As a product owner or project manager your goal is to have a solution that can adapt fast and stable to your needs. Appway is a great tool to develop professional solutions fast, but as a Appway project owner you also want to make sure the quality of the solution is the highest possible. Good quality allows you to apply change requests quick and cheap.

Bad Appway code increase the amount of time to apply change requests, fixes and the work for maintenance. This reflects not only in the work needed, but also your costs to have the work done.

My Intro: My name is Saso Nikolov, I work as a computer scientist and coach for Appway with 4 years of Appway experience as a product trainer and developer. I love the Appway process platform – I really do. Those of you who attended one of my trainings know how much I do 🙂 It is a great product which allows you to create fast and complex process oriented solutions.

If a lot of change requests are added to a project, it quickly can run out of budget. With Appway change requests are welcome, but still we need to apply best practice and good solution design approach to stay agile. This is what needs to be validated repeatedly.

Good code allows you to adapt both fast and cheap adaptations

If you keep the quality of the solution high, you can apply changes fast and with less risk to break your solution. Bad code and wrong approaches in the solution design will increase not only the amount of work to apply changes, but it also lowers quality, therefore increases the risk to a project in general.

As a consequence from the above, developers become less confident adding new features within the estimated time and costs. The more features are added, without close monitoring of the quality and design the more fragile the solutions will get. I already saw solutions where simple changes took more than six times the expected amount of work of a properly coded and designed workflow. This lead to equivalent higher costs.

Good solution design and code at the end saves you money and increases quality. Additionally it reduces the stress of and creates confidence for the developers to apply new features.

Controlling the code helps to control the project risk

To control code and workflow design quality, inspect and validate the implementation of the solution. Tests are just one aspect of quality control. You can have the desired output also with bad code, so just to have the solution, but this is not sustainable.

With best practice code and proper design patterns you can have more reliable estimations and faster changes applied. This will lead to an overall better project performance.

Imaging your projects starts off very quick but then slows down with each new feature. What will this mean to your budget? You can be sure, it will affect your overall costs and maybe leave you with not implemented features, just because you run out of time and budget.

Do not let this happen. With simple periodic code reviews, you prevent this right from the start. It will enable you with more opportunities to act on. The Appway platform should accelerate your business, not slow it down. And with the right approach it will. Keep your room for maneuver – “Handlungsfreiräume” 🙂

Code reviews are very effective to train the developers and assure the quality

Code reviews do not only discover potential risks within your solution, they also provide you with the possibility to coach your development team. Correctly executed code reviews with a debriefing of the developers are part of the continuous improvement each great team should strive for.

Well executed code reviews are a great way to improve product quality, team knowledge and effectively lower overall costs with faster results.

What to do?

Get your project an Appway Master. Just like a Scrum Master who helps the Scrum team to perform better, having the regular consultation with an Appway Master is key in each Appway project.

Facilitate code reviews with debriefings: What could be improved and what are risks. Apply best practices and make sure you do not let features reduce quality and have them increase costs and risks. Implement the single responsibility design pattern and make your business objects become re-usable.

Great or great? You decide.

Saso von DigitalMove Consultants