“We just look at the market, and we have to make some good application.“
“Such as?”
“Application to control your carb and fat! Can you imagine? Here 10.000 dollar for you, all must be done by next month!”
Almost everyone uses mobile devices now, from toddlers to seniors. There’s a huge market for mobile apps. That scenario above is one of example for what market needs and needed to be made as an application. Some examples might need to be explained more as a feature that will be built. In Agile development process, we need to write user story based what user wants. A user story describes how a market employs the product; it is told from the user’s perspective.
Don’t forget, market changes easily based on what people need. There’s a lot of ideas in market, and they don’t hesitate to give that idea as soon as possible. Should we hesitate to listen? Of course not. Gather their ideas and tell to the product owner/dev team to make new/updated stories.
Market has an epic user story. It’s good, so we can start from an epic. And after stating the epic user story—you can break that into some specified user stories. For example of epic user story; Application to control your carb and fat. The specified user stories contain;
- As a user, I need to track my carbs
- As a user, I need to track the amount of nutrition in my breakfast/lunch
- As a user, I need to understand how to prevent myself from diabetes
From this specific user stories, developers can build their application based on those user stories. And don’t forget to add acceptance criteria. They allow you to describe the conditions that must be fulfilled so that the story is done. The criteria enrich the story, they make it testable, and they ensure that the story can be demoed or released to the users and other stakeholders.
Okay, we talk a lot about Agile, is this the best method/methodology to deliver faster? How about other method/methodology?
You may use other better and suitable method/methodology (whatever the name), but the point of what explained here is why we deliver faster. Agile told us to deliver faster in small iteration instead of launch all of them in a bulk and complete application which is higher risk for the application will not be used by the user.
When it’s done, is the application can be sold? Is it meet what market needed? Are you sure the application will be used by them? Come think again.
Sometimes we don’t have any view is the application will be used or needed by the market, then with Agile, which is deliver faster, we can test the market with the application, then we can get the feedback what need to be done, removed, replaced, and added. There is a lot of tools that can be used to analyzed which is the most area of application reached by the user. The tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, etc can be used to analyze market movement and you can see is the link putted on the application reached by the user? How you place the button so people do not need to be told, “Hello there, this is the button”, this is the art of communication between your application and the users. The application need to tell the user without saying a lot of things especially on mobile device which is the view port is limited.
Deliver it faster to the market/user/client to get the feedback then you know what need to be done.
So yes, Agile can help a lot. At least to make sure we use our time well when making an application that suit with what market needs. Use other tools to help our application’s useful also, and collaborate with agile methodology to make some useful but also impactful application.
Good luck!
