Apps are now doing things only dreamed of a few years ago and we’re continuing to move from a Mobile First to Mobile Only mindset. But while many aspects of the market are maturing, sloppy practices can erode the foundation of mobile projects, create sustainment nightmares and even cause projects to fail completely. In software development, the accumulation of errors in architecture, design, and poorly written code are referred to as technical debt.
Technical debt is a serious issue that is impossible to avoid, but some organizations add to it unnecessarily. Errors made innocently enough at the beginning of a project can snowball into an avalanche.
For example, AIM was once brought in by a new client to analyze why their enterprise-level iOS mobile app, which had been in development for over a year, had stalled and failed Apple submissions. We discovered that the code, which the company had developed in-house, did not follow any discernable design patterns, was all original, and was therefore unreliable and difficult to debug. The resulting technical debt was so high that the client would actually be served best in the long run by scrapping
