30 Aug Transform your software development process

The top 5 startups, with a combined team of 500 people have become in less than 5 years worth more than established companies with tens of thousands of employees, and reaching back more 20 years. Companies like Microsoft and Google defined the software world. But now there’s a new generation of companies challenging the status quo in Redmond and Mountain View.

So how do successful startups build so much value in such a short time?  One of the many ingredients is achieving high speed and high rates of delivery and learning cycles – and there are several frameworks and technologies that are key to that.

1. Cross-platform tools in mobile development

Statistics released by Dot Com Infoway show us that about 83% of developers utilize cross-platform tools. These third-party tools are used for initiatives like analytics, crash-reporting and testing. After all, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel; great tools are out there to make developers’ jobs easier and more cost-efficient.

Here’s three of the best:

No. 1: Sauce Labs for testing Sauce Labs is the leading cloud-based web and mobile application automated testing platform, built over one of the most used automated testing platform, Selenium. Sauce Labs enables you to easily scale, to speed up test cycles and boost capacity without the hassle of managing infrastructure.

How can it help your business?  – drastically reduces execution time (and costs) and can be scaled with little to no costs, increases testing coverage.

No. 2: Piwik for Analytics Piwik is a tool for cross platform Apps, and provides simple integrations with almost all platforms from Node.js to WordPress. It can be used for user data tracking, Event tracking and campaign tracking.

How can it help your business?  – Control your proprietary data by hosting your own server and data. If you don’t know what your users are doing, you don’t know what you are doing. Own your analytics data within a proprietary, custom tailored engine.

No. 3: Crashlytics for crash testing An industry leader for crash reporting for iOS apps. Crashlytics monitors all crashes in your iOS app and reports these to the server along with the reason(s) behind each crash. It captures the precise line of code that is causing the crash so developers can reproduce the crash. This tool helps you not having any answers when users say “I was just using the app and it crashed” and you had just no idea where to start from?

How can it help your business?  –  Avoid costly problems by monitoring crashes as they happen.

2.  Hybrid mobile development frameworks

No. 1: Ionic – A robust system that has been used to create over 875,000 mobile apps. It helps you build native-feeling mobile apps using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Its open source framework has a library of mobile-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components, gestures, and tools for building highly interactive apps. It is built with Sass and AngularJS.

Ionic deals with cosmetic and front-end aspects, goes perfectly with PhoneGap for deeper JavaScript development.

How can it help your business?  –  Ionic Framework has many benefits over pure native apps, specifically in terms of platform support, speed of development, and access to 3rd party code.  Develop once (okay, maybe once and a half) instead of twice, and have the same look and feel across all devices and platforms.  Add to that hot update capabilities and you’re set.  Nice, huh?

No. 2: React Native – At React.js Conf 2015, Facebook announced React Native, a new way to write native iOS and Android applications with JavaScript using the familiar React.js.

React Native focuses on making life easier for developers by providing a consistent experience across all platforms. Facebook owns React Native and deploys it across multiple production apps.

How can it help your business?  –  Regular hybrid frameworks transform development into a highly-efficient process (less need of specialized knowledge) and are great for simple apps but have their limitations once apps get beyond a volume of features, for example.  But React brings here a huge promise: extend into a space once reserved for native apps by writing JavaScript.

No. 3: Meteor – an open-source JavaScript framework written on top of Node.js that focuses on real-time web applications.  It’s not very new, it has already reached a stable version (1.0), but lately more and more people are discussing and adopting it to create their applications. In fact, Meteor has already reached 334k unique installs.

Meteor simplifies the development process for app development in three ways: 1. Unified package system 2. One language everywhere 3. Radically less code

How can it help your business?  –  Building apps using Meteor gives you the ability, without any extra effort, to create real-time web applications that work near-instantaneously. This empowers businesses to start using live data, rather than old and out of date information.

3. Angular

AngularJS, a Google-maintained framework deserves a category of its own. It enables the extension of HTML vocabulary for your application, resulting in an expressive, readable and quick-to-develop app. The amount of code is compressed into less than a quarter of the original code. The amount of time to build the same app from scratch takes roughly a third of the time including learning the framework along the way.

In terms of productivity, the improvements are dramatic and resulting applications are more functional to boot as new features can be added.

How can it help your business?  –  AngularJS extends an easy draft to carry out tests and maintain developments. It offers enterprise-ready single page web apps, fulfilling the needs of businesses that long to have rich Javascript MVC framework web and app development.

Summary

Whether it’s creating compelling front-end experiences or cross platform testing, the leaders in mobile app development have a go-to set of tools to move at speed – and continue to learn while they do it. For any business that invests in these tools and frameworks the payoff will be immediate.

Your applications will be liberated and so will your development team. Your development sprints will be faster and you’ll unlock real-time insights into what’s working and what’s not.

 

If you’re interested in how any of these tools could be deployed on your next development project, register for a free consultation with one our experts.