The Mobile Application Development Agency Lifecycle

We’ve been get­ting a lot of calls late­ly from local busi­ness­es inquir­ing about mobile app devel­op­ment.  Not just because we rank on page 1 for almost all the local key­words (How did we do this? We use Search Engine Opti­miza­tion) but prob­a­bly also because mobile apps are gain­ing a lot more cred­i­bil­i­ty as legit­i­mate busi­ness tools for both pro­mo­tion and util­i­ty.  Most of the ques­tions are cen­tered around the actu­al devel­op­ment process, such as the dura­tion of the build, and what the prospec­tive client should expect to get out of their investment.

Since mobile appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment is still a young, but aggres­sive­ly grow­ing mar­ket, I thought I’d share some insight on how a mobile dev house like ours, goes through the process of devel­op­ing a qual­i­ty, enter­prise lev­el app.  This should pro­vide some insight on just how much work is required to suc­cess­ful­ly build a qual­i­ty app, and what it takes to keep both the agency and the client on the same page through­out the entire process.  It obvi­ous­ly helps to have well struc­tured teams with defined roles, and strong Account and Project Man­age­ment directives.

Please keep in mind that the fol­low­ing expla­na­tion is just an exam­ple of how a com­pa­ny like ours (a high­ly regard­ed, pro­fes­sion­al mobile app devel­op­ment house =) would han­dle a mobile project (in this case, and iPhone app) from start to fin­ish.  Also of impor­tance is that not all of our mobile projects will go through this exact process.  For the sake of time and cost, we may con­dense these steps based on the client indi­cat­ed bud­get and expectation.

The Bid Process

The bid­ding process starts with the Ini­tial Con­tact, either by reach­ing out to poten­tial clients through our var­i­ous busi­ness devel­op­ment efforts, or through refer­rals and inbound calls from our SEO efforts.  If the client is seri­ous and has some mon­ey to put behind their con­cept, we will gen­er­al­ly set up a 1^st Meet­ing to dis­cuss in detail what the poten­tial client has in mind.  After we’ve gath­ered enough details, we can build a Pro­pos­al to demon­strate our under­stand­ing of these require­ments, what we intend to deliv­er, how long the project is expect­ed to take, and what we are going to charge to get all of this done.  There may be some back-and-forth with the poten­tial client regard­ing cer­tain fea­tures, addi­tion­al enhance­ments that might not have been dis­cussed in the meet­ing, or even omis­sions of fea­tures to reduce the cost – if these are indi­cat­ed, we can Mod­i­fy the Pro­pos­al to assure client and agency are in mutu­al agree­ment.  Once these are all worked out, we cre­ate an a writ­ten Agree­ment or State­ment of Work between both par­ties that is required to be signed before the project starts.

The Devel­op­ment Process

This is where the inten­si­ty goes up sev­er­al notch­es, as we mobi­lize our work­force.  There are a lot of key par­ties involved that need to be brought up to speed on what is being built and how this is all going to be done.  Ini­tial­ly we may sit down with our inter­nal teams and the new client to put togeth­er scop­ing doc­u­ments dur­ing the Project Scop­ing phase to make sure we’ve iden­ti­fied all of the func­tion­al spec­i­fi­ca­tions of the build.  This can be a time con­sum­ing process, if the mobile app is robust in fea­tures (see CW Net­work – The Vam­pire Diaries App) and both par­ties may elect to sep­a­rate the entire life cycle process into mul­ti­ple phases.

 Upon com­ple­tion of scop­ing we can start on Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture and wire­frames.  These “IA” docs out­line, in detail, how the app is expect­ed to per­form.  Every­thing from the behav­ior of the load­ing screen, to what action should occur on every sin­gle click, tap or shake, is defined in this doc­u­ment.  We may pass this doc­u­ment to the client to assure that we are still on the same page with the intend­ed func­tion­al­i­ty.  Some­times a visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the ideas helps flush out some issues that were not brought up in the scop­ing phase.  As soon as we’ve cap­tured all changes, or if none are request­ed by the client, we can sign-off on IA and move into Cre­ative Design and Soft­ware Development.

The Cre­ative Design and Soft­ware Devel­op­ment phas­es may move in par­al­lel paths, espe­cial­ly if there are cer­tain back end devel­op­ment tasks that are inde­pen­dent of the UI on the mobile app.  Some Inter­nal Dis­cus­sion may be required by the var­i­ous teams to assure that the devel­op­ment process is com­ing togeth­er as the client has request­ed.  The project man­ag­er comes in to assure that the efforts by all teams are seam­less and run­ning accord­ing to sched­ule.  The devel­op­ment process is com­plete when a func­tion­al build is released.

QA Process

In some cas­es, the Inter­nal Alpha Test­ing QA process is almost as impor­tant and com­pre­hen­sive as the Devel­op­ment Process.  If dead­lines are tight (they almost always are), the project man­ag­er may impose an expe­dit­ed devel­op­ment process to have a work­ing demo avail­able for the client as quick­ly as pos­si­ble.  If such is the case, it is not uncom­mon for the mobile app to have glitch­es, bugs and oth­er issues.  Even under the best inten­tions of the devel­op­ment team, there may be crit­i­cal dif­fer­ences in the intend­ed func­tion­al­i­ty vs actu­al, and a strong QA team can iden­ti­fy such issues and assure imme­di­ate rec­ti­fi­ca­tion.  After (or often­times con­cur­rent­ly) exhaus­tive efforts have been made by the QA team to iden­ti­fy issues, the devel­op­ment teams can make Revi­sions to the code to cor­rect out­stand­ing prob­lems.  The app becomes a Beta ver­sion and if need­ed, can be shown to the client (at this point, anx­ious­ly await­ing to see some­thing) for their own QA.  In some cas­es we may decide against this and per­form our own Beta Test­ing andRevi­sions to have a final release ver­sion avail­able sooner.

App Store Process

The final release get’s sign off and Client Approval before it under­goes App Store Sub­mis­sion, in this case, through Apple.  Depend­ing on the com­plex­i­ty of the app, this process could take as few as five days to as long as six weeks.  Typ­i­cal­ly, for an expe­ri­enced devel­op­ment house such as ours, the process takes on aver­age two to three weeks, and has a 90% approval rate.  There have been some cas­es where we’ve had to per­form App Revi­sions to get the approval nod from the App Store.  Apple sends an email noti­fi­ca­tion once the app has been Approved and is ready for Dis­tri­b­u­tion.  A hyper­link to the avail­able app is pro­vid­ed by Apple as well.  At this point the project has end­ed, or is ready for a sec­ond phase of enhance­ments, and the entire process starts over.

If the process is as com­pre­hen­sive as the above, the entire process gen­er­al­ly requires a min­i­mum of four months until com­ple­tion.  This is just a rough esti­mate, some projects have been com­plet­ed in as lit­tle as one month (includ­ing the app store approval process) and oth­ers have tak­en well over a year.

If you’ve got a mobile app that you want built – look no fur­ther.  ISBX can build all types of apps for all types of clients.  There’s no bet­ter mobile app devel­op­ment agency in Los Ange­les.  At least that’s what we think. =)