Top 5 Tips to Improve Your App Development Team's Efficiency
Anirudh S.
Marketing Director @Trantor | Global Marketing & Growth Leader | IIM Alumna
When you start developing mobile apps, you might feel like a lot of time is spent on processes or software instead of creating the app. You’ll want to streamline your production process as much as possible to save time and get new apps to users faster. Let’s face it: If your team can’t efficiently produce quality apps, you won’t be able to release them frequently enough to keep users returning. If that sounds like you, read on for our top tips on how you can improve the efficiency of your app development team.
?Streamline Your App Development Process
The first step in improving your team’s efficiency is ensuring each member’s role is clearly defined. This will help make the team’s overall workflow more streamlined and allow each person to focus on what they do best. For example, if one person is responsible for user research and another is responsible for the design. Those tasks cannot overlap and become part of someone else’s job. Define each person’s role and the overall flow of the process so that everyone knows what to focus on and what to expect from their team members. This will also allow you to spot areas where the process could be improved.
Make use of automation
You can use many different tools to automate various parts of the app development process. Here are some of the most common tools used in app development. Testing and bug management tools - These help to coordinate testing and facilitate bug reporting across the entire team. Source control and collaboration services - You can use these to store and organize your project’s code so that everyone can easily see what’s going on at any given time. Continuous integration and delivery tools - You can use these to automate quality control and other aspects of the delivery process. You’ll want to ensure your team members are aware of all the tools you use so they can take advantage of them, too. This will help you further streamline your process.
Create a digital backlog
If you don’t already have a digital backlog, now’s the time to start creating one. A digital backlog is a collection of user stories that can be added, modified, and prioritized at any time. It will help you track changes in user needs and pain points throughout the app development process to ensure your team’s next app release addresses those issues. You can make your digital backlog available to your team members so they can add user stories as they discover them. This will allow everyone to stay on top of what needs to be addressed next in the app development process.
Establish coding standards and practices
You may be tempted to let each developer decide what standards they follow when it comes to coding, but it’s much more efficient to have a set of coding standards that everyone on the team follows. Everyone’s coding standards should be based on the industry’s best practices so that your apps remain compliant. You also want to ensure your team members use tools that allow them to write code efficiently, such as autocomplete tools, keyboard shortcuts, and source control. These will help your team save time and produce easier-to-maintain code.
Have a clear definition of done
By now, you probably know that a done list is essential for any agile process—and app development is no exception. A done list is a list of criteria the team uses to determine when a project is complete. The done list might include items such as “development is complete,” “design is complete,” “testing is complete,” and “the product has been deployed.” You can also create different done lists for different stages of the process. Once your team members know what they need to accomplish to complete a given project, they’ll be able to identify any roadblocks that might be slowing down their progress or preventing them from achieving their goal.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many ways to improve your app development team’s efficiency. Start by streamlining your overall process and ensuring everyone is on the same page. Then, use automation to save time, create a digital backlog to track changes, and establish coding standards and practices so that your apps are easy to maintain. Finally, have a clear definition to spot any issues that might slow your team down and fix them.