#23 Seven Best Practices for Enterprise Application Development

Developing a new application is the art of your thinking and creativity. You not only focus on your business but research a lot about how your customer will respond. That is the reason we have experienced a very good focus on customer experience these and days. Here are some of the best practices that will help to develop an application for an Enterprise.

UI best practices

1.  Provide a familiar look and feel:  Standardizing the look and feel of software allows users to transfer the skills they learn on one piece of software to another. Training costs are minimized
2. Provide consistency: Standardization may occur in varying scopes. Examples include the various components of an application, applications that will be used together, and an operating system and all the software that runs on it. The more broadly a standard can be applied, the greater the benefits
3. Use human factors findings: Standards take advantage of the large body of human factors research and accepted practice. The authors of the standards assimilate and interpret the research, turning it into guidelines (“best practice”) for designers to follow
4. Streamline development: Standards make many design decisions routine. This frees designers to spend time on decisions that are more difficult or critical
5. Evaluate usability:  Standards provide one basis for judging the usability of products. All else being equal, a product that meets an HCI standard should be more usable than one that does not
6. Comply with requirements: Standards compliance for the software may be required by the buyer (like Country specific rules, law etc.)

Follow User Interface Design Guidelines: 10 Rules of Thumb for more details

Single Sign-On best practices

All Web Portals and Mobile App would require secured access through sign in. The user profile would be maintained in the user session and would be used by all other applications. Here are some best practices to be followed

• Choose the right product as an Identity Provider (IDP)
• Verify that the identity directory is accurate
• Secure all the components of the SSO system
• Consider user privileges: Provide authorized access to each module

Learn more about how to implement security and single sign-on with your application – https://www.onelogin.com/learn/how-single-sign-on-works

Omni-Channel best practices

All Web Portals and Mobile App to be made compatible to defined service delivery channels. In a multi-channel environment, the user has access to a variety of communication options that aren’t necessarily synchronized or connected. However, during an omni-channel experience, there aren’t only multiple channels, but the channels are connected so you can move between them seamlessly. Best practices to be followed are –

• Provide Real-Time Updates across all channels
• Digitally Supplement In-Person Experiences: Not only should online interactions inform in-person experiences, but the two should blend for new, unique experiences
• Leverage Messaging to Meet Audience Needs: More people than ever are using messaging to communicate with businesses, such as Facebook Messenger, so build your integration across these messaging platform

Loosely Coupled and Bounded Context Applications and modules

All IT application and their modules should be developed such that the features and functionality are made available as loosely coupled, self-contained, standards based and configurable services.

The Application functional dispositions are designed aligned to the loosely coupled architecture principle with business service supported by ministry specific applications connected to the integration platform. The common shared or supporting services would follow the common application principle. Following best practices may be followed to achieve decoupling.

• Decouple at the module level
• Decouple at the object level
• Decouple at the processing level

Common Applications For Common/Shared Business Services

Construct and agree on common business supporting services.  Develop application to support those services or enhance existing IT Systems to support the services. Best practice for developing shared application may be decided based on the need and functions of the enterprise.

Low Code/No Codding Service Platform

A low code/No Code development platform provides an environment to create services through graphical user interfaces and configuration instead of traditional computer programming. Promoting such best practices for application development may reduce lot of cost and time to the market.

 Integrated Service Delivery Platform

An integrated service delivery platform, that forms the basic building blocks of domain specific services that would be built and re-used across the enterprise to develop all services

Conclusion

There are many best practices for designing the architecture for your application, better implementation, coding, and testing. There are best practices to automate your DevOps and another manual task during development and application rollout. But when you start thinking about an Enterprise as a whole, remember these 7 best practices to drive your application development and provide a unique experience to your customers.

Explore more at Teknonauts.com

Awadhesh Pratap Dwivedi

Awadhesh Pratap Dwivedi is an IT industry leader with over 13+ years of experience. He is excellent at providing an easy solution to complex business problems with his tremendous problem-solving skills. Currently, he is working with Oracle as a Principal Solution Engineer.