Dear Web & App Developer,
I trust that by now you have completed all your design, development and testing for the changes you’ve made to your websites, e-shops and mobile apps and are planning to take time off during the holiday season.
What? Not quite there, yet? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Truth be told, when I was a developer, I wasn’t prepared either. After all, isn’t life on the edge with code being tested and put into production the night before (or likely the early morning hours of the day of) the holiday code freeze period, so much more fun?
Over time, I’ve learnt that the key to you having a good holiday season is to plan and prepare for a few key things as you design, develop and test your websites and mobile apps.
Design phase:
Start early and get ahead of what the business is likely to ask you to factor into your design. Whether you are adopting a responsive web design (RWD), adaptive web design (AWD) or blended approach – there’s no getting away from the fact that it is a mobile first world and there are a very large variety of different devices to consider. Secondly, this year, you will be asked to deliver a richer-than-before, image heavy user experience to drive greater engagement. Next, you’ll be asked if the websites are SEO friendly and landing pages for on-the-fly marketing campaigns can be setup. Last but not the least, you will be asked to guarantee performance across network and device conditions, security and 100 percent availability. Delivering a consistently great user experience should be the goal of your design.
Development phase:
Given the rapidly changing business demands, it is likely you will need to adopt some variation of iterative and incremental development techniques to meet expectations. As you focus on executing those cycles, you want to ensure that most of your energies are spent on building functional capabilities. Leverage technologies that can alleviate the need for you to code for the device and network diversity from users and provide you with a buffer against the vagaries of the public internet performance and availability. You should also look to automate the management and delivery of images to significantly reduce the pressure on your development team.
Testing & Deployment phase:
This is undoubtedly the most critical phase to deliver on the business and user expectations. You need to execute various types of testing including usability testing, functional testing, security testing and stress or performance testing. But the key is to ensure your testing reflects the real world. Can you simulate real world traffic conditions on your site/app before go live for testing? Can you test by segmenting your audiences and/or selectively block users from certain geographical locations without more coding? (Remember, we are past the design phase and no time for change requests now!!!)
Since it is unlikely that all development and testing will be done in one go, continuous delivery and deployment is a fact of life. How can you do that without breaking the production website? Never mind, the “phases” may be a few hours apart – not weeks or months.
There is a lot to think about. But there are also a lot of tools and technologies that can help make life as a developer a little easier. I do hope that you will ask yourself these questions and explore the technologies available. Nothing will spoil a good holiday dinner party, than a phone call saying you are needed back at the office to fix an “urgent” issue.
Here’s wishing you a very happy holiday season!
Yours sincerely,
A fellow ex-developer
Contributed by Srinivas Padmanabharao, Director, Product Marketing, APJ, Akamai
Image credit: webdesignerdepot.com, designmodo.com, thinksem.com
