You need an app development team. When choosing, what are the essential app development team skills that set one app apart from another?
You look, you search, you interview… but every mobile app company sounds vaguely similar to every other . And when you ask them about their skill sets, you get a shock of engineering language: technologies, languages, and platforms that only make them sound more similar.
What skills make the difference for a software development team? applications?
Business skills.
After all, if they don’t understand your vision, they’ll never build it the way you want it to.
According to Eric Feng in TechCrunch, “the average engineer spends 15-30% of their time working with non-engineers each week.” If your mobile software engineers lack business sense, much of that time is wasted. That is why, according to a study by the Harvard Business Review, 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional. Though not yours. Your application developers are going to be the best in class. Because? Because you know the 14 skills every app development team must have to succeed.
Essential App Development Team Skills You Need From Your Team
1. Product Management
A mobile app developer’s product manager is an important liaison between the project team and the customer. They dig into the business needs behind the app and get to know the customer’s vision. They make sure that the app development team also shares that vision.
2. Agile Methodologies and Scrum Management
If you want to succeed in mobile apps, you need to adopt agile development practices. It’s the best choice for the fast-paced mobile industry, where technologies come and go as fast as the life cycle of an “old school” product. Agile methodologies consist of a series of rapid design, build, and release events.
Scrum Management is the best way to manage these projects. Perfect for highly cross-functional mobile development teams, Scrum enables greater cohesion between developers and customers, with aggressive communication schedules and frequent reviews. At Ascendle, Scrum expertise is one of the essential application development team skills we look for in prospective employees.
3. User Interface and User Experience
Known as UI/UX, these skills are incredibly important to end-user satisfaction. They are also frequently overlooked by mobile app development companies, which tend to focus more on enabling action than encouraging it. Even if you have the perfect app idea, you may not know how best to present it to your clients.
A team of trained UI/UX professionals can bridge that gap. And that’s why, increasingly, UI/UX is often at the top of the essential skills the app development team is looking for.
4. Layout
Layout simply refers to the overall appearance of the application. Your customers don’t want nasty apps and icons on their high-tech smartphones. They want their app to look attractive as well as provide a smooth experience and value. Your mobile app development team should possess design skills that engage and inspire customers to use your apps.
5. Writing
Have you ever opened an app that looked great, but the wording made you cringe? If your application text looks like it was written by an ESL student, you should pay more attention to the writing. And even if it doesn’t, you want your words to back up your message and sometimes persuade users to take action. Your typical C# engineer will sound more like an ESL student than a trained copywriter.
Don’t create the perfect mobile app and send the wrong message with poor writing. Make sure your app development also includes professional-quality writing.
6. Business Analysis
This skill involves taking the customer’s vision and requirements and turning them into development needs and specifications for the project team. It’s often done by project or product managers, but it’s really a separate skill in its own right. A mobile development team with more training and experience in business analysis will be better able to translate your vision into bottom line results.
7. Communication
Scrum management requires vigorous debriefing between you and the mobile development team. The same goes for interactions within your cross-functional groups. You want your app developers to be on the same page as you. And everyone on your team needs to be on the same page as well.
This requires communication skills, clear communications, both in speech and writing. It seems so simple, but in the high-tech world, it can be very difficult to achieve.
8. QA and Performance Testing
In the world of agile deployments, QA skills are crucial to the continued viability of your application. Your mobile development team must have strict QA testing methodologies in place. Being “agile” can cause some companies to focus on speed instead of quality.But QA testing isn’t a corner you want to cut, so make sure your prospective app development team possesses this essential skill.
Essential App Development Team Skills You Need From engineers
Above are eight business and general skills your application development team should have. Here are six other essential application development team skills that software engineers should bring to the party:
9. Modern Coding Languages
Since mobile is the technology of the future, you don’t want an app developer to keep coding in the past. DZone lists the top 6 programming languages for mobile development as HTML5, Objective-C, Swift, C++, C#, and Java.
Your app development team doesn’t need to use all of these, of course. But they must be proficient in at least one or more of them… and be able to clearly explain why they made that decision.
10. Cloud Infrastructure
Because cloud infrastructure is such an important part of mobile development, the team must be adept at using technologies like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Microsoft Azure, for example, is a platform for deploying and managing applications and services. It uses a global network of Microsoft data centers to house its infrastructure.
Most of the apps you build will live on platforms like these, so your app development team must also have the ability to interact with them. as able to suggest the right one for your needs.
11. Cross-Platform Capabilities
Whether you want to launch your app on Android, iOS, or Windows, any successful app will eventually want to be ported to the other two. Coding native apps for one platform has the disadvantage of making porting to other platforms much more challenging. In some cases, it might even require a completely different team of engineers.
That’s why it’s important that your app development team advocates for a cross-platform tool. At Ascendle, we chose Xamarin as the best option to do this. Xamarin is based on C# code and provides a reliable tool for cleanly translating apps to Android, iOS, and Windows, or all three simultaneously.
12. Data expertise
Data drives applications. Data defines customers. Data is both what you will collect and how you will recognize your bottom line results. You need that data. lots. This means you’ll need trained data engineers to create the most efficient databases and repositories possible. A well-designed database will lead to a smoother, better-performing application.
Your application development team can also find data in many different forms from a wide variety of sources. Understanding these fonts and being able to seamlessly interact with them is an important skill for mobile development.
13. Integration with Cloud Hosted Systems
You don’t always know what you’ll find in the cloud. Technologies like Amazon Web Services have become so large and versatile that they have enabled all kinds of platforms, languages, systems, and data. You may want to push data into these systems or extract data, or both. This means you’ll need mobile developers who are well-versed in push notifications and who are ready for whatever they come across.
14. Security
Making sure your applications are secure can be a real headache for a CEO. You need your customers’ privacy secured, your systems protected from compromise, and all registrations, verifications, and balances in place.
At Ascendle, we use tools like OAuth to allow users to log in via accounts. social networks. This avoids revealing passwords and has the advantage of familiarity for end users. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to security.
There will always be some risk. Minimizing that risk is important. And that means working with mobile development teams with a deep understanding of security protocols and the latest best practices and tools because you can never be too safe online.
When thinking about essential team skills In application development, does the size of the team matter?
No, it doesn’t matter if the team is small or large. Small teams will be based on versatile members with multiple skills, while large teams may contain more specialists. Be careful, though, that they don’t get too specialized or communications become a problem.
Agile methodologies can work best with smaller, more versatile teams… but of course, there’s always exceptions to the rule. .
How many of these essential app development skills does your team have?
Does the team you’re considering meet the criteria? We hope so! If not, consider Ascendle. We are proud of our highly skilled and highly versatile teams. And we believe that good business sense drives results, not technology.
So whether you choose Ascendle or another mobile app development company, always make sure the team you hire possesses these 14 skills important.
For more information on hiring app developers, check out this guide!
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