Fast Track to the Mobile App winners had the 'best case scenario' track: get their apps developed, tested and in the Marketplace by early February in time for promotion before (and hopefully during the) Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. However, sometimes life throws wrenches in the best-laid plans. In this installment, we continue reporting on the next steps of the app development process, implementation and testing, and check-in on our winners—both those who are developing apps themselves and those working with Microsoft developers.
To be on track for Barcelona, a contestant's next step is implementing the app's core functionality. For each app, that will differ. Geof Harries and Michael Johnson's cash flow management app, Cash Hound, requires financial functionality so they programmed the ability to add, edit and delete income and expenses in order to run calculations to determine spendable income. They then created charting tools to visualize that knowledge. With that functionality in place, they tested the app to see what worked, and in light of that, what needed improvement.
The testing phase can only take place on a workable prototype (discussed in our last article). Implementing the aspects that make the app functional mean dealing with the real-life problems that may arise. The time for theoretical conjecture is over: at this stage, developers are considering specifically the "hows" and "whats" to best bring the app's concept to life. Pratik Kothari's Social Mints tracks what's being said about a chosen topic of interest (e.g. your company, a celebrity, a sports team, etc.) by fetching data from social media sites. Kothari focused on the core functionality of the app's responsiveness by improving the sluggishness he initially encountered. He reworked the architecture so a filtered set of results would now fetch from a cloud component, making the initial download of information smaller and faster. Cacheing mechanisms were applied so when multiple users searched for the same topic (aka 'Mint'), quick response times would be maintained.
Testing makes any necessary modifications to the interface more obvious based on the app's actual use. Visual elements that don't fully serve core functionality will be adjusted so they do. Then, more testing, testing, and still more testing. This may mean removing or adding data to test how the app behaves in every imaginable circumstance, and finding and fixing bugs. It's in this phase that an app developer sees the last holes in the app's construction and patches them up.
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