FindItMore | The world of application development is rife with unsaid or unwritten rules. These are guidelines that are often observed and put into practice through years of experience but rarely documented or communicated in an official capacity.
Application development, specifically, iOS application development, also has an undocumented rulebook. These undocumented rules have a profound impact on the way iOS developers create solutions, especially enterprise applications. So, let’s figure out what these unsaid rules are and how they can help an iOS app developer attain success and an edge over the competition in the enterprise application development space.
- Understand the Mission:
Prior to partnering with an organization and getting their project started, it’s important for the prospective iOS developer to do a thorough research. This means understanding how the enterprise functions and learning how you can be of help from the very beginning. Every developer desires to contribute but only a few of them can willingly do all the mechanical work, that is, creating and reviewing a quality source code, sifting through documentation and fixing flaws, and testing patches. These are generally undesirable tasks but are essential for building a healthy mobile product.
- Broaden Your Expertise:
As your reputation builds up with the enterprise, it becomes essential for you to acquire a broad understanding of the project as well as the code base. Go beyond the mission statement. Dive deep into the project and its requirements to understand what makes it look daunting and beyond your areas of expertise. This not helps you broaden your understanding but also provides you with insights into how greatly your code has contributed to or impacted the project. Showcasing that you understand a broad range of challenges and have the ability to patch them up can go a long way in making your contributions counted.
- Coding & Patching Isn’t Enough:
Your work doesn’t end with submitting the code. Your code will undergo various quality assessment discussions, tests, and changes once accepted. It’s important to invest the right amount of time and efforts in understanding how to move your code and patches across QA and testing without it becoming a burden over other team members.
Enterprises build products not to help themselves but to the world out there. They build useful solutions that can add value to people’s lives and most importantly, they put the project value before individual efforts and contributions. In order to increase your chances of being a valued resource (with your code being accepted), ensure you help others with their contributions. If you are good with code reviewing and fixing bugs or errors, put your knowledge to practice to improve the entire source code. There’s no doubt that top reviewers often correlate with the best of contributors. Remember, the more helpful you are, the more valued you will be.
- Address Pain Points:
Every enterprise seeks to build a product that addresses a common pain point. As a developer, you are likely to contribute to the project to figure out how can efficiently address the pain point considering the overall time, resources and cost of app development. While creating the product, you may encounter challenges such as an urgent need to modernize the application security technologies, implement agile practices, etc. The best way to resolve the most complex of challenges and make changes happen is to address them to their edge. Understand the code enough to think and try solutions through every possible use case. Extend capabilities without affecting existing features or functionalities.
- Commitment is Crucial:
It’s far easier to find fly-by-night developers over the ones that stay committed and go above and beyond to ensure the flaws are fixed. Don’t give up when a fix is rejected. Put your energies into knowing why it was rejected and what can fix it. And while you work on the fixing the glitches, keep a track of the changes within the code and ensure your patch is seamlessly mergeable even when the project evolves greatly. As a professional iOS developer, take the onus of your work and patch things up until they’re functional as expected. Do not leave it for the testers or QA professionals to work on your patches. It is essential to free them up to do the same with their code base and patches.
Final Thoughts
The undocumented or unsaid rules for building enterprise iOS mobile apps mentioned above may appear to be trivial and a lot of developers either overlook or fail to follow them. But those developers who readily and ardently follow them are most likely to succeed in enhancing the project and understanding for themselves as well as for the enterprise they have partnered with. Are you aware of other unsaid or undocumented rules for enterprise iOS app development? If so, supplement it to our list using the comment section below.