Agile Mobile Process
Anyone can develop a mobile application. These days all you need is a little programming knowledge, internet access and a laptop and off you go. At first, mobile development sounds exhilarating, especially around the time when new and exciting platforms hit the market. The iPhone phenomenon is a perfect example. In just a few short months, thousands of developers have jumped on the iPhone application bandwagon. And rightfully so as the iPhone continues to be a massive hit.
Once the initial excitement of mobile development starts to fade out, the diverse set of challenges intrinsic to mobile come to light. The full spectrum of fragmentation in mobile development is experienced most clearly and frequently when dealing with multiple development projects at once and especially when developing for multiple mobile platforms.
Imagine developing several simultaneous applications for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Java ME, Android and Windows Mobile platforms. The numerous complexities surrounding this cannot be captured in a single blog post. How does one manage a mobile development team in the face of these challenges? The answer we found at Five Mobile can be summed up in three simple words: Agile Mobile Process, or simply as AMP.
Agile Software Methodologies have been around for quite some time now and have gained significant traction within both large and small organizations. The concepts are proven to work in both desktop and web development. The Scrum process, for example, is an ingenious way of keeping things visible within an organization with minimal project management overhead.
For mobile, Agile simply makes sense. In a mobile development environment, the four Agile principles are of utmost importance:
• Individuals and interactions
• Working software
• Customer collaboration
• Responding to change
In addition to these core Agile principles, an efficient mobile development process requires a mixture of robust development tools, a well structured and experienced team, as well as the appropriate handset and market knowledge to ensure a positive ROI.
At Five Mobile, the core team, with over 25 years of combined industry experience, have tried and tested Agile for mobile. Both our internal team and our customers have come to appreciate the value of the right mobile tools, high-responsiveness to change, overall visibility and continuous working software. What makes AMP unique is that it’s a modification of the traditional Agile methodologies best suited for mobile development. It’s a mixture of both traditional and Agile principles with an emphasis on portability and cross-platform code management.
In upcoming posts we will touch on different aspects AMP and we will look at some real world examples where our process is validated both internally and externally.
