A few days back, I was at a lunch with my team, discussing day to day activities at the company. My company is a products company involved in developing mobile banking applications.
Mobile applications development is an interesting and complex one, considering the variety of platforms (operating systems), form factors and companies involved. Optimizing user interface experience for the user is a critical factor deciding the success of the product.
Now we as developers we expecting a well defined set of process for certain things like security, user interface and blah blah… That started of an interesting discussion.
Since we are developing a new product, there is no benchmark for what we need to do and how we need to achieve it. The product keeps evolving; I myself know how much we have evolved in the past 1 year when we started off to where we are now. There is no defined path/process in a startup. Different people will come up with different ideas on different things. For some things like security, things will get clear, but for some other things like UI and various functionalities we as developers, have completely no control. Some things could be solved by consulting domain experts but ultimately the user will decide the things. The out come of this discussion was, don’t expect things to be defined. The development is a continuous process – a regenerative one. Probably the real development could actually start when the customer gets his hands on the product.
A recent article published by a mobile development expert stated that – “To develop a simple mobile application in 5 languages for 50 different phones, it would require around 7500 builds, averaging around $ 2500 per build”. A scary scenario indeed.
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