Life Following an App Release (Part 1)

4 weeks of hell..

I was involved with the release of an in-house app in one of my previous job experiences. With a team of 5, we’ve been building it from scratch for about 10 months and it was ready to be released back then. Well, ‘ready’ to be released is probably strong term to use because the app wasn’t really fully tested.

What made it more challenging was this wasn’t a brand new app with a clean database. It ws an app created to replace an existing app that has been in use for the past few years. That means there is existing data with a prior defined schema which the new app deviates from. The schema and migration wasn’t really an issue I handled though but it certainly added to the complexity of the problem.

Under pressure from management, we did our first attempt and it failed miserably. We had to restore the previous application because the moment we went live, tons of issues started popping up everywhere. The WhatsApp groups we were in for various departments started blowing up with tons of messages and we were constantly firefighting. We had data migration issues, logic issues, frontend issues and worst of all was the SQL timeout issues. We had to restore the previous application in the afternoon on the first day we launched because the app was just too buggy.

You’re probably wondering, why wasn’t the app tested on staging? Well, we had a 2 month testing period but the users didn’t really spend time despite us reminding them constantly. They were more interested in minor arrangements, adding new features instead of giving the app a good run through. The users just tested the most basic functionality and then moved on with their work because they themselves had deadlines to catch.

Part 2 to be continued..