A developer's guide to getting ready for go live | CLEVR

There’s nothing worse than spending months of hard work on your application, looking forward to go-live, and then all hell breaks loose. You don’t want it to happen to you.

That’s why this session is all about the things you need to do to achieve a successful go-live experience.
Let’s dive right in.

Test for Success

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Before every major release, and especially before initially deploying your app to production, you want to make sure that every process works as expected. That means you need to test your app. Don’t just test it locally and call it a day. Try to create some real life scenarios. Think to yourself: how many users will be using my app? If you’re not 100% sure, double your estimated value, just to be prepared for the worst-case scenario.
{{cta('8876e954-dd4f-4149-851f-d6df8a06714e','justifycenter')}}After that, you should write test scripts for any process that the customer will use often or that consumes a lot of performance power in your application. Run them with your estimated user value, then check the test results and optimize your app if there are performance issues.

There are a number of tools you can use to write test scripts. The most popular one in this field, and the one I recommend, is ATS (https://www.mansystems.com/smart-digital-factory/tooling/ats), because it also includes load testing on the roadmap. What does that mean? With ATS, you’ll be able to write and run test scripts with your desired number of concurrent users and gain insight into the potential load for your application. Check it out in action! -> https://www.mendixworld.com/session/implementing-a-qa-process-for-app-efficiency/

Proactive Monitoring

Proactively monitoring your application provides quality assurance and helps the customer feel like they’re in good hands. In a perfect world, the customer would never notice any app issues because you would have fixed them beforehand. That’s what we all should be striving for.

To help you get there, Mendix offers a dashboard for all of your app’s KPIs. Automatic alerts can be activated and sent to your support team if certain thresholds are exceeded, so that action can be taken before issues arise.

When you pair that with an application performance tool like APD (https://www.mansystems.com/smart-digital-factory/tooling/apd) and a load testing tool like ALT (https://www.mansystems.com/smart-digital-factory/tooling/load-testing), you’ll be well prepared for any unexpected circumstances that come your way.

Create a support process

The last step before you go live is creating a well-structured support process so that you guarantee application quality throughout the entire lifecycle.

There are several important steps you need to take towards making that a reality:

Publish documentation in your app - like an FAQ page

Let the users know how they can get help - like a “Help” button

Hire someone who can provide customer support for the app

Create an escalation process, so if issues exceed the knowledge of the support team, they know who to contact

Close the feedback loop with developers and route the information back to the customer

Regularly update your app to fix any existing bugs

To sum it all up: write test scripts for the real world, monitor your app, and create a support process before going live. Good luck!