When a lot of businesses are struggling to find the right solution and team, for Mobile application development, you take a sip of your Costa Rican coffee and sigh in relief – Your mobile application is already in place and a fair number of users are loving it (Hey, we have grunters everywhere!).
But your peace of mind doesn’t last long as your CIO informs you of the potential bugs in the application, which are causing a substantial dropout. Worse more, it’s something which your current team fails to solve. Your Marketing team nudges you for an update on the much-requested enhancement list which has been curated based on the market research and user feedback.
You sigh again and hit CTRL+N (or CMD + N in Mac) to open a new tab and search for competent companies who have proven excellence in Mobile Application Development. But, before you like what you see and take your discussion forward with one of the companies, here are 5 key elements that you should keep in mind.
Define the Goal:
For a redevelopment, precisely list what are the changes you want in your current application. These can be – existing bugs that you want to be resolved, new features which you want to be included, design changes & performance issues which you want to be optimized. It may be luring to just shoot a quick email with the problem statement and a brief about your current application and let the competing company figure out your mind, but it is certainly not advisable. When it comes to project failures – Gap in understanding is cited as the numero uno cause. It is almost like an American trying to order a hamburger in a downtown Chinese restaurant.
Collate the Existing Details:
Before surgery, doctors perform tests to understand your body functions. They need to know in detail what they are operating on. So is true for the development companies. If a company or a team is redeveloping your existing application, they need to know what the application currently does, the backend architecture & the third-party integrations which it has. Make sure you collate the initial Business Requirement Document, the Scope Document and the Delivery Document (which should have all relevant technical details) before you entrust the team with the responsibilities.
Be Regression Ready:
Whenever new work is done on top of existing code, Regression Issues are bound to occur. The development team will have this factored in their delivery plan but even they cannot be 100% sure because they do not know the code in its entirety. During development, there will be more issues than expected and most of these will come from the failure of the existing features when they are being embedded to the new one. You just need to be patient and aware of the fact. Hey, no one said life was fair!
Stop That Comparison:
Are you going to tell the company “But the other company did this faster/quicker/better/(and my favourite)at a lesser cost”? Enticing it is, but refrain from drawing parallels with the previous company, primarily for 2 reasons – a) It tells the current team that you do not trust them, and b) If the previous company really did it well, it would have been them and not the new team with whom you would have been conversing with. You have every right to request for a reasonable explanation so that you understand the service which you are getting but a comparison with another team from the past will not do anyone any good.
Consider the Downtime:
Once the new application has passed the UAT and is ready to be released, you need to make this application available seamlessly for all users. However, some customers may get the new app a bit later than the others. This happens when there’s a delay hitting that Update Now button. To circumvent this, the new team may help to release a new version of the existing code with a Mandatory Update feature. By the time the new version of the app is released, close to 99% of your current app users would have updated the last release which has the Mandatory Update feature. When they open the app after the new version is released, the app will request an update before proceeding (or at least urge the user not to skip the critical update) This will ensure almost all your customers are using the brand new version of your mobile application when it is released; the one which is – better, faster & smarter.
A couple of considerations come into play while choosing a mobile app development firm. However, maintaining transparency is crucial, so that you can stay abreast about the progress of work on a regular basis. Do your research before entrusting the responsibility to a service provider in order to keep things hassle-free in the long run.
