New Year’s Resolutions for App Development and Testing

Enterprise mobility will apparently lead IT investments in 2016, so expect extra attention and oversight of your mobility projects in the coming year.

While not everyone loves making New Year’s Resolutions, this is a great time to think about the big picture and make sure you are prioritizing the right things.

As a starting point, here are five New Year’s Resolutions that you can bring into your business which will serve you well.

1. Create a solid mobile strategy

If your organization hasn’t actually written down and circulated your business’ mobile strategy, 2016 is the year to fix it. Although this is rather like building an airplane while it is already in flight, everything becomes easier when there is a thoughtful strategy in place.

If you need a third-party perspective on developing your mobile strategy, bring in outside experts to help you articulate it.

2. Get a grip on app security

Data security is the most common barrier to realizing mobile initiatives, according to a survey of enterprise decision-makers.

Few people will have missed the massive and regular data security breaches of 2015, so this is far from an irrational fear. In fact, we have reached the point that we are so used to hearing about massive data breaches that as a consumer of news, that it’s getting pretty boring.

If you don’t have the internal resources to deliver proficient and exhaustive security testing, you need to make a quick resolution to bring in experts that do have that experience.

3. Get clarity on what to outsource

Gartner reports that by 2017, the demand for enterprise mobile apps will outstrip internal capabilities by five to one.

That doesn’t mean that you can sit back until 1st January 2017 and wait for that sudden spike. The demand for enterprise applications is growing rapidly and the sooner that you find a solution to the demand, the stronger the position you will be in.

Going it alone entirely may seem like a good idea to maintain full control. However, this is rarely the fastest or even the most cost-effective route. Gartner recommends that enterprises need to adopt a mixed-sourcing approach. Organizations need to find partners that they can trust to manage some or many aspects of mobile app development and testing.

4. Shift from QA to QE

The traditional position of testing being that thing you do at the end needs to change. Quality Assurance (QA) needs to shift towards Quality Engineering (QE).

Although this is happening already with Agile dominating and DevOps increasing in popularity, there is more that most enterprises need to do.

At each step in software delivery, measures can be taken to determine if the process is working and the product is working. Armed with consistent measurements, QE teams can assess software readiness days ahead or behind schedule, and defect levels at implementation.

5. Automate more testing

According to a 2015 survey of testers, 74.5% of organizations are automating less than 50% of their testing. However, in our experience, most organizations can comfortably run 80-90% of their testing in an automated way.

There are now advanced mobile automation testing tools that can help the management of this process, whether you use open-source or commercial testing tools.

Whether your barriers are short-term bandwidth or a longer-term skills gap, increasing mobile test automation can drastically free up resources and increase testing efficiency.

If you need help with executing any of these resolutions, get in touch so we can show you how to make this your most successful year of mobility yet.