Modern application users have high expectations for applications, even for in-house enterprise apps. IT leaders realising this have adopted a mobile-first development approach, which ensures great user experience, reduce overall development and maintenance cost. In this post I will provide an example of a mobile-first development project for an enterprise application.
Business case
A retailer is using Windows CE devices for performing daily tasks in it stores and is planning to move to the latest Android / iOS devices. Each particular task is performed using a single independent application, developed with different technologies (.Net Compact, C++), and each application communicates with many different back-end services and systems.
Apart from maintaining applications on variant technologies, the company also spent heavily on training employees to use these applications.
The road ahead is to develop these applications for Android powered devices.
Road ahead
The application was initially to be developed only for Android, with a future scope of developing a similar iOS application.
The company relied a lot on the daily activities performed through these applications, which meant that these should be powerful and simple enough for end users, minimising training and update costs.
Xamarin was chosen as the development platform, for the fact that it will prove beneficial for porting later to iOS, single code base with C# language (fully matured async patterns, better type-safety, front and back-end teams work more collaboratively), and also, it can realise the full potential of the native platforms (native UI, Geo-location, Notifications).
Mobile-first approach
Mobile-first approach in enterprise means allowing user to perform complex tasks, with ease. This means interactive and intuitive UI, build around the use-case of solving a problem from a user perspective. This also means developing new infrastructure and services that cater for specific use cases in the application.
Consider a case when the store manager of a hardware store wishes to order new stock for an item. This previously involved getting following information:
- Current store stock
- Stock availability for delivery
- Back store capacity
- Shelf capacity
- Upcoming sales
- Pending deliveries
- Pending customer orders
- Wasted / discarded stock
- Understanding of stores’ sale patterns (daily / seasonal / monthly)
Some of the services interact with the in-store server, some will require the central server, and a manual review of previous orders, while some of the tasks are completely dependent on a person’s experience. The final task is to manually calculate the final stock to be ordered.
With the new system, a scheduled task interacts with all of the above services, uses machine learning (items bought together/ customer ordered / quantity etc.) to find out sale patterns, cache results daily and in case an order needs to be placed, pushes a notification to the user who has the authority to submit orders.
On the application side, the user can interact with the notification, review the order and submit or cancel with just 3 clicks.
Thus, focusing on the user-first mobile app, made a complex task very easy and efficient for the user.
Additional use case: An item in a store is to be recalled, or is towards the end of its life and needs to be discarded. Since the new web service caches all of the data every day, a new service can be added, that identifies such products and utilises the existing notification module to notify the user.
The mobile-first development can turn a ‘pull’ experience into a ‘push’ experience – making use of mobile platform features like push notifications. With powerful services in place, new functionality is easily added greatly improving store operations.
Code-sharing
The application was designed using Model View Presenter (MVP) architecture. In this pattern the presenter layer acts as the supervising controller for the view. The view itself is quite passive and is responsible for displaying the data provided to it by the presenter and to route UI interactions to the presenter. This allows for moving most of the logic into the presentation layer. The presentation layer is shared across platforms reducing platform specific code. Test coverage is also greatly improved as most of the presentation code is shared.
Use of Xamarin combined with MVP architecture allowed for more than 95% of the code to be shared across different platform, with emphasis on Unit and automation testing. This is evident from the fact that the whole project was delivered in under 9 months and the iOS application was started in the 7th month, and delivered with the Android app.
The components of the application were broken into individual packages, so that they could be used for all future enterprise or customer facing applications.
An excerpt from the OrderService shows how a sync component (LiveDataService) written to work with a live database could be used for a consumer application as well. In below case, it will notify user of current promotional stock.
It is also worth noting here that the use of Xamarin allowed for sharing components between mobile and back-end systems (as separate NuGet packages). This was the case with custom synchronisation framework, model classes, ORM components, utility libraries etc.