The more we work at something, the better we get. Application development and testing continues to grow as the years go by, and we’ve been able to take everything we’ve learned from the web and apply it to the next wave of technology. How we test and develop on Internet of Things, and even more importantly, mobile devices, was informed by what’s come before it.
The different techniques and skills testers and developers learned during the more traditional period before mobile came into existence still play a major role today, but instead of simply looking at how the past informs the future, it’s critical to observe how the future is helping us better test and develop on what’s come before it.
So, how have we taken the lessons learned from mobile development and retrofitted them to other facets of the industry, such as the web? Prathap Dendi, Vice President of Business Development at Electric Cloud, argues that there are three main lessons we’ve learned that apply.
And it all starts with user experience.
“Nothing personifies the importance of user experience and the quick time-to-value more than a mobile app,” Dendi told StickyMinds. “These days you get, literally, forty seconds or so, as an industry benchmark, from the time somebody downloads and opens your mobile app, it kind of gets that value, the initial value, out and, hence, the user experience is super important. We've seen, very quickly, even the web and other app developers absorb that importance of user experience to their design.”
The second lesson surrounds the use of cloud-based services. Because of the rapidity of mobile and the need to get things done as quickly as possible, cloud-based services have taken precedence over installed software or on-premises software. This cloud-first mentality has now moved to other realms, such as the enterprise market and other non-mobile apps.
The last, and maybe more prominent one, is speed. Everyone is moving to agile, and mobile is a big player in the agile market.
“Mobile, by definition, is short release cycles and people, by nature, use the agile methodology there. We've seen, even those who lag behind in enterprise, very quickly moved on to adopting agile and DevOps processes today,” Dendi explains. “Those three things… mobile was the first to jump into them. We are now seeing the rest of the industry also beginning to adopt.”
That adoption can only bolster what developers and testers on non-mobile projects can do. It’d be easy to adopt a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mindset here, but if we don’t look toward what’s working in new industries, it won’t be long before the old ones are left in the dust.
