Today I want to talk about the quality of your Flutter app.
Low-quality applications get no second chances, only 16% of users will retry a failing app. If there’s a bug stopping the user from doing what they want, your app will be deleted.
Most developers are not taught quality assurance, when the code works for them, they release.
You can’t claim high-quality if you don’t take the time to ensure it
In this post you will learn:
How to document quality expectations
The process to ensure quality
The single action you can take to double your quality
There are millions of apps, thousands uploaded every month, most of them are low-quality.
If you don’t put in that little bit of extra effort you might be working on an app that goes into that sea of low-quality mobile apps.
But if you’re willing to spend some extra time on your app, you can easily stand out, let me show you what you can do.
Document Quality Expectations
Quality is not a clean UI and fancy animations.
Quality is when the user can do exactly what you said they can do in the app, on any device, on any screen size you support, running on any platform you support.
If you cannot allow the users to do that you have a quality problem, regardless of how good your app looks.
So, this means, if quality is based on the user’s task completion, we should document everything the user should be able to do. This will make it easier to confirm later.
Here’s what you can do:
Go through every feature you have in your app
Write down every user story for that feature
User story is a sentence describing what action the user can take and what result they can expect from it.
Keep that somewhere, it will come in handy on the last step.
The Developer Quality Assurance Process
There’s a difference between testing vs quality assurance.
Developers always do testing, otherwise they wouldn’t say their work is done. We run the code, it works, and we’re all happy to say it’s ready.
Quality assurance is the process of making sure that a user can perform all possible actions in your app, without getting blocked by anything. This takes more time than you usually expect.
To do this we’ll start by closing your IDE 🤯 Yes, trust me, you don’t need it:
Close your IDE
Install a release version of your app (not from the code, a release mode build)
Go through all the user stories you have above and ensure that it all works as expected
IMPORTANT: Anything you find or don’t like during that process, write it down, no coding
Prioritize the list you end up with, and that becomes your lists of issues to fix before you make a release.
The Fastest Hack to Doubling Your App’s Quality
Someone other than you, the original developer, should do the step above.
I can’t explain to you enough how lenient we are as developers on the quality of our output. We miss things, we ignore things, we accept all kinds of weird issues that others would not.
It’s one of those “hacks” that really work.
Ask your mom, ask a friend, ask your manager, ask a fellow dev, it can be anyone.
But I promise you, this little trick will change your app’s quality forever.
See you in the next one,
Dane