How We Develop Mobile Applications
At Arter Mobilize, we generally commission each mobile application development project with a concept design exercise that fleshes out the ‘look and feel’ of the App such that it’s form and function become clear and agreeable to everyone. Estimates for the time and cost needed to bring that concept to reality allows for the concept to be adjusted, if needed, to fit in with any constraints.
With the concept established and agreed, we then begin to develop. We follow an agile application development approach that sees us breaking down the overall development effort into bite-sized manageable chunks such that it takes no more than 4-weeks (called a sprint) to detail design, code and test any number of features.
Features comprise any number of buttons, icons, fields, or controls on the screen. For example, a search feature might comprise a search bar, a keyboard for entering search criteria, and a table view to display search results. Three screen elements in total.
An optimally sized team can deliver up to 25 screen elements within a 4-week sprint window. The team can be augmented to deliver more, but we caution against anything more than 75 screen elements. Complexity and overhead increase leading to inefficiencies and a potential compromise of the sprint objectives.
Features, or screen elements, delivered from a sprint can be deployed, or released as a fully functioning mobile App in their own right or saved and bundled with features from the next sprint. We recommend not holding back for too long and bundling too much – there’s much value to be gained from early-use. The business realizes benefits earlier and the development team gains from early feedback that can be factored into future sprints.
A planning exercise at the start of each sprint serves to validate the backlog of features yet to be developed and confirm which ones are to be tackled next. The feature backlog is fed from a number of sources including the initial conceptual design, stakeholder direction, feedback from early-use or suggestions coming from post-sprint review sessions, known as retrospectives.
