8 Best Practices for Third-Party iPhone App Developers

by Matt Gratt on 21/06/10 at 5:00 am

Matt Gratt is a technology marketing professional. His blog can be found at Grattisfaction and he is also an Editor for iPhoneCTO.

iOS is an exciting new business computing platform, providing a robust application environment in a visually appealing, easy-to-use package. To fully utilize the power of your iPhones and iPads in a business setting, you may need to create customized business apps, unique to your company’s industry and business processes. (If your company has more than 500 employees and a D&B number, you can join Apple’s Enterprise Developer Program, enabling you to create custom in-house apps.)

However, you may not have the knowledge (Objective C, the interface builder and/or graphic design) within your own IT department to create iPhone apps. As such, you’ll probably get a third-party vendor. These projects can go right or wrong depending on how they are managed. I spoke with some top independent iPhone developers to find the best practices for outsourced iPhone development work.

Before You Begin Development

Survey your potential users or run focus groups to build requirements – You may have a good idea on what would be best for your organization, but potential users may have a very different picture in their minds of what will

help them do their jobs. Try sending a survey to your employees through email, through a third

party system like SurveyMonkey. Alternatively, hold in-house focus groups to get real feedback on what functionality will be critical and what functionality is unnecessary. This will help you limit the scope and avoid spending on functionality that will not result in increased productivity or sales. – Jason King, Accella

Create an Application Definition Statement – At Future Workshops we always create an Application Definition Statement before starting work. This is a single sentence which describes what the App will do, who it is for and how it will differentiate itself from any other [apps/alternative systems]. – Matt Brooke-Smith, Future Workshops

Feel Confident About Your Development Team – Talk with the development firm on the phone, discuss your needs, make sure they understand what your objectives are. Send them your project details. Ask about prior projects and clients they have worked on. Ask for references. Ask about their development process. Who is going to be developing your project? Will it be outsourced to another shop offshore or developed in the US? – Alex Moazed, Applico

During Development

Know Exactly What You’re Getting – Front-load the design and usability testing. You shouldn’t write a single line of code until you’ve put the wireframes through usability testing by unacquainted users. Yes, you can do usability testing on paper wireframes. It works great. – Matt Brooke-Smith, Future Workshops

Test Early, Test Often – Get regular ad-hoc test builds and be an active participant in providing feedback. Show the app to friends, family, co-workers. The app may work functionally but it has to be easy to use with minimal instruction. Leave time in your development schedule to adjust things if needed. – Greg Raiz, raizlabs.com

Designate a “Champion” – When working with a third party developer, it’s crucial that you have a “Champion” of the project, someone that acts as a point person within your organization to help gather assets and information, drive internal reviews of the application, and ensure the apps success. Typically, our biggest hiccup in delivering apps is waiting on feedback and information from clients, if we can have someone that is the person that owns the app, they usually are more eager to give us the information and assets we need. Don’t have too many cooks in the kitchen. – Jason King, Accella

After Development

Focus on User Adoption – User adoption is where we see the biggest challenge in post implementation support for apps. Making sure that users are properly trained as well as see the value of your application, understanding how it will help them and make their life/job easier. This will be made much easier by making sure that each department or user type for the application has input in the application’s design and creation. – Jason King, Accella

Maintain Your App – Keep updating and maintaining the application. This is key to an application’s

success. If it’s an enterprise app, you can contract the development firm for annual support/maintenance. They should include turn-around time and support procedures in their support SLA. – Alex Moazed, Applico

Outsourced app development can only be successful if managed properly. All of the developers I talked to agreed: the keys are knowing (and communicating) exactly what you want, staying closely involved in the development process, and planning for the whole lifecycle of your app. If you follow these three keys, you will have a much more successful relationship with your contract developer.

How do you keep your iPhone developer partners on track? If you’re a developer, how can clients work more effectively with you? What are your best practices? Leave a comment and share with the community…