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Tag: mobile app development

Rookie Mistake: Not Managing Mobile Customer Feedback
Managing mobile customer feedback effectively could be the single-most important success factor for your company and customers. Call it addiction or habit, but every passing day we encounter new data confirming the growth of mobile app usage and total hours spent interacting with them. In the “2015 U.S. Mobile App Report,” the CoreMetrics team has shared some useful data metrics regarding digital media consumption growth and app usage. A couple of notable themes or trends are:
1. Americans across all age groups spend increasing time on Mobile Apps: By mid-2015, Americans on average had spent approximately 68 hours per month on their mobile devices. That number rises even further to more than 90 hours per month among millenials.
2. A whopping 50 percent of time is spent within a single app and about 90 percent on the top five apps: Not only is the average time spent on mobile app usage increasing, it is concentrated in a few limited apps. A staggering 50 percent of their time is spent working within a single app, and that number tapers off rapidly as popularity, utility and quality decreases.
It is evident from this data that you want customers to include your app on their home screen. That means not only having a compelling utility, but also ensuring that the app is of the highest quality. In this article I will illustrate how you can accomplish that by incorporating mobile customer feedback loops in every stage of the development cycle and involving and engaging customers through your path to production. Along the way, we will look at various open source and commercial tools that enhance the ability to collect feedback at various stages of the continuous delivery pipeline.

Typical Continuous Delivery Pipeline

Most agile or lean software organizations have an automated continuous integration and delivery pipeline that helps manage the flow of release artifacts to production. While there might be nuanced variations across teams and enterprises, the typical path to production for apps or services is represented through the steps shown:

It will be useful to review this pipeline as we explore options to incorporate feedback throughout the path to production.

Continuous Delivery and Mobile Customer Feedback

Not too long ago, most negative user feedback consisted solely of poor ratings, comments and rants on social media platforms. Without having context, metrics and data, most development teams were left guessing on how best to reproduce and determine extent of the issue. This usually resulted in issues and features getting prioritized in an ad hoc manner.

Today, numerous open source and commercial tools are available that help solve the feedback problem. Most of them can be categorized in the following broad areas:
- Instrumentation
  Despite recent reports that Facebook made its Android App crash to test user loyalty, most app crashes are not of the deliberate nature. There are a plethora of crash testing and reporting solutions, the most popular being Crashlytics (part of Twitter Fabric), Apteligent (formerly Crittercism), TestFlight (Apple) and HockeyApp (Microsoft). They each provide a client-side SDK to capture and report crash reports and a server-side service to to manage and analyze those reports.
- Phased Releases – Alpha, Beta, Staged Rollout
  Android application developers can take advantage of the alpha, beta and staged rollout capabilities available as part of Google Play. For alpha and beta tests, production APK is not required. Developers have a number of options to target specific groups for their alpha and beta tests. They also can utilize feedback channels available within the app to obtain feedback. Staged rollout allows a developer to progress from alpha and beta testing to production in a phased manner, constantly collecting feedback and metrics, comparing against baseline (if available) and progressing to 100 percent in production based on satisfactory results. Developers on the iOS platform can avail of beta testing capabilities provided by TestFlight and can invite up to 2,000 beta testers via email to test the App pre-production.
- Direct In-App Feedback
  Gone are the days when email, messenger or app store comments provided the only semblance of feedback. Customers increasingly expect to communicate via the app, and provide feedback without leaving it. Meanwhile, mobile app developers have better to tools to scale that feedback and manage it effectively to address bugs, prioritize features and get context—screen shots, system information, etc.—for specific feedback. HelpStack is an open source framework that makes in-app customer feedback relatively easy, so they can report issues, attach screen shots, embed device information and more. Customer feedback can be reported via email, or help desk integrations are available.
  Apptentive, Crittercism, HelpShift, UserVoice and Parature are some of the notable commercial solutions that enable in-app feedback.
- Metrics & Performance
  When business analytics do not provide provide adequate answers, diving deeper into technical data might provide insights into what is going wrong. Two key mobile customer feedback metrics worth tracking is app uptime and performance. App uptime helps identify customers facing crashes while performance issues could be impacting engagement rates. Some of the tools mentioned in this article do provide an APM solution that enables monitoring of these key metrics.
- Experimentation & Analytics
  A/B testing or multivariate testing is a data-driven experimentation approach to promoting app feature changes. While some of the above tools enabled you as a developer to better listen to your app community, A/B split testing allows you to validate your hypothesis and invest further in features and capabilities that demonstrate lift.
  Apptimize, Optimizely and MixPanel are few of the available commercial products that offer multivariate testing capabilities that can be incorporated in some situations without code modification or app updates. They also provide abilities to compare test campaigns against baseline and promote features that demonstrate positive feedback.
Incorporating Mobile Customer Feedback In Continuous Delivery

Leveraging data-driven tools throughout the continuous delivery pipeline increases the odds of a quality and high-utility mobile app. Even in situations where it is not possible to expose apps prematurely, it is possible to “dog food” your app—a term referencing a team or company that actively utilizes its own product with the intent of testing it. For example, frequent builds tied to developer commits enable alpha build testers and other team members to download and test the app. Meanwhile, beta builds can be downloaded by other members of the company. As release candidates emerge the beta community can be expanded to include members of the app community.

So take steps to incorporate mobile customer feedback loops at every step of the development cycle and garner a majority of the app user’s engagement time. Would love to hear how you and your teams are leveraging tools and techniques to build better apps and continuously listen to customer feedback.
April 8, 2016
Testing Mobile Apps? Consider a Mobile Device Cloud

Market demand for mobile app development services is expected to grow at least five times faster than internal IT organizations’ capacity to deliver by 2017, according to Gartner. As a result, enterprises must use the most efficient, effective and secure methods possible for their mobile app development processes, including mobile app testing.

Today’s users expect the highest quality user experience from their mobile applications, so testing should be a top priority for enterprise IT departments that want to keep up with these expectations. Mobile testing is more complex than legacy application testing, however, because of the myriad platforms, networks, OSes and devices on which the applications run. To ensure their mobile apps perform reliably for every user, businesses must test on key variations of this growing universe of mobile devices.

Sharing a single large pool of mobile devices across large or geographically distributed testing teams creates a number of challenges that risk bleeding IT and QA testing budgets dry. Mobile device access management has been plagued with inefficiency and risk, requiring IT teams to purchase an unreasonable number of devices to cover their enterprise’s growing needs. Inevitably, many of these devices remain unused or become lost, which can stall testing and result in idle mobile engineers.

In addition to the cost and inefficiencies of having multiple mobile devices, security has become a top concern for today’s enterprises, thanks to the rise in data breaches. To avoid complications, enterprises must hold mobile testing practices to the highest security standards. A data breach during app testing can create significant cost for an enterprise and harm its reputation. Plus, for industries that must adhere to Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA or other federal privacy regulations, a data breach or unauthorized user access can create a regulatory compliance issue.

The Mobile Device Cloud Option

A mobile device cloud may be the answer to the cost, security and compliance issues enterprises face in their mobile app testing environment. It can serve developers looking to test and debug applications and QA teams performing manual or automated testing, and facilitates collaboration among these groups and other stakeholders such as marketing and customer support.

A mobile device cloud offers organizations four significant benefits: security, accessibility, speed and cost. Let’s explore each in a bit more detail:

Security

On-premises, private mobile device clouds access a centrally managed pool of devices and mobile apps and enable testing within an enterprise’s corporate infrastructure and behind the firewall. This creates a highly secure environment for proprietary apps and sensitive data throughout the testing process, which is managed in-house. In addition, private, cloud-based mobile testing can improve compliance with regulatory standards by reducing the chances of a data breach or unauthorized user access.

Accessibility

Private mobile device clouds can still meet the enterprise need for global access—developers, testers and mobile engineers can securely access centrally managed mobile devices from locations anywhere across the globe without compromising corporate data security.

Speed

Technology advancements in mobile application testing platforms now allow automated, continuous testing simultaneously on multiple devices. This allows private mobile device clouds to be even more effective in increasing an enterprise’s app testing speed and quality without compromising security.

Cost

With IT budgets for QA and testing increasing 9 percent over just the last year, reaching 35 percent of enterprise IT team’s total budget in 2015 according to Capgemini’s “World Quality Report 2015,” IT teams need affordable options that still maintain efficiency, effectiveness and security. Private mobile device clouds often are much more cost-effective than off-premises, public device clouds, while also providing an agile, efficient and effective solution.

BI Intelligence predicts that mobile phone sales will surpass 2 billion in 2016, which means demand for enterprise applications will continue to increase rapidly. More enterprises already have begun using on-premises, private mobile device clouds and are seeing the benefits of this secure, agile, affordable option for their mobile application QA needs.

For those enterprises that haven’t yet considered private mobile device clouds, 2016 is a great opportunity to upgrade your mobile testing with an improved solution and to meet both employees’ and customers’ high expectations for enterprise mobile user experience.

March 3, 2016
DevOps Q&A: Datalink’s Dennis Vickers on MobileApps

Companies are custom-building mobile enterprise applications to enhance employee productivity on smartphones. devopsy.kinsta.cloud recently spoke with Dennis Vickers, director of Software Solutions at data center services and solutions provider Datalink about this trend and where DevOps fits in to the process.

devopsy.kinsta.cloud: Why does applying smartphones to business initiatives require so much additional custom-built software?

Vickers: Companies have developed and designed legacy software to group things that need to get done together into applications. With mobile application development the focus is more granular in terms of functionality. It’s not that the applications that we designed for the legacy environment don’t fit on the smaller screen, though they don’t. It’s really that the whole concept of having a group of functionalities in a single application doesn’t really work in a mobile environment. You need to rethink the way that not only your applications work but really the way that you do work. You need to think more in terms of granular work than accumulation of work.

In finance, for example, you might have an application that combines accounts receivable, accounts payable, even expense management. You would have an application that would have all of that functionality in it. For mobile apps, what would make sense is to break out the expense management part of that and make that a mobile app that allows users to be able to use their smartphones to actually capture expenses as they’re incurred, as opposed to having to save a receipt or remember what your expenses were and then go back to an application and fill that in later at the office.

devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How do you apply DevOps development approaches to provide usability on mobile devices for the most needed features and functions of in-house applications?

Vickers: Mobile applications tend to be single functions focused on getting something done. Users are much less tolerant of anomalies in the software, whether that anomaly is a bug, a poor user interface or anything that is undesirable about the application. They’re not nearly as willing to look for workarounds with a mobile app as they are with legacy applications.

You have to have a continuous delivery approach with mobile applications because the time frame between deliveries has to be accelerated. You have to automate that process. We’ve made good use of some of the automation tools, specifically Puppet, around doing continuous delivery. We use tools for source control and QA (quality assurance). Some type of automated delivery process is critical because the turn time for release has to be shortened. There’s just not a willingness for users to wait long periods between releases.

devopsy.kinsta.cloud: Can you discuss the custom-built software project where you developed a custom equipment maintenance app that feeds into the customer’s proprietary maintenance application?

Vickers: We developed that for an aerospace company that had a requirement to provide field service for one of the Department of Defense systems. They had to be able to maintain large pieces of equipment. We had to build an application that enabled them to be at the equipment and do the data collection that they needed at that time. It walked them through the data collection process right then.

Before that, they had a paper process where they would print out instructions, go out and write down the information that they needed to collect, and then go back and enter that into an application. This allowed them to be able to do that closer to the actual event, which cut transcription errors and data collection errors and made the whole process much more efficient. That was an extension of a legacy app that added quite a bit of value.

devopsy.kinsta.cloud: For that Department of Defense project, were there particular development tools or approaches in DevOps for the software?

Vickers: We used an agile methodology where we iteratively released the software and did test and review and then essentially layered the application. We provide a layering process as we build and add features to the application. We delivered to the customer through an automated process using Chef. We use Jenkins to do some release management, but we often revert back to Chef or Puppet.

What we haven’t done a lot of yet, which I think is important and I see growing in the mobile platform, is monitoring. I think that monitoring is an important part of DevOps. I haven’t seen that move into the mobile environment nearly as much as I think it needs to. I think it will happen in the short term. I think there’s some good monitoring tools out there that are coming online or that are maturing and are going to be adopted for mobile app dev.

devopsy.kinsta.cloud: There was another project where you custom-built a jobs app that enables union members to apply for posted jobs without going into the union hall.

Vickers: We developed a mobile app so union members can review jobs that are available and request the job through the app. They can receive job assignments and electronic tickets to go out and do that job. It saves traveling down to the union hall on a regular basis and makes the whole process much more efficient.

The only difference in that project is that we needed to integrate with the back end through an API. The tool we used to help us interface with that API and manage that API integration was Postman. We use it for testing, managing and documenting APIs we build or work with.

February 16, 2016