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Enterprise Application Development Best Practices

Need a new business capability? There’s an app for that, as the saying goes. Enterprise application development is becoming a standard practice for organizations who want to ensure business agility and business process automation. 

So, to keep up with the demand for enterprise applications, more organizations are leaning towards low-code and even no-code development, accommodating people with varying skills across the organization.  

But it’s not as simple as providing your team with the tools they need and letting them get on with it. It’s important to make best practices clear to reduce development time and costs and optimize output while also ensuring guardrails to meet regulations.

 

Set goals 

As with any business project, planning is paramount. Before you begin, ask yourself and your team questions like: What is the application going to be used for? Who is going to use it? What are the results you want to see from it? Setting goals and objectives, preferably that link back to how the new enterprise application will benefit the business, will help to keep your project on track and give everyone aims to work towards.

Involve the right team members 

Assemble your A Team. In this case, A stands for Application. Build a team comprising of both business and IT workers for a well-rounded approach. The business users will understand the processes and what needs to be done to improve them, while IT will have the technical knowledge to engineer the solution.

Create fusion teams 

Not only does your project team need to straddle business and IT, but they should also be a multidisciplinary group who can drive app development with their shared knowledge and expertise. Enterprise application development can be enhanced by fusion teams, a group orientated around a shared, specific goal, comprised of interdisciplinary experts who can solve specific problems and anticipate any barriers to success.  

Hold regular check-ins 

Make sure the project is running to time and meeting the necessary capabilities as you progress. This will ensure the final application achieves the goals set at the beginning of the project. They also provide opportunities to test the application for usability and functionality while it’s still in development, which will ultimately reduce cycle times. Regular check-ins avoid going over-budget and over-time. 

Communicate the project to the wider organization  

Change management is key to avoiding resistance to a new way of working. Communicate the benefits and provide reassurance to employees that they are going to be empowered by the new technology, not replaced by it. It’s often effective to gain executives buy-in who can then get their teams behind them. Then they can help to make sure all employees understand the bigger picture and are empowered to drive change themselves.  

Embrace composability  

Composability makes application development easier as developers can create and use components as building blocks to create an application. This speeds up development and empowers business users to act as citizen developers, decreasing their reliance on IT. When components are pre-made, users can select these reusable components from a library, which maintains quality and saves costs, while development time is shortened because the same elements aren’t being built twice.  

Focus on security 

Working with company and/or customer data comes with responsibility. Sensitive information must be handled with care, so any data used in enterprise application development must be dealt with in a secure manner. There should be restrictions on who is allowed access to the application and the information held within it, and guardrails and encryption should be set in place to prevent data leaks or unauthorized sharing.   

Evaluate performance 

As the project nears completion, it’s important to assess that it’s met the goals set at the beginning of the project. Check in with users and gather feedback on whether the application is meeting their expectations. It probably won’t be perfect first time round, but by evaluating performance and addressing any issues, you can rest assured that you’ve completed all that you set out to achieve.

 

Build low-code enterprise applications with Bizagi  

And last, but by no means least… choose a suitable platform for your enterprise application development. Bizagi is an easy way to create robust enterprise applications, aided by drag-and-drop reusable elements that provide both operational standardization and a composable architecture to enable rapid change.  Find out more about Bizagi Apps and how it can help you create robust enterprise apps with built-in governance.