How we built an election report-casting app for the 2015 Nigeria general elections (with little experience building mobile apps, using agile scrum methods for the first time)

Bulama Yusuf explains how he and his team introduced agile methodologies to build a mobile app with a cloud-based backend at an organization that previously used the waterfall method of software development (and had never built a mobile app before). Bulama outlines the challenges the team faced and the lessons they learned along the way.

Most software development companies in and around Abuja, Nigeria, go for the big bang approach, using the waterfall methodology. This makes software development painful for the developers, designers, architects, and the company as a whole. Changes in user requirements (which happen frequently) create tension between the company and the client; in the end, the software always fails, and its intended purposes are never met. This is the scenario I found myself building software in. It didn’t feel right. I knew it wasn’t right. I wanted to change the game by introducing a more agile means of building software. As the team lead for mobile/web applications—although there was no mobile development in the company at that point—I decided that the next project I led would be done using agile methods, but the project, an election monitoring app for the 2015 Nigeria general elections, presented a lot of challenges. We wanted to build mobile apps for Android and iOS, and I wanted to us to use a totally unfamiliar approach to accomplish it. I’ll take attendees through the challenges we faced as a team and company because of the software development methods we employed (with specific examples given). I’ll give an overview of the steps we took to convince management to let us build mobile apps (which was totally foreign to the company) and explain how we experimented as a team to build two mobile apps (Android and iOS), build a RESTful web service on Google AppEngine, and host a MySQL database on the Google Cloud Platform. Finally, I’ll discuss our experience with an agile method of building software (scrum) and the lessons we learned along the way.