I'm thinking about hiring an app developer. What do I need to know?
What is the process for building an app?
Do you have an idea for an app but don’t know where to start? Nitid.co specializes in building apps for non-technical organizations. While some of our clients have built apps before, most of our clients are experts in a different domain and need someone to take care of the technology part. This article covers the minimum someone needs to know about computers and apps to hire a software development agency. Similar to remodeling your kitchen, you don’t need to know plumbing and electrical to have a new kitchen. But you do need to: consider design and issues that your design team raises, prioritize how to best spend your budget, and check your app for correctness.
Here are the steps of the “Agile Process” we use for building software:
- Know what problem you’re solving
- Define priorities, estimates, and budget
- Write specifications
- Create UX and visual design
- Code
- Test and deploy
- Iterate
We’ll go through each step below. A big difference between remodeling your kitchen and building an app is iteration: home construction is generally done in one big project. But over the past 30 years, software engineers have found it better to build apps in smaller pieces. So the above steps would be repeated many times, each adding a little functionality. One iteration through takes a few weeks or a month. After the first iteration, you have a very small app that is very slightly useful. You will repeat the building process for many months to build your full app, but you can use it each month as it grows, unlike your kitchen which is unusable until the end.
1) Know What Problem You’re Solving
Although it sounds obvious, this first step is often the most tricky. If your app is to automate an existing manual process, you might know the problem intimately. But if your app is a new business or social impact idea, you might be exploring and experimenting with what works. Fortunately, the Agile process is designed to allow changing your mind. Since each iteration delivers a complete running app, you can change direction at each cycle without incurring significant costs. This provides the “agility” for exploration and experimentation.
2) Priorities, Estimates, and Budget
Just as kitchen remodel budgets get out of control from many small changes, app development budgets do the same. When you choose a slightly more expensive tile, and a slightly fancier kitchen faucet, soon you find the budget grown by 20%. For this reason, each iteration starts with a prioritization session. You will meet with the development team to go through all the features you want to build. They will give you rough estimates per task. From those estimates, you can evaluate your options and choose the work that will deliver the most value with the least effort. Since each iteration starts with the highest priority work, your budget will produce the most value possible.
3) Specifications
In a kitchen remodel, architectural and structural drawings specify what needs to be built. How does that work with apps? Specifications start with a short paragraph describing one person (or role), their desire, the steps they should perform, and the output they will receive. Here is an example from Bedsider.org, a web app about reproductive health:
“As a women’s reproductive health provider, I want to publish accurate figures for how effective birth control methods are so my patients are well informed. I will log in, choose the list of birth control methods, click on the one I want to edit, and change the ‘efficacy’ value. Then I can see the new value on my website.”
Sometimes this is called a “feature,” but in Agile, we call it a “user story” to emphasize the people involved rather than the software. It’s a tiny story of the user, their wants and fears, the journey they must take, and their resolution. These user stories are the items that are prioritized and estimated in step (2).
4) UX and Visual Design
Once a few user stories are chosen for work, the UX and Visual Design team will start. A common question is: what is UX and how is it different from Visual Design? User Experience (UX) design is understanding and designing the experience a user goes through when interacting with an organization and its products. Research, data, and test results drive design decisions in UX rather than aesthetic preferences. Visual design then incorporates aesthetic preferences and branding with the regimented goals of UX to design the look and feel of the app. Visual design will generally produce “mockups,” which are drawings of what the different screens in your app will look like. Depending on needs, this could be a pencil sketch on paper or a very detailed set of drawing documents.
5) Coding
With user stories and a mockup in hand, software engineers will start coding the features in your app. Coding is very detail-oriented and all details must be worked out every step of the way. Many of these decisions require input from someone knowledgeable (you or your representative), so expect a lot of questions. Be ready to spend time each week or maybe even each day with your development team talking through situations, to keep development on track. Engineering will deliver your app and it should include a suite of automated tests to ensure reliability.
6) Test and Deploy
Before you deploy your app to your users, you need to verify it does what you think it should. With good communication along the way, there should be few surprises. But communication is hard and misunderstandings happen all the time. It’s critical to set aside time to thoroughly verify that your app works as expected. Your development team can assist you with testing plans to make the process faster and more thorough. But you and your organization’s staff are the ones who know your needs intimately. For best results, find someone in your organization who is detail-oriented to test each version before it is delivered to users.
7) Repeat
All these steps sound like a lot of work, and they are. But with the iterative approach, a cycle should take a few weeks to a month. An early version of your app may only have one or two features, but it’s something you can see, and hopefully already provides value. Each iteration will add more user stories, building your app slowly but surely and with tangible, verifiable progress.
Very often, once you start using a feature, you will find that you have learned something new. You might realize that something you hadn’t considered before is quite important. And other things that you thought were important, are not. The Agile process expects this learning to continue through the development of your app and inform how it proceeds, saving you budget by incorporating new information at each step.
Conclusion
Building an app doesn’t require technical expertise, but it does require your active involvement. Be sure to find a development team whom you find comfortable to work with and who communicates well as well as experience.
By breaking your project into small, manageable pieces, you can build your app incrementally, learning and adapting as you go. With the right development partner, you can bring your app idea to life while staying in control of both the outcome and the budget. We at Nitid.co hope you will consider us for your web and mobile app needs. We have over a decade of experience working across many technologies but our most important focus is on people. Call or email us to discuss your ideas.