We made a mobile app in 6 weeks. Here’s how you can too.

Healthcare is one of the most exciting industries for digital transformation. In recent years, our consultants have helped several healthcare organizations shift their focus to preventive care and patient outcomes. Companion apps have helped users with self-diagnosis, allowing them to seek proactive treatment. Many healthcare organizations also use companion apps to help their users fight addiction.

So, when our experts atwere looking for their next challenge, they decided to create a healthcare proof-of-concept app that provides self-diagnosis. The project would allow our bench team to hone their skills in an industry that’s rapidly embracing digital initiatives and working towards better patient outcomes.

Additionally, the team decided to do it all in just six weeks.

Why such an aggressive deadline? Mobile development, just like any other craft, requires practice. What do you do when you’re operating under a tight deadline? Which tech stack do you choose and when? How do you successfully collaborate remotely and asynchronously? You’re much more likely to nail these scenarios if you’ve practiced them before. By simulating a tight deadline, the bench team would be better prepared to navigate such projects with future clients.

Tight deadlines also present opportunities to get creative and try new ideas. It’s the developer equivalent of practicing match-day scenarios before the season begins.

So, the team kickstarted the project to develop a mobile application from scratch— from product strategy and CX to end-to-end development and release, all in six weeks. This post shares how we did it and the lessons we learned along the way.

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Why the Ishihara Test?

Colorblindness affects over 300 million people around the world. The Ishihara Test, created by Japanese ophthalmology researcher Shinobu Ishihara in 1917, remains the most popular way to test for colorblindness. The test shows several images of circles formed by small dots painted using different color patterns and attempts to hide a number or letter in the middle. This helps diagnose several different types of colorblindness.

We felt that the century-old test could use a 21st-century makeover —a mobile app. It would be an interesting challenge to generate thousands of plates for the current state of the application and test for both Red/Green and Blue/Yellow colorblindness.

So, our team of three developers, with support from the product, QA, and engineering departments, kicked off the project.

Product strategy and design

Even when you have a tight deadline, you can’t ignore creating a strategy. Everyone needs to understand what the product aims to accomplish and what’s reasonable to expect in a given timeframe. Here are a few ideas that served us well.

1. Set a goal

Our goal was clear —Develop a Proof of Concept in Six Weeks. Nothing more, nothing else. Our application should be able to run Ishihara tests successfully and share results with the users. A clear goal helps align all stakeholders on the definition of done at the end of the project.

2. Set expectations

Six weeks isn’t enough time to incorporate every feature you can fathom into your app. So, we decided to build smaller scopes for each project phase and create a workflow based on short feedback loops. The focus was on an MVP that creates value for our users and the technologies that can support us in delivering the required outcomes.

Additionally, since healthcare is a sensitive industry, it’s critical to understand and adhere to the regulations. For example, we knew we couldn’t claim that our app provides a final diagnosis to users. It’s a proof of concept.

3. Be prepared to iterate, quickly

Iteration is the name of the game. Short feedback cycles would provide a continuous stream of feedback. Therefore our team needed to be agile enough to iterate quickly and make incremental improvements to the product.

4. Maintain brand consistency

Finally, the application design had to reflect the Modus Create brand. Therefore, the team understood that all UI decisions of the application needed to adhere to the company brand guidelines. The application should feel like it’s a Modus Create app, not a random online test.

Modus Create’s brand manual

Frontend development with Ionic and StencilJS

Building an Android and iOS app using native technologies would entail twice the work, time, and team. Therefore it was clear that a hybrid app is the best course of action.

That’s where Ionic comes in.

Open-source and hybrid framework

Ionic is an entirely open-source development platform that builds cross-platform mobile, web, and desktop apps, all with one shared codebase and open-web standards. Since we had an aggressive deadline and wanted our app to be available on both iOS and Android devices, a hybrid framework like Ionic was ideal for us.

Ionic empowered us to use our existing expertise around the JavaScript ecosystem to create a smooth native user experience for Google and Apple’s operating systems. It also opened the door to creating a great web application.

Preventing technical debt with StencilJS

While our app’s functionality wasn’t too complex, we couldn’t jeopardize the biggest challenge in building the backend that generates the Ishihara plates — losing valuable time to technical debt.

Ionic allows developers to use different JavaScript libraries to build app components. StencilJS is one such option. It empowered us to build the app quickly by leveraging its simplicity and minimalist, functional architecture. By allowing us to write JSX code familiar to our ReactJS engineers, StencilJS generated UI components leveraged by Ionic to build the UI for iOS and Android mobile apps.

Backend development with AWS serverless

Thinking, planning, building, and releasing the app in just six weeks was an enormous challenge. While using Ionic and StencilJS would allow us to simplify frontend development across multiple platforms, one big problem still remained.

How do we generate the Ishihara Plates?

Ishihara Plates might seem simple on the surface, but their dots and colors aren’t randomly generated. There is a scientific process behind each display. And that requires a complex algorithm.

The algorithm needed a place to run, and the resulting images needed a place to reside. However, we didn’t have time to invest in an in-house hardware setup or complex AWS configuration.

So, we turned to the AWS Serverless model application framework, which allows you to build cloud-native applications without the overhead of managing your own hardware. We used the framework to configure a set of lambdas and storage buckets that we could run our JavaScript algorithm to generate and store the images.

Backend Development with AWS Serverless

Then, we exposed an API Gateway where our mobile app can authenticate and consume the Ishihara plates, and show them to the users.

Project management with Jira and GitHub

Modus Create is a distributed organization with a global team. The project members were spread across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Therefore, it was critical not just to have the right tooling for remote work but also the right processes.

For example, we didn’t want to overcompensate for physical distance by having too many meetings. So the team decided to meet only once a week on Tuesday mornings (US ET) and rely solely on asynchronous collaboration to drive the project home.

Jira, Confluence, and GitHub were essential in allowing us to work asynchronously. Documentation on Confluence provided team members access to all the project details, reducing the need for back-and-forth communication. Similarly, we used Jira to track the progress of the work, which reduced the need for the dreaded “status-update” meetings. These measures helped create deep work time for developers, allowing them to code in peace.

Our code was stored and versioned by GitHub, and we used Slack for occasional real-time communication.

GitHub played a critical role in managing different ongoing versions of our codebases and deploying the right code to the production environment. We built workflows with GitHub Actions that allowed us to deploy the different backend environments for development and production and the apps to their respective app stores.

The workflows are triggered in different situations. For example, when merging the code to the main branch, our backend was deployed to its development environment, while the app was deployed to the store’s test environment. When publishing a GitHub release, the backend code was deployed to the production environment and the apps to the actual stores.

Release management with MS App Center

Our final challenge was launching the app on the two app stores.

Microsoft’s App Center allowed us to manage both publishing strategies, including deploying beta versions for testing purposes. It also allowed us to manage the deployment of the latest versions and provided statistics on the app usage. This helped us get real user insights and incorporate them in future iterations.

Final thoughts

This project was an attempt to align our bench team, industry focus, and technology expertise to hit an ambitious goal. We chose to work on a healthcare application due to widespread digital transformation in the industry and a shift towards preventive care. We’re already a partner to healthcare companies building apps to extend patient care. In the end, the team succeeded by using the right blend of agile practices and technologies.

The key to delivering a product fast is to keep it simple and iterate with a continuous feedback loop. A short timeline can tempt teams to dive straight into execution. However, you’ll increase your odds of success by investing time in a data-driven product strategy. Additionally, it’s also vital to pick modern tooling and the right technology stack to avoid double the work.

Above all, the most important factor behind the success of any technology-related project is to trust your team’s ability to do their best work. Focus on clearing blockers and giving them room for deep, focused work. Engineers can make extraordinary progress if they feel empowered and have clear requirements at the start of the project.