You’ve been working for months building something amazing and now it’s time to let it out into the wild. Are you ready? Is your app really ready? If there’s a bug you didn’t catch, will you know? If you get a huge influx of users, will your app hold up? If your users are getting stuck somewhere, how will you figure out where? Building an app is the culmination of a lot of hard work, innovation, and determination. However, the journey doesn't end with development; preparing your app for a successful launch is critical. To ensure a smooth transition from development through deployment, there are a number of areas that startups should focus on: monitoring, exception handling, testing, scaling/redundancy, regression testing, analytics, and customer feedback channels. At Uptech Studio, we help startups not just build their app, but also get them ready for prime time. Here’s how we do it.
Monitoring is crucial for maintaining the health and performance of your app in real-time. It helps you detect downtime, slow page loading, or any other issues affecting user experience.
Internal monitoring of your services for uptime is great, but if you are managing any infrastructure, make sure you set up alerts for things like CPU utilization, memory usage, or disk space.
External monitoring from outside your network is a must. Your internal monitoring may show everything is fine, but a misconfigured DNS entry or load balancer can make your app unavailable to your users and your internal monitoring would think everything is ok. External monitoring can also allow you to test key user workflows like login or sign up to ensure that not only is your app available, but also that all the underlying systems are functioning as well.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) allows you to understand what parts of your application are not meeting user’s expectations. You don’t want your first user reviews to say the app is too slow or sluggish, but if they do, how will you know where to look? APM can give you stats on how each page or API endpoint is performing and even alert you when things creep beyond acceptable limits.
Exception handling is about preparing for the unpredictable. It ensures your app can gracefully manage errors without crashing, providing a seamless experience for users even when things go wrong. Handling the exceptions in your application gracefully is step one. The last thing you want your users to experience is an app that crashes or a confusing error message intended for a developer’s eyes only. Make sure your developers have properly handled exceptions within the application at the appropriate places and also have a catch all handler for those pesky unexpected errors.
Step two is having your developers notified that those exceptions are occurring. Don’t just rely on logging them, no one is looking at your logs on a regular basis. Utilize a third party error alerting system to notify your developers that users are experiencing issues and link them to your project management system.
So you’ve tested all the features as they’ve been developed, so everything is good right? Well maybe. It’s possible that some of the things built most recently accidentally broke something that was already working. This type of bug is a regression. Regression testing verifies that new changes haven't adversely affected existing functionalities. It's essential for maintaining the integrity of your app as it evolves. Effective regression testing can prevent bugs from reaching your users, saving your team time and resources in the long run.
Automate your regression testing process as much as possible, it will save you a ton of time in the long run. If you don’t have time/budget for that, at least document the test plan. Develop a comprehensive test suite that covers all critical paths of your app. Keep your test cases up to date with new features and changes to avoid gaps in coverage.
In addition to regression testing, you’ll want to understand what types of load your back-end systems can handle. Implementing some load testing tools will help you understand how many simultaneous users your system can handle. Find a tool that will help you do this and test the various parts of your application, not just the home/initial page.
Running single instances of your back-end services is fine for development, but once you go live, you’ll want to have redundant systems in place, ready to go should something fail. This can be a hot standby in another data center, or it could be a live instance. In either case, you’ll want to utilize a distributed load balancing layer that can easily route traffic between the two data centers.
Your server instances can only handle so much traffic and maintain a performant experience for your users. Hopefully you’ve done the load/performance testing mentioned above and you have a good idea how many users your infrastructure can handle. At some point, you’ll hit those limits, hopefully! Ideally you can set up some auto scaling on your infrastructure, but if that’s something out of your wheelhouse or don’t have time for it, at least make sure you understand how to scale things manually. The alerts you set up for CPU/memory/disk usage etc., will hopefully alert you before you have an outage and give you time to scale those resources up.
Analytics provide insights into how users interact with your app, which features they use the most, and where they may encounter issues. This data is invaluable for informed decision-making and prioritizing development efforts post-launch. Resist the temptation to track every single page view or click/tap. This just creates a lot of noise. Identify the key actions you want your users to perform and make sure those are being tracked. Create a tracking plan so product managers and developers have something to reference as the source of truth of what should be tracked.
Integrate a reliable analytics platform that offers detailed reports on user behavior, engagement, and app performance. Set up key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to your app's goals, such as sign ups, purchases/subscriptions, and other important actions. Important actions will depend on what your app does, say for example your app is a social media app, an important action could be inviting a friend/follower, or a post being made. Use this data to continuously refine and improve your app based on actual user behavior.
As you go beyond the initial launch, track the actions you take in your business and see how they impact your metrics. For example, did a new feature improve the number of posts people make, or hurt it? Did a recent marketing campaign increase the lifetime value of a user, or decrease it?
So your app is doing all the things you want it to, but do you have a mechanism for your users to provide feedback or get help when they are stuck? The best way to improve your app is to listen to your users. If they don’t have an obvious way to do that, you’re not going to hear from them, except maybe on social media, and then it’s too late! Integrate a third party tool for customer engagement or simply put a button that links to a web form and emails you when they submit something.
Another nice thing to have is a FAQ or knowledge base so users can help themselves if they can’t figure out what to do. This can save you a bunch of time supporting your users.
If you are building a mobile app, you’ll want to have a mechanism to force your users to upgrade their app. Even though a majority of users have automatic updates on, there will be some, especially on Android, that have this feature turned off. If your app has a bug and you need to get a fix out there quickly, ensuring all users have the newest version, you’ll need something in your app that notifies them to upgrade. This can be something that blocks the user from using the app entirely until they upgrade or just a banner recommending they upgrade depending on the severity of the issue. It’s important to add this functionality before you launch because otherwise when you need it, it won’t be there and you’ll just have to wait for people to upgrade on their own.
Launching your software app is just the beginning. Implementing the steps above will set you up for success and give you the time to focus on acquiring users and retaining them instead of dealing with issues and fighting fires. Good luck out there! Please reach out if you need any help along the way.
