The beginner’s advanced guide to building an app

"There are several keys to building low cost/high-quality web, mobile and desktop applications. The most important is meticulously defining what you will build. Part I of this series will show you how to map out what you will build. The remaining parts will build on this until you have an application that is ready for launch.

The formal and comprehensive method of defining what an app will do is called requirements engineering, and is made up of :

• Elicitation: gathering all the wants and needs of an app
• Analysis: reviewing each want or need for feasibility, estimation and valuation
• Modeling: making low tech and high tech prototypes of the app
• Validation: ensuring the model is consistent with the analysis and elicitation
• Management: documenting and maintaining all of the above

If you’re building software to help pilots land planes, you might follow some strict standards in all 5 of the above tasks. However, for general or business applications, we bring those activities down to two: creating User Flows and turning them into User Stories. We use different tools to draw our user flow diagrams and document our user stories."

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