In every life cycle of software comes a point where it no longer becomes feasible to continue using certain parts of the overall program, this is even more problematic when the application is not modularly designed. On the other hand it is time to just retire what was made and replace/rebuild it from the ground up for current standards and technologies like Microsoft does every few years for Windows.
For those who don’t know the QuestionPro app: its base is probably the senior most of the offline survey applications, with the seniority has come a lot of experience for the team behind the wheel. Over the years the app has been maintained, updated and enhanced to offer more and more of what the QuestionPro online service offers but without a net connections. This task started to get time consuming due to the following:
- Research needed to be done since a net connection was out of the picture
- Ways to update the architecture were starting to be required around the clock for the smallest of things
- Significant changes needed to be made for just about every small thing that needed to be fixed.
We at QuestionPro decided that it was time for a change before our hair fell out. There were two ways to go about this either sit and update each part of the app piece by piece or rebuild it from the ground up. After some discussion we agreed we needed the following:
- The app needed to be more agile to meet user needs.
- It should have a centralized system to control things used in the various parts of the app
- At the same time it had to be made up of multiple components so that changing one thing didn’t break another.
- It should meet all the newer standards introduced in iOS and Android.
- It should be easily updatable to new standards that appear in the future
After looking at the above it seemed that rebuilding the app from scratch was more practical as updating it from its former stage would have taken more time and effort than it was worth. We would make it faster, better and stronger…. Sorry got carried away, the point is that we started a rebuild process for the app.
This improved version was first out on the Play store a few months ago and has just made it onto the Apple store, check it out at: