All About Application Development Life Cycle
Apps are no longer exclusive tools for the tech-oriented or geekier industries. It’s more crucial than ever that you have an app for your business, regardless of whether you have a heavy online presence or not.
Apps allow your customers to connect with you or make purchases on the go, and provide additional features and functions for your business’s operations, marketing strategies, customer retention, and more.
This is doubly true since mobile apps are becoming more and more ubiquitous across every industry. Most smartphone users spend the majority of their time on their devices on applications of some kind or another.
If you want your business to do as well as it can, you need an app. But developing an excellent app will be tricky if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Let’s break down the application development cycle so you know what to expect, what to budget for, and so you know how to go about creating a wonderful app for your business without making mistakes.
What Are the Five Stages of the Application Development Life Cycle?
App development is an ongoing process of idea generation, prototyping, development, and deployment. But the stages of app development – from its earliest idea or iteration to a full launch on supported app stores – can be broadly broken down into five major steps.Discovery, Market Research, and Planning
The first stage of app development can be broken into three subsidiary steps: discovery, market research, and planning. Discovery is the most organic of all of these – think of it as stumbling upon a need or problem you have to solve with an app. You discover the issue that can be solved by developing or upgrading an app, so you start a plan to carry out that idea.Discovery Process
You can alternatively begin the discovery process if you already have a few great mobile app ideas for your business in the proverbial bank. Regardless, every app’s development starts with a single core concept or need. But an idea alone is not good enough to make an excellent app, especially for your own business. Next, you’ll need to do some market research – your app idea might be exceptional, but you’ll need to determine if there’s a market for it or if such an app will help your operations. Don’t forget that security in each stage is crucial, taking care of your startup’s safety will make the foundation of your business. If not, the app may not be worth the cost in terms of time or dollars it takes to complete development. To perform adequate market research, you need to ask questions like:- Who is the target audience?
- What purpose does the absolve?
- What language will be app be in?
- What are your competitors doing?
- What’s the overall budget for the app’s development, and the timeline?
- How can you market or promote this app?
Planning Phase
If you answer all of those questions and come up with satisfactory answers (for instance, you find that there is a market for your app idea and a workable budget in your business account), then you can begin planning. This involves coming up with answers to some of the hard questions above. Come up with a budget, and a timeline, and determine who will work on the app. Is it going to be you, or an IT team that works for your company? Maybe it’ll be a freelancer – if so, you’ll need to work out communication plans, as well. You’ll also want to come up with the core features or functions of the app so you don’t overdevelop. Your budget is likely limited to some extent. Planning out everything that the app will include or do will help you avoid wasting money later down the road. By the end of this stage in the app development cycle, you’ll have an idea, a sense of how the app will perform or how you’ll market it, and an outline for its development.Design and Wireframing
Now you can move on to the next phase of the app development cycle. To start with design, go back to the answers to the big questions asked before, like who the app will be for and what services it will provide. You can use those answers to come up with a general design for the app. For instance, if your app is designed to work as a mobile store for your business, you’ll need e-commerce functionality, plus a few different payment methods for your customers. You’ll also need to move on to “wireframing”. Wireframing is app development lingo for building a clear picture of your ideas and showing how the different features or functions of the app will combine into a functional interface. Think of this as storyboarding or road mapping the development of the upcoming application. To wireframe, you or others in your development team can come up with a sketch on paper or software of the app and what it’ll look like. Keep in mind that you want to:- Emphasize the user experience above most other factors
- Place your brand anywhere that it’s appropriate
- Remember that you’re developing a mobile app instead of a website, which requires different solutions or strategies
The backend of the App
As you wireframe, you’ll also need to figure out the backend of your app. This is all the stuff that you and your team will interface with regularly to control the app and handle customer issues. Choose the backend structures that you use to support your app in terms of servers, data integration, push notification services, and more. Wireframing during this stage of the app development process is useful since you can adjust the frame if you run into limitations or budget issues. Eventually, however, you’ll need to finalize your wireframe and come up with a prototype. A prototype is the first version of an app’s idea in workable form. It’s not something you’ll present to your customers or users, but it should be at least mostly functional and give you and your team a base version to spring off for further development. Build the prototype of your app using the wireframe you constructed before. Then, once the app is functional, have a few people from outside your development team test it. They can provide valuable and actionable feedback about the app, how it feels, and any pain points you need to get rid of during the full development application cycle.Development
Once your prototype is satisfactory, you should have a laundry list of different things you’ll need to develop or change about the app’s basic design. This is the development part of the app-building process. Developing an app involves completing a handful of complex steps. You’ll need to:- Set up storage solutions and databases
- Set up servers for the backend of your app
- Come up with developer accounts for app stores for easy distribution
- Program and code the app – by yourself or hire developers depending on your skillset
- Create the “skins” or screens for your app, which should look similar to the storyboard-esque designs from your wireframing efforts
Testing (Quality Assurance)
The next step of the application development cycle is testing or quality assurance. Even if your app looks phenomenal when development is largely complete, you can’t be certain that it’ll work as advertised or that it will be a comfortable experience for your users unless you test it. You should do a lot of testing yourself – break out your wireframe designs and earliest ideas and go through the different features you’ve included. If something was included, test it out and see how it measures up to your initial ideas about the function. Furthermore, you should hire outside users to test the app or have employees in your company test the app as part of their job responsibilities. Ask questions about everything – ask how the UI feels, for instance, or whether the app responds fluidly to user inputs. You’ll also want to test for other things like:- How the graphics measure up over time, and how they impact current mobile device hardware
- If there’s enough cross-platform compatibility for various images (if applicable)
- If the update/bug fixing system is responsive – can you roll out updates or major bug fixes promptly if and when they are detected?