How should developers pace up with iOS or Android Mobile App development? Here’s a tentative report on the processes that affect the time and cost of mobile app development!
If you have finally decided to build your mobile app, It can be safely assumed that you are aware of the business objectives. You must be having a budget to start and cover all the expenses that you will come across. Must be knowing from where to hire dedicated developers and what skills they must have. You must be aware of the research, hardware, and software required to accomplish the entire process. Also, you need to know the steps within the software development lifecycle – right from the initiation of the idea, planning, design, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance. Additionally, you must know the licensing, permissions, legalities, feasibility of the idea, and the niche markets and audience to target.
But the entire thing rests on how much will it cost. Every other step is decided based on the cost bifurcation for every individual step in the mobile app development lifecycle. Starting with the design, the developers need to chalk out time, effort, and resources to create software design specifications, wireframes, prototypes, and mockups which will require approval from the clients. These designs must match the client’s requirements, and can be converted into actual screens once they agree.
Planning, Analysis, Design
A lot of research goes into creating wireframes with every specific detail. Once a preliminary sketch is in place, the second key activity is to create technical designs. It involves creating entity relationship diagrams, UML Diagrams – Activity diagrams, Use case diagrams, interaction overview diagrams, State machine UML diagrams, Sequence UML diagrams, Class diagrams, Object diagrams, Component diagrams, Composite structure diagrams, Deployment diagrams, Package diagrams, and Profile diagrams.
Technical architects, specialists, and DevOps engineers in Android app development companies are involved in the process of writing coding standards, a list of project tasks, and approximate project timelines, before the third key activity of quality verification and validation.
Quality assurance engineers verify and validate the designs to code ratio, any loopholes in the process, any broken links, and any unfulfilled objectives. The final designs are then given to the project manager for approval. The team can move on to the next project phase, once the manager approves all the designs.
Implementation and Integration of Code
Like the design, there are many indispensable steps toward creating the digital products that you want. Teams in iOS app development companies start by transforming assumptions and ideas into complete and detailed product specifications. This is where the real work starts. It is essential to have professional support from a project manager, UX designer, business analysts, and other stakeholders. To make way for quality infrastructure that can be used to make a great product.
Idea initiation, planning, and design are the longest phases in the project development lifecycle. The design phase models the way a software application works. It includes app architecture with programming languages, industry practices, overall design, use of templates, boilerplate code, user interfaces, platforms, and programming.
Code Writing/Development
Software developers are the people who are efficient troubleshooters. They find respite in resolving a problem that has been there for a while. They constantly evolve in the process, learn new ways of solving a problem and implement new techniques, by making use of new and varied tools and technologies. Sometimes they can put an occasional fix in place, but it is a part of a more complex strategic solution.
Besides the regular phases of the software development lifecycle, source control, continuous integration, and SDLC Management Systems play a huge role in the continuous evolution of software development. Implementing the security plan, keeping the code at a single location, with secure and logged access, ensuring that every component is compatible through the whole development cycle, fighting out significant challenges at the end when developers brought every component together, and preventing every conflict and duplicated work to make it look real and unique.
SDLC Management Systems add transparency to each phase and project. It adds analytics, bug tracking, and works management systems. Such metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) can be used to improve parts of the cycle that are not running efficiently.
Before discussing the testing phase, let’s again go back to the planning stage. Sketching project feasibility and analysis sub-phase also requires defining any prototype system requirements. Evaluating alternatives to existing prototypes, perform research and analysis to determine the needs of end users. Software Requirement Specification is also prepared in this phase by the developers. All this requires 1-3 weeks depending upon the size of the project and the availability of the developers.
Testing and Maintenance
Besides the user interfaces, systems interfaces, network requirements, and databases, the developers then prepare Software Design Specification (SDS) after developing Software Requirement Specification (SRS). After initial slogging through the planning, analysis, design, and development phases, we can safely assume that 75 – 80% of the work has already been done. But building software is not the end. It must be tested to check if the resultant software is bug-free.
Next is the implementation phase where the overall design and developed code are integrated into different modules, again integrated into a primary source code by leveraging the training environments to detect further errors or defects. The implementation combines developers’ efforts through user notification, installation of hardware, software, and user training resources until the system is in production in accordance with the defined user requirements. Additionally, some filling steps include:
- Gathering facts
- Making command decisions
- Prioritizing features
- Suggesting alternative solutions
- Drawing specifications
- Implementing logical systems
- Planning out requirements – the choice of project development methodology, technologies, tools, libraries, API, and third-party integrations.
The software development lifecycle does not end when the software product reaches the market. In fact, it is always a work in process. It needs to add those versions and bug fixes, must assemble new information. It must be at par with the competition. If it does not offer what others are offering. There are chances of losing existing customers and very less chances of gaining new ones.
Towards the End: How much time does it take to develop Android and iOS Applications?
App development agencies in India take 4 to 6 months on average, but it really depends upon the app’s complexity. A simple app takes 2-4 months to market. A complex app with more than 20-25 features takes 9+ months to market. Also, the development time is impacted by (1) The complexity of an idea, (2) the precise requirements, (3) the accuracy of the final product, and (4) The business expertise. All the conditions are much more intense, to say the least. but it is all in a day’s work * many months in sequence depending upon the client’s budget, the size of the project, the development team’s proximity with tools in hand, their time zone differences, the ever-persistent issues, getting plagued by a bug, stripping down a few modules to integrate others, and sensibly integrating the system into a workable unit on the basis of MVP (if applicable).
