Are you looking for a way to accelerate your time to market process? Are you struggling with long periods between mobile app releases? Here is something that might help you!
Most common obstacles during development
There can be any number of reasons why it takes longer between fixing something or create a new feature and actually releasing the updated mobile app. But you are not the only one struggling with this.
You might be stuck at one of the following points:
You may not be adopting an agile process properly or you’re not adopting it at all.
You are testing after development, maybe even outsourcing testing, leaving it as the last step just before release. If another bug is found during this stage, the whole development process will start from the beginning prolonging the release.
Tips to optimize your time to market process
Agile development is a crucial factor to ensure a faster time to market, to react faster to changes, and satisfy user’s requirements.
Our research shows that very few companies have adopted an agile approach, even if it is, in fact, one of the core factors to accelerate the time to market process. By adopting an agile approach you can optimize your development and testing cycle and deliver updates faster.
An agile methodology is a process that cannot be implemented overnight. The changes are should be slowly introduced over time, with small adjustments every day. If you decide to follow this path, be prepared for some tough ground work.
Testing should also be seen as part of the development process and not as the last step just before release. That means your development team should also include testers and project managers to make sure that every step of a bug fix/new feature is given the right attention.
Here are some ideas on how you can start implementing agile in your development cycle:
Create feature team: feature teams are teams composed of people from different development stages that work together at one feature/fix simultaneously with other feature teams, accelerating the time to market process.
Find the right tools for your agile development: use tools that best adapt to your needs, changing them to fit new requirements instead of sticking with one tool at all costs.
Because of featured team, you can implement testing during the development cycle, testing after every iteration/sprint. Testing often and as soon as possible is one of the keys to release updates faster.
Collaboration and communication between teams are also crucial. A scrum master acts as “referee” between the teams and helps to divide tasks as well as prioritize the most urgent ones, based on customers and users needs.
If there are too many bugs and adding new features takes too long, users will uninstall your app. Once a user uninstalls an app it is very difficult to win them back. Optimizing your time to market process will definitely help you retain users and boost downloads.
