Mobile Application In One Month
I hadn’t had the opportunity to experience application development for mobile platforms and the process of publishing on the App Store & Play Store before. While I had previously experimented with technologies like Ionic, React Native, and Flutter in local environments, those experiences mostly remained at the beginner level.
At the company where I work, a small-scale mobile application development idea emerged for our web-based project, and I volunteered for it. It was expected to be a simple application to be completed in a short time.
In my team, where I work as a Scrum Master, there would be 4 software developers, including myself, and we would complete the application with one month of development effort. We planned it out and shook hands. Although the idea of completing a project for the company within a month under such constraints caused a bit of stress for me, I entered the project with my team, trusting in the experiences of my teammates and saying, “I’ll work extra if necessary, but I’ll get it done.”
Developing a project under such constraints has always provided me with positive experiences. Completing the planned application in a simple and functional form within one month would be a great learning opportunity for me to get started with mobile applications.
Hello World!
As a team, we decided to develop the project using Flutter. In our sprint planning meeting, we created stories in Jira for the desired screens and started our first sprint.
As a first step, we created a new Flutter application and pushed it to a repository. Then, we gathered in the office, read documents together, and started to familiarize ourselves with Flutter by experimenting with our local devices.
Login
After our technical reviews, we developed the first login screen together. We integrated it with our existing Single Sign-On (SSO) system and obtained the user token. With the token, we made our first HTTP request and redirected the user to the home page of the application.
Home
On the home page, we sent requests to our existing APIs to display some data.
(I cannot share details as it contains business information.)
Reports
(I cannot share details as it contains business information.)
Notifications
We set up Firebase Cloud Messaging and Firestore connections of our Google Firebase project used in our web-based application. Since both Flutter and Firebase are Google products, we didn’t face any complex issues during integration. However, on the Firebase side, we performed some optimization work regarding the need to avoid excessive stream and read/write operations.
Account
We displayed some information of logged-in users here and added some buttons related to business actions for the user to take, along with a logout button.
Developing, testing, receiving feedback, and making some improvements with this small-scale application, we completed the development process of the application within 1 month (2 sprints).
App Store & Play Store
We created a new application on the App Store & Play Store and followed the relevant documents to publish our application for testing by other users within the company through Apple TestFlight and Google Internal Testing. After completing our internal tests, we entered the Apple & Google review process on the App Store and Play Store and published the application within a short period.
Conclusion
Developing the application within a month gave us valuable experience and motivation as a team. Of course, we faced many challenges regarding technical issues and business decisions, but as a team, we supported each other and successfully completed the project, delivering it on time.
