each one.

To increase the productivity of the mobile app development process, you should stick to a reasonable strategy. A strategic approach should enable you to optimize your expenses, better plan your time, enhance the efficiency of your team and deliver products of higher quality. Consequently, your customer satisfaction will grow, it will be easier for you to attract new clients and your revenue will rise. In this article, you’ll discover the brief characteristics of the eight steps of the app development process. This strategy should come in handy for companies of any size and apps of any type.

Gather the Requirements

Before starting the work, any application development company should make sure all its staff members share an identical vision of the project’s scope and objectives. Break down the process of building the app into small fragments. Present these fragments in the format that your team is most used to, be it user stories or a Google Doc.

Validate Your Requirement Expectations

You should check whether you have enough technical resources for the requirements that you have listed. Plus, you should make sure that the requirements are detailed enough. If you state that your team needs to build, for instance, an educational app, that would be a too generic approach. You should specify the tools and methods that you’re planning to use. That will enable you to allocate a realistic budget for the project and compile a reasonable schedule for it.

Predevelopment Planning

This stage involves the work of three teams. They should be responsible for architectural and technical design, project planning and quality assurance, respectively:

  • The architectural and technical design team should focus on such aspects as the app’s hosting, product licenses, data modeling and languages.
  • The project planning team should determine the optimal project management model. If you opt for Waterfall, you should compile a master project plan encompassing the entire scope of work and lay it out in a Gantt Chart from start to completion. If you prefer Agile, you agree you will have a deliverable every two or three weeks and organize a planning session at the beginning of every iteration.
  • The quality assurance team at this phase should start writing out their test cases based on the fleshed-out requirements and begin test scripts.

At this stage, it would be wise to ask a technical representative to validate the technical direction of your project. You might apply various approaches to the same business requirements. So it would be reasonable to ask all the specifics upfront, to avoid delays or misinterpretations later.

Implementation

Now, it’s time to tackle all the phases that you laid out in the preplanning stages. According to the Agile methodology, you should set up deliverables that can be reviewed every two or three weeks. Such an approach should enable you to work quickly and minimize errors, so you might want to try it even if you don’t fully stick to Agile.

Quality Assurance Testing

If you’re working on a small project, you might carry out quality assurance once it’s finished. Otherwise, it would be reasonable to run QA tests throughout the project. For instance, you can arrange a test with each one of the two or three-week deliverable iterations plus the final one at the end of the project. Biweekly tests will allow you to detect errors at such stages when fixing them takes minimum time, funds, and effort. If you discover an error in a large project after completing it, you might need to redo it almost from scratch.

User Acceptance Testing

At this phase, you should allow people who weren’t involved in building your app to test it. The ultimate goal is to make sure that all the requirements are fulfilled. If testers approve of the app, feel free to deploy it.

Deployment

The deployment process consists of the following steps:

  • Set up the environment for your app
  • Upload the code in that environments
  • Do a quick test to make sure everything is running
  • Push the app to production

When you deploy an app, it means it goes live.

Support

Once the app is ready, it doesn’t mean that your work is over. The app’s users will expect you to support it. You’ll need to fix bugs, upgrade the code and make the app compatible with new solutions that enter the market. Businesses are more likely to choose those app developers that provide ongoing support for their products, so by offering this service you can considerably expand your customer base.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, this article came in handy and now you better understand the main milestones of app development. You should start with gathering the requirements and then validate your requirements expectations. Next, you should carry out predevelopment planning and implement the project. After that, you should conduct quality assurance testing, deploy the app and provide ongoing support for it.

Fawad Malik

Fawad Malik Technology geek by heart, blogger by passion, and founder of nogentech.org, He regularly explores ideas and ways how advanced technology helps individuals, brands and businesses survive and thrive in this competitive landscape. He tends to share the latest tech news, trends, and updates with the community built around Nogentech.

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