One of the joys of owning an iPhone is seeing that my applications have awaiting updates. As a consumer, there is a lot of joy in being able to enjoy new features without having to pay extra money or in some cases, buy a completely new phone.
As an innovative organization, you might feel a similar excitement in rolling out new features to your customers. Whether it’s to fix a long-standing bug or to develop a new feature to drive customer conversions or converts from a competitor solution, there are several best practices to keep in mind. We will dive into those in today’s blog post.
- Tip #1: Understand Development Requirements: In order to develop a requirement, you need to know if anyone will want it. Collaborate with your engineering, marketing, and sales teams to gather feedback and subsequent technical requirements deemed necessary from the conversations. From here, the product manager should go and develop mockups that illustrate the eventual product vision.
- Tip #2: Discussion and Collaboration: Once a draft of the mockup is complete, the team should come together and examine compliance and feasibility. For the engineering teams, the information gathered here should enable the creation of a development timeline, which includes everything from process flow to the necessary building blocks of the application such as APIs. The plan needs to be transparent to everybody involved.
- Tip #3: Begin the Automation: Now begins the process of DevOps. With many of our customers, we encourage them to begin integrating automation through automated testing and code quality evaluation. Starting this part of the process will minimize future bottlenecks in the feature development process.
- Tip #4: Discussion and Collaboration (Part 2): The nuances of DevOps require a streamlined communication process, especially as new questions and requirements arise. Everyone must be coordinated despite different tasks, and this saves on frustrations, redundancies, and unprofessional moments. Slack, JIRA, and SharePoint are some of the commonly recommended platforms on the market today.
- Tip #5: Focus on Unity: Finally, make sure that everyone is working on identical development environments. Even having a different version of the same software or a slightly altered code library can lead to incompatibility issues, which in itself is a mess that seeps into communication.
With these tips in mind, your organization can embrace agility while developing an innovative feature. Bear in mind that as you also become more experienced in these best practices, your time to delivery will also decline.
Elevate Your Products Today
Are you trying to figure out how you can build new features into your applications? Reach out to us today at sales@perficient.com where you can discover our process for leveraging DevOps and our product know how to translate into success. You can also download our Amazon Web Services guide below to learn more about how you can use AWS to develop specific solutions.
Learn more about our Amazon practice here and our overall practices here.
