Case Study: Devstimate
A hassle-free estimation app for software developers
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Web and mobile project estimation for developers!
Our Devstimate app makes project estimation almost fun. Add tasks, estimate, and get total cost in no time. Agile fan? You can also score tasks with story points, set sprint length and velocity, and get total cost range based on scores.
The first version of Devstimate is now out for Android and iOS.
OUR RESPONSIBILITIES
This is our product so we worked end-to-end on it. It was a great experience from deciding what would our MVP would look like, to designing, developing and publishing the app.
Product Strategy
We determined the MVP version and prioritized our backlog. We took our product plan and created a plan for releasing our first version.
Design
We stuck with a very minimal design. Our goal was to get to market as quickly as possible and get feedback.
App Development
We chose React Native as our app platform to help us very quickly get our MVP out to Apple and Google play stores with a single code-base.
Backend Development
We chose Firebase for a very simple and straight-forward backend solution.
React Native
Our front-end uses React Native, which we are big fans of due to the speed of development, hot-reloading, and of course its cross-platform approach which means we work a lot less to bring the app to our target platforms.
The app uses the React Native Firebase library to bring native Firebase features into React Native.
We currently are using anonymous login into firebase, realtime database, and remote config features. As we listen to our users and continue to develop we will continue to implement other Firebase features.
You can say the heart of the app is Redux which handles the global app state, and React Redux Firebase helps us glue Firebase and Redux very seamlessly into our screens.
Other notable libraries we use in this project:
Serverless Architecture
Firebase is great because it handles so much of the tedious back-end work.
We fully rely on the realtime database, without any additional code logic on the server to get the user to manage their data. This has saved a huge amount of hours and allowed us to bring a prototype version to testers quickly.
Firebase’s Remote Config feature lets us update our estimate templates easily through the Firebase console, without having to push out new app versions.
We will be adding more Firebase features down the road and continue on the great groundwork we have laid so far.