Maximizing Efficiency in Enterprise App Development: A New Design Strategy

Creating your mobile app within an enterprise setting can be challenging. You start with an idea at the beginning and a clear intention of a functioning mobile app at the end of your process. Along the way, you face the complex task of integrating the app with your data stack within your enterprise.

For consumer-facing apps, the process is linear: beginning with the user stories and refining them into Figma designs. Once the workflow finalizes, you start the development process by creating a UI that interacts with public cloud services through APIs.

This process works well if the app does not interact with the enterprise data stack stored behind a firewall. Once we cross into the enterprise domain, the development process becomes more complex. The linear design from dev to deployment no longer produces a smooth transition from one process stage to another.

The Linear Approach to Creating a Mobile App

The linear enterprise app development process often comes to a screeching halt when it moves into the testing phase. In that phase, we may discover user authentication complications as we move the app package from a dev server to a test server.

As the backend APIs move through various environments in the testing, QA, and deployment processes, incompatibilities may continue to surface and significantly disrupt the app development and deployment process. Therefore, a more efficient approach may be to replace the linear path with a dual-pronged app development process that will surface any backend connectivity issues before the first app release cycle.

As you can see in the diagram below, once we enter the design process (orange), we bifurcate the UI design from the API design. Once the API design is complete, the API development (green) process can commence independent of the UI design. Subsequently, utilizing mocked-up API data,  we will perform the API tests within respective environments (blue) while the lengthier and more rugged UI design and development process continues in parallel.

A Dual-Pronged Approach to First-Release App Development

Once the API testing consummates, we can start the merging process of UI with the APIs. This parallel development effort aims to resolve the complex API integration issues before the testing and QA process. The linear approach could introduce significant delays within the release schedule while the backend team scrambles to resolve the environment-related problems.

Subsequent development cycles can follow the standard linear approach since we have addressed most unknown factors during the first release cycle.