What makes a great app developer?
Rapid application development is a balancing act between several important forces. You need to find the best IT team to handle the project while also ensuring they have the right tools and the training to use them. Follow these steps correctly, and you could strengthen your connection with your user base. Fail, and trouble could follow.
Who to hire? You don’t want just anyone working on your apps. Applications are increasingly becoming the way clients and employees alike interact with companies. After all, reaching out through Web browsers and mobile devices enables a greater reach than distributing software that must be installed on a few specific terminals. Your apps will be the face of your business.
InfoWorld recently gave some tips from IT insiders that may help you build the team of your dreams instead of ending up with a group that cannot get the job done. For instance, MongoDB Quality Director Alvin Richards suggested not placing too much of the responsibility for success on a few high-profile IT workers. Losing these employees would leave the unfortunate company with a major vacancy to fill, creating a potential gap in an app release cycle that should be seamless.
In fact, assuming that IT workers are going to leave, and building that expectation in, may be prudent, as Famo.us CEO Steve Newcomb told InfoWorld. He suggested that having talented employees in the short-term is better than a long tie-up with an inadequate team member. His experience is in the startup space, and he stated that he is familiar with strong workers becoming business leaders in their own right. He is happy to reap the benefits of their coding while they are available, however.
Working with the right equipment Platform-as-a-Service tools may help you organize the ideal team you select, enabling them to collaborate easily in a rapid application development environment built for the purpose and deployed without any on-site hardware. As detailed in a Progress whitepaper, a strong PaaS deployment may enable you to change the role of some employees to enable even greater development productivity.
IT experts can take some of their time to supervise the activities of employees from other sections of the company as they enable rapid application development by harnessing simple and effective tools to create software with little coding. While the highly-trained workers ensure that the new apps are functional and secure to very high standards, the non-IT group can produce new deployments quickly, ones that suit their own needs.
How you direct your developers and enable rapid application development is up to you: They are there to suit your firm’s unique business goals.
Michelle Tackabery
An experienced content and social media marketing professional, Michelle writes frequently about the practical applications of information technology.