It's a surprising statistic, but it's true! And it underscores the crucial importance of managing updates to ensure the quality and performance of your application.

Let's explore the essential steps together to ensure that every change made to your application enhances the user experience.

Building the Best Application, One Step at a Time

Even before starting to develop a new feature or update, it's essential to define quality standards that the product must adhere to. These acceptance criteria will serve as your guide throughout the development process and ensure that the application evolves according to expectations—yours as well as those of your target audience.

Next comes the decisive step of integrating tests directly into the code—the more you do, the better. Your developers should design their applications with automated tests to detect any errors or inconsistencies. These automated tests will allow you to verify at any time that the new updates do not alter existing functionalities and to create a more robust and reliable codebase. As discussed in a previous article, this is one of the keys to ensuring that your application remains performant over time.

The third essential step is implementing a code review policy among your developers. These peer feedback moments contribute notably to identifying and correcting common or potential errors before they become major issues, as well as to improving code quality.

Another aspect to consider is the frequency of updates. Instead of making huge updates in a single deployment, it is recommended to publish smaller updates or features more frequently. This approach, favored by major players such as Apple, helps maintain better application quality while increasing the velocity of the deployment process. By minimizing changes made in each iteration, the chances of creating major bugs or disrupting the application are reduced.

Finally, do not underestimate the importance of engaging quality assurance (QA) specialists: these individuals are trained to detect potential errors and performance issues. QA specialists conduct thorough manual tests and explore all possibilities that could lead to errors in the application, all in great detail. Their expertise is essential to ensure that your application functions optimally. It's worth adding that good communication between your teams and these specialists is paramount: only close collaboration will allow you to identify and resolve issues more quickly and effectively.

Succeeding in updates is a complex process that requires significant investment in time and resources. But by following these few steps, you can ensure that each deployment enhances the quality and performance of your application, thus providing the best.