A word about Release Management

Perhaps you are thinking of getting an App developed with us, perhaps you already have and just need a refresher…..

 

In the lead up to the first release of your App, you and your team will be provided with a ‘release candidate’. That is a version of the app, that hangs together in a functionality coherent way. It may or may not contain all of the features that are meant to be in the final version. It may just be a MVP (Minimum Viable Product), which is the smallest amount of app that can be released and still provide the optimum user experience. As part of that, you will receive your access to the issue tracking system, and a primer document on how, when and why to log issues. As part of issue logging, it is important to provide one issue per issue logged. And also to concentrate on the Priority to you and your business. The priority is owned by you, and is used to direct the team at Digital8 to work on the most important things to you, the client, and your business outcomes.

The landscape for the industry in app development, is such that the end user is now well accustomed to the idea that Apps update often to provide new content. Here at Digital8, we provide as part of you app launch, a weekly release cycle, pushing new fixes as part of the Warranty period of your application development. This will allow timely release to market of fixes for issues that have been identified post launch. The aim of this cycle is to ensure that the application is completed and as close to bug free as possible, however, it should be noted that complex application development that interacts with many moving parts, can often be subject to what seems like a never ending run of small issues. Take Facebook for example, having spent over ten years and literally billions of dollars developing the app, their customer facing issue tracker still reports in excess of a thousand bugs/issues, yet millions of people successfully use the app for its prime mission every day.

This is the tightrope of feature development/issue remediation that your head of production walks everyday, ensuring that your application moves forward, whilst still maintaining an acceptable user experience.