App Quality: Secrets for Agile App Teams

by Jason Arbon

"App Quality: Secrets for Agile App Teams" gives agile and lean app teams an edge in building well-received apps, and accelerates them on the way to 5-stars. The book is written for app developers, testers and product managers. The book uses real world examples and data-driven techniques that any app team can apply to their designs, code, agile sprints, and product planning. "App Quality" gives your app team access to the best practices and hard-earned lessons from analyzing hundreds of millions of app store reviews, thousands of app testers testing hundreds of top apps, and conversations with top app teams. Included: Top 10 App Quality Monsters Top 10 Quality Attributes Tips for Developers, Testers, and Product Managers The book is aimed at both "Agile" and "Lean" app teams. The book is focused on analytics and practical, real-world examples of quality issues, and practical solutions to those quality issues. Whether the team is just starting to plan their next great app, or improving an existing one, following the recommendations and system outlined in this book will help get your app to 5 stars. "App Quality" walks through the "Top 10 App Quality Monsters." These are the top sources of quality issues in today's modern apps: App Deployment and Distribution, Device State and Fragmentation, Users, Real World, Reviews, Metrics, Competition, Security and Privacy, User Interface, and Agile Mobile Teams themselves. Each quality monster is described in detail, with specific best practices and tips for Developers, Testers, and Product Managers. The book also describes the "Top 10 Quality Attributes," learned from app store review analysis and app testing: Content, Elegance, Interoperability, Performance, Pricing, Privacy, Satisfaction, Security, Stability, and Usability. Each quality attribute is described in detail, with real world app examples, with specific best practices and tips Developers, Testers, and Product Managers and pointers to tools and services to improve app quality. Prepare for a deep dive on app store reviews. Deep analytics of what types of feedback people are leaving in the apps store reviews, by type, by frequency, per-category, etc. The book outlines ways to leverage this data to build a higher quality app, improve star ratings, and make users happier. Some myths about Agile for app teams are also debunked. Techniques for leveraging app store reviews for competitive analysis are also described in detail. App store reviews are critical to building a high quality app that is also perceived as high quality. Putting it all together, the book then walks through an example of applying all these great tips, best practices, and data, to a real-world app. See how an expert applies these techniques to a real world app, and see how it can easily apply to your app. See the impact on test planning, development practices, and product prioritization. Armed with the latest best practices, tips, and data-driven quality analysis, app teams can build solid apps with minimal effort and time. The secrets in "App Quality" gives agile and lean teams an edge in building well-received apps, and accelerate them on the way to 5-stars.

350 pages, Paperback

First published April 21, 2014

Reviews

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of filler material, but a good book overall. The key concept is that the author founded a company which has gone data mining on all the reviews in the iOS and Android app stores, and come up with a cluster analysis that defines 8(?) key quality characteristics which people tend to comment on in their reviews.

I did not find a ton of surprises here but the following was useful:
1) The quality ontology they define is great not because it is surprising but because it is based on real data. If you ever need to create something like this, use thiers.
2) They mention a ton of tools which store-based app developers use to increase quality, and that was informative for me (I am not a store-based app developer by trade).

[John Wargo · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's OK; there are some good tidbits in there. Unfortunately, the book's more than two years old (as of my reading) and the author did nothing to fix the myriad of typos in the book. There's also many long listing of app reviews eating up the page count for limited value. The author made almost no effort to format the book for print, so sections end where they shouldn't, and there's big blank or almost blank pages where he could have made better use of the space. It would be interesting to see this book get a refresh, heck, I'd even help format it for print for him.