By:Haresh Donga
August 20th , 2016

Significance of the Fittest BA-PM-QA Developers in Mobile App Development Team

 Mobile App Development

Generally, businesses have the least ideas that how a software project is executed and attain the success. They are simply aware of the existence of designers and programmers as the real players of the software or mobile app development project process. If we think the mobile app development in a straight way, we can see that when a business is approaching a mobile app development company like Addon Solutions, what is going on in the development company.

Mobile app development team at the Addon Solutions has to

  1. First, understand the business requirements/problems
  2. Need to convert those problems into the comprehensive architecture
  3. Now, that architecture needs to convert in the technically feasible solutions
  4. Finally, test the solutions and deploy it when everything seems perfect or expected
Of course, each simple step has multiple sub-steps when broken down into technical terms that the team at Addon Solutions can understand. In order to accomplish those processes, the team has to assign some roles to its members based on their skills and expertise for each process or a sub-process.

Roles in the Mobile App Development Process

For big scale projects, these roles are allocated one-for-one while in the case of the small and medium scale of projects, one team member may have more than one role to play. Unfortunately, the app developments processes are varying, greatly and depend on the nature of the app and niche it used. For instance, mobile web app development projects are quite different from the native mobile application development projects. Therefore, we can’t fix the list of processes/sub-processes and its roles in a typical or standard ways. We have to rely on a joint agreement made by the industry. Thus, in a broad way, we can enlist the following roles for a team during the entire app development lifecycle.
  • Solution Owner
  • Business Analyst
  • Project Manager
  • Designer
  • Developer
  • Quality Assurance Analyst
  • Trainer
  • Application Architect
  • Data Modeler
  • Database Analyst
  • Infrastructure Analyst
  • Information Architect
  • End User
  • Subject Matter Expert
  • Stakeholder
Unfortunately, in Agile Development model, these typical roles have no place to define and allocate to the team members. Instead, we can define skill sets needed in a project and expect from team members to bear the responsibilities as per their extended capacities.

Those skills might be:

  • Vision
  • Recognize needs
  • Facilitation
  • App development process knowledge
  • Analyzing impacts
  • Motivating the team
  • Coding
  • Testing
  • Metrics
For the sake of simplicity, we should follow the traditional roles in a project or a team of mobile app development. Among those roles, followings are highly significant in the success of projects so that we will restrict up to it.

Business Analyst (BA) in Mobile App Development

In simple term, a Business Analyst (BA) is analyzing the business requirements and translate it into the mobile app development process, means BA owns requirement processes. Therefore, business analyst knew as requirement analyst, business system analyst, business technology analyst, or simply system analyst.

Apart from gathering business requirements, Business System Analysts (BSA) in general sense plays other responsibilities too such as:

  • Defining project scope at initial stage by working with business team
  • Translating business needs into the format that developers can understand and use in the project
  • Break down the technical and architectural intricacies into comprehensive simplicity that each stakeholder can understand
  • Recognize project details and requirements, model it, and document all
  • Facilitates development team to get right business people to work with
  • After prolonged experiences in the same organization, BSA can guide teams through political minefields within an organization
  • Becomes business representative for the developers to bridge the gap

If we look at business analysts in mobile app development projects, their shared responsibilities are:

  • Recognize and process
  • Business requirements
  • Model data requirements
  • Business rules requirements
  • Test requirements
  • Manage requirements
  • Assists in requirement sessions
  • Assists in scope the project
  • Write use cases for mobile app
  • Prototyping
  • Write system/technical specifications
A business analyst is always there:
  • When project manager overwhelmed
  • When internal and external communications break down
  • When several confusions regarding projects arise
 

Project Manager (PM) in Mobile App Development

App entrepreneurs or business owners sometimes underestimate roles of a project manager, just to save spending on an additional team member. Therefore, they face a hard time in communication with the team in designing and programming terminologies. Conversely, mobile app designers and mobile app programmers work in the haphazard manner and delay delivery of outputs. Thus, it increases the overall cost of development. Therefore, we can recognize the significance of a project manager in mobile application development project due to useful roles of project manager in following ways: As a Leader: To clearly define the role of each team member of the project based on expertise and experiences required in the project. Thus, a Project Manager can help to reap off the best of their abilities in project enhancement. As a Liaison: A project manager is a natural link between clients and Mobile App Development Company. Apart from external links, a P.M. can link internally in the company with designers, programmers, QA team, marketing team, support team, CEOs, and other stakeholders in the app development projects who are facilitating development by various contributions. As a Mentor: A successful leader or a manager must be a good mentor at first instance. Therefore, a project manager should provide righteous guidance to each team members in their contexts and needs. Therefore, we can practically list the responsibility of a project manager in App Development Company in following ways.

Project Planning

With consult to the business analysts, project manager takes part in project requirement analysis, scope definitions, and project planning. Project manager defines the roles of team members and allocate them with activity schedules. A PM outlines the timeline of the project during proposal documentation process and follows it during the entire project process. PM uses project management software to allocate specific jobs to the team members and compels clients to provide required resources on time to smoothen the development process. In the same PMS (project management software), project manager provides regular updates of project process to the higher authorities and after their permissions, pass to the clients. The project manager should set the project objectives and goals with metrics to measure the quality of the product as well as the progress of the project. Thus, a PM can help marketing and business development team to estimate ballpark costs of the project and define terms for payment, milestones to achieve, and assign budget accordingly to the team. The most important role of a PM is to implement project development process plans and monitor all carefully to achieve desired results without missing quality, timeline, and budget defined by the clients.

Quality Assurance Developers

The quality of a mobile application has paramount importance in making or breaking app success in the market because it is quality and user experiences of a mobile app that fascinate users, not the tech advancements. Today in mobile app development, Hiring Quality Assurance Person / QA / Tester is an integral part involved throughout the development process, right from beginning to end, and even in post-development stages as maintenance and updates. The mobile landscape is quite different from the traditional web/desktop in many respects including hardware and OS fragmentations, the mobility of users, and different use cases of the mobile users. QA practices for mobile involves myriads of quality credentials to include in various tests such as unit tests, functional tests, UX tests, and so on for autonomous/automated tests and manual tests. QA developers have to accomplish following tasks for mobile QA.
  • Arrange and manage review meetings
  • Prepare and approve QA documents for the project with the team
  • Go for internal quality audits with planning for subtasks
  • Participate in external quality audit and user testing
  • Maintain and update audit databases
  • Provide reports for discussions in review meetings
  • Recognize and resolve the problems with mobile app for given quality credentials

Conclusion:

For the success of the mobile applications in the market, custom mobile app development company has to accumulate required talents for dozens of traditional roles for the entire development process and equal skills to deliver the best product. Among those roles and skill sets, business analysts, project management, and quality assurance manager are more significant to add real values in the mobile app success in all aspects. However, gathering exceptional talents for those valuable roles are daunting and very few mobile app development companies have succeeded in this regard. Fortunately, Addon Solutions is one of those prominent names of companies in the outsourcing community of India, which can deliver expected results using the pool of talents that it has nurtured over the time. If you are scrappy, to reap off advantages of high quality human resources in your mobile application programming projects, let us have some exchanges prior to fixing anything on it.