A Comprehensive Lesson on Why is Mobile App Development Scope Important

It is hard to imagine any single being on this earth with no mobile phone. In well-developed countries as well in emerging economies, everyone walks of life ranging from healthcare to banking to shopping to movie ticket booking are managed by this tiny but useful device. Since its invention, It has been changing the way the world functions.

In that scenario, a parallel world of mobile app development also has come into being and it is upholding importance without any doubt. While developing an application, building everything on your app wish list for initial launch might be a good idea. But, before you implement, you may want to think again.

Just think of all of the giants- Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, etc. have not raised directly in the market. Project scope is not talked about enough, still, it is very important. Scope impacts on timeline, budget, even the ability for you to meet your business objectives. The majority of people we speak to have a laundry list of features that must be included in version one of their apps, and the desire to have your whole app as you envisioned it built in one go is understandable.

Uncertainty of Building Everything at Once

The things we discussed so far are too common. However, there are different consequences either good or bad with “building application all at once” method.

Consideration of Hypothesis

Application development is not child’s play process. You need to define different assumptions based on the requirements received from your clients. Iterative and continuous delivery is practiced in Agile application development approach, developers are able to test and validate different assumptions by analyzing the performance and feedback stated by the end users.

Analysis of these factors definitely helps you to further strategies for your application development. When you build everything out at once, you are making more assumptions than if you were to approach development iteratively, which means more time and money invested into validating or invalidating these assumptions.

Adding Value

Going hand in hand with making assumptions, your application is being developed to put up value to your business and users. But, what is the actual problem you are trying to solve? Well, many mobile app development companies miss this mark completely. Because when you start building application all at once, you actually drop the focus on real business objectives if you spend more time and money testing assumptions. Every problem adds value in your application. How? Problems actually tell you what users really want.

Risk of Budget and Timeline

No application development completes with budget planning. Developing application all at once might cause unbalancing of both time-to-market and budget. Well, it will badly hamper your process as you can waste all your budget money and development time. If you fail to focus on important business objectives or unable to find out disproven assumptions, you need to put even more time and money to reach predefined objectives of app development. Thus, before proceeding development plan further, make sure to consider budget and timeline factor precisely.

Benefits of Having Smart Project Scoping

It is always better to scale down the actual scope of your mobile app development. It does not always mean developing a low-quality product but opposite of that. This is called Agile development and it has a number benefits associated with it and below is some of them.

1. Focus on Business Objective

Each application development project has a number of priorities to follow. Smart scoping allows you to focus on what the highest priority is either to address user pain points or meet your business objective. Concentrating on a core feature or problem for version one of your app allows you to develop something that will have the most impact in the fastest time.

2. Learnings to Make a Better Product

Focusing your mobile application scope lets you be in the market easily and quickly so you can validate or invalidate assumptions and collect feedback to enhance upcoming versions. This encompasses benefits like tracking analytics, tracking usage behavior, and gathering real user feedback from actual end-users. These learnings can describe you more about what your users want and need than any user research you do prior to launch. This intelligent strategy can be utilized to improve future releases of your app.

3. Test Assumptions for Less Money

Since you are able to test assumptions with information and real users, still with a smaller project scope, you are effectively able to cut down your overall costs. Deploying a larger product at initial launch carries greater risk and costs more to develop. Reducing your initial extent for the first version, hence, can help you create a better product, for less money and reduced risk, in the long-term.

Scoping Your Mobile App

The thought process behind “building everything at once” is understandable but it increases the uncertainty and might hamper your chances of launching a successful application. Determining a suitable project scope will help mobile app development company to ensure these things, especially the initial launch of your application. By scoping intelligently, you are able to maintain timeline and budget in checking test assumption for less money and collecting real user feedback to improve quality of your product with every subsequent launch.