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According to a recent Gartner research app development teams will have to employ practices that are different from traditional app development, because there is a big demand from business companies and it puts increasing pressure on IT organizations to deliver large numbers of mobile applications.
“Enterprise application development teams use traditional practices to define and develop desktop applications; however, most don’t work with mobile app development, due to device diversity, network connectivity and other mobile-specific considerations,” said Van Baker, research vice president at Gartner. “Instead, AD managers should use functional, performance, load and user experience testing, as well as agile development practices.”
Mr. Baker said it`s difficult for users to define what the app needs to do, and as a result it`s not easy or even impossible to define requirements for a new mobile application.
“There are several reasons these efforts don’t succeed for mobile applications, even though they’ve worked historically. Firstly, mobile business apps are a new category for most users and secondly, mobile business apps are constrained by the nature of the platform and the size of the screen, so porting the workflow of a mature desktop app is not viable,” said Mr. Baker. “Finally, the experience associated with mobile devices is significantly different from that of desktop devices, including shorter session lengths and limited presentation, due to screen size constraints that affect how mobile business apps need to function.”
A lot of people are not satisfied with a poor user experience. This can be due to poor user interface design, poor application workflow or poor responsiveness. So the developers need to focus on design of user interface.
“Letting the users experience what the application will look like and building the screens on the fly with the appropriate tools will ensure that the initial build of the app looks familiar to the users and is close to what they’ll need once the application has been piloted or deployed,” said Mr. Baker “This alone will result in a higher chance for a successful development effort.”
“Mobile business apps are different. They need to be frequently revised to meet end-user expectations, and this agile development process especially requires operations to be on top of infrastructure and systems to support frequent mobile app deployments and pushed updates,” said Mr. Baker. “The number of mobile device types further complicates mobile app development and operations efforts, because the range of device screen sizes, resolutions, hardware API access and performance is fragmented and changes rapidly. The pace of change in the mobile market presents challenges in particular to the operations team, and this pace is unlikely to slow down.”
