Scalable Development and Testing for Enterprise Mobile Apps

Mobile devices have become our daily partners. No matter the digital task we’re trying to perform, our mobile device is there to solve the problem. Modern mobile devices are packed with powerful hardware running all kinds of mobile apps, and it seems like there is no limit to new innovations and solutions

However, this rapid innovation cycle introduces many challenges for mobile development and testing teams. This is especially true for large-scale companies that manage large code bases and multiple mobile development and testing teams.

Adding the challenges associated with scale to the challenges presented by the rapidly evolving mobile app development landscape makes it imperative for enterprises to establish robust development and testing foundations, to ensure the success of their apps.

In this post, we will take a closer look at some of the best practices for building a scalable mobile development and testing process and solutions to the challenges of large-scale development.

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Before scaling and expanding your development and testing practices in a larger-scale organization, it’s crucial to establish a clear vision and strategy. Usually, the vision and strategy are defined by upper management in terms of the products and services a company wants to deliver to its customers. The IT department must then use this vision and strategy to derive its own technical vision and strategy.

This helps focus your efforts on the work required to scale development and testing for mobile development teams. The technical vision and strategy must include long-term goals for mobile development practices, like the tech stack used to develop the mobile apps and the APIs and backend technology of choice.

It should also include the demographics and personas of the customers. This knowledge is especially important for mobile development and testing in order to define the mobile devices and operating systems being used among the customer base and adjust accordingly. This helps mobile development and testing teams to focus on what is most important for their customers.

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Once the vision and strategy are clearly defined and spread among the organization, it’s time to establish your tech foundations. First, you need to find the right talent to build skilled and motivated core mobile development and testing teams. This team must consist of experienced developers, testers, product managers, and UX/UI designers.

All team members should be experts in their field when it comes to mobile platforms, features, and technology. Their expertise and commitment are important to set the appropriate standards for quality and performance, which can then be scaled across the entire organization.

This core team is required to define mobile-specific cases, like creating mobile personas, gathering data about the target customers, and defining which frameworks and tools should be used for mobile development and testing. Without a core mobile team, tackling the challenges of scale becomes almost impossible.

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Scaling mobile development and testing is a natural step for many companies. One mobile development team is not enough to keep up with all of the organization’s business needs, forcing companies to scale their mobile development and testing efforts.

However, scaling comes with various challenges that need to be addressed and solved.

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Hiring the right people

The biggest challenge when scaling mobile development and testing in a large-scale organization is finding and hiring the right talent. Great coding and testing skills are definitely important, but working in a distributed mobile development and testing environment needs much more than that.

The right mindset is almost always more important than coding and testing skills. The best candidates know that they don’t work alone on the codebase and understand that they need to communicate and align with the rest of the team.

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Defining standards and processes

Once the core mobile team is established, their first task must be to define mobile development and testing standards and processes. To do that, they must first answer questions like

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• What programming language will they use?
• Which IDE is the best fit for the organization?
• What are the mobile testing tools they need?
• What are their CI/CD tools and pipeline?
• How often should they release?
• How will they handle hot fixes in production?
• How can they document changes to the process?
• What is their code review process?
  
  

These are just some of the many questions they need to answer to be able to clearly define their process and successfully build, test, and ship new features and enhancements.

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Effective communication

Working with hundreds of people on mobile apps requires effective communication to help the teams stay aligned, know their dependencies, and work towards the same goals. Here are 4 requirements for effective communication to help scale mobile development and testing in larger organizations: 

1. Clear and concise messaging: Every communication must be clear and precise to the point. It must be free of jargon that can be misunderstood.
2. Clear communication channels: Establish standard communication channels and processes, from email, chat apps, video calls, project management software, and regular town hall meetings.
3. Regular updates: All teams must regularly update the rest of the organization on their progress and status through reviews, status update rounds, or other meetings.
4. Feedback cycles: Everyone must be open to constructive feedback wherever needed to enhance communication and deliver a better product.

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Scaling infrastructure

The fourth challenge when scaling mobile development and testing across large organizations is scaling your infrastructure. The mobile core team needs to provide different services for all the teams involved in order to develop, test, ship, and monitor their mobile apps. This includes services like a powerful CI/CD pipeline to seamlessly integrate code changes and build new versions.

They also need to invest time in defining and setting up logging and monitoring systems for all teams. In the best case, each team has its own tailored monitoring and logging dashboard to see what is happening with their product features in the real world.

Another important decision taken by the core mobile team is whether a cloud-based device vendor fits their specific needs or if they should build up an in-house device pool to represent their user base.

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Once a company has tackled the challenges of scaling mobile development and testing, the top priority becomes shipping new features to enhancements.

Mobile development and testing are completely different when compared to web development. When mobile apps face an issue, the development team needs to provide a fix, build a new version of the app, and upload it to the mobile app stores. After that comes the app store review process which can take up to 48 hours and even then they still need to wait for their users to update to the new version to get the fix.

This adds a lot of pressure on mobile development teams, forcing them to significantly raise the bar for quality. On the other hand, web development teams can fix and deploy an issue almost immediately and have it available for all customers at the same time.

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Mobile developers need to keep in mind that their code is running on a small device, powered with a variety of different hardware and software versions. This poses many challenges when it comes to development activities. For instance, their code must consume power efficiently to avoid draining the battery of the device.

Additionally, mobile apps need to be mindful of their data consumption and work within the limits of their users’ data plan, which is another bad experience. At the same time, they need to have very high standards for security because mobile devices are packed with all kinds of personal and sensitive information.

Mobile developers have to grapple with a lot of variables and must work closely with mobile testing experts to ensure success. They not only need to check that the implemented features are working, but they must also check that the features run well on the different hardware and software combinations they’re targeting and that the mobile apps can be used in different mobile networks and environments.

Testing mobile apps on a limited number of devices and environments is a recipe for disaster. Mobile testers must test their app on the devices being used by their customers and take into account the use cases and environments the app was built for.

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Scaling mobile development and testing across a large-scale organization is a complex but rewarding endeavor. It is a journey characterized by strategic planning, embracing change, overcoming challenges, and continuous innovation. By maintaining a focus on quality, communication, infrastructure, talent, and security, companies can transform into a mobile-first organization.