Most engineering teams - mainly startups - believe onboarding mobile developers is simply an "immersion experience." "Throw them in with little guidance, and they will figure it out independently." Unfortunately, this assumption should never hold.
Successful onboarding plays an essential part in engineering teams' overall success.
Studies reveal that businesses may lose up to 25% of employees within one year due to poor onboarding experiences, with costs estimated between 30-50% of salary replacement for developers lost due to lousy onboarding experiences hire an ios developer.
Onboarding strategies that use standard processes and tools increase employee retention, improve job performance, and create happier workers.
This brief guide explores how bad onboarding experiences can wreak havoc with mobile development teams while offering engineering-specific advice on designing extraordinary onboarding processes.
Onboarding refers to welcoming new employees into an organization, helping them understand their roles, job requirements, and how best they fit within it.
It should not only involve providing training but also taking into consideration social norms within that particular environment.
Onboarding mobile developers involves more than simply filling out forms and setting up email and other company accounts; it also involves learning about their organization's history and policies.
Each company has its own coding structure, tools, dependencies, and engineering practices that new engineers need to learn to become productive members of their organization.
Mobile developers require additional onboarding programs and corporate onboarding processes to help familiarise themselves with all this material to ensure long-term career success.
Poor onboarding can have several adverse effects, including:
New employees typically take eight months before becoming fully competent; however, to have new engineers contribute quickly, companies often cut corners by skipping tasks that give new engineers a more profound knowledge of the codebase and internal processes.
While new engineers may quickly understand simple tasks (debugging or running tests), fixing complex problems or making significant modifications takes much longer for newcomers.
Longer-term benefits. Engineering teams that deal with legacy codebases often possess quirks or secrets they know of within the codebase that veteran engineers use to navigate difficult situations more smoothly; with formal onboarding procedures in place, this knowledge can be passed down effectively to younger engineers.
Onboarding processes that could be better designed limit mobile developers' opportunities to form meaningful relationships among engineers and enhance mutual learning and cooperation.
Furthermore, studies demonstrate how good onboarding programs encourage employees to interact among themselves, resulting in office friendships, satisfaction, and positive effects for all concerned hire dedicated ios developers.
Take Your Business to New Heights With Our Services!
To effectively onboard new mobile developers, you need to achieve these objectives:
This will allow them to see the big picture and better understand what they are building.
Here are a few engineering-specific tips to help you create an onboarding system to meet the goals outlined.
As part of your team's onboarding strategy, create an internal wiki such as Tettra or GitHub Wiki to assist your engineers with daily activities.
This wiki should cover codebase information, workflow and culture considerations, software/tool guides, and your organization's engineering processes. This is especially important for remote teams where communication may not always be accessible: having such an internal resource makes for better planning hire ios application developer!
Mentorship of new developers, mainly if they will be working with legacy code, is critical for success. Mentors can provide technical support, pair programs with new hires, correct mistakes quickly, pass along long standing company engineering secrets, and train newcomers on long standing company engineering secrets - two objectives will be accomplished: faster codebase ramp-up time while simultaneously having engineers who possess similar technical know-how should senior engineers depart the workforce.
Mobile DevOps can drastically cut down developers' time to contribute meaningfully to codebases. Mobile DevOps involves automating processes and using tools to assist developers in quickly producing high-quality mobile apps; techniques like automated testing and environment setup automation using infrastructure such as code and CI/CD pipeline allow newcomers to focus on writing quality code rather than tedious, repetitive tasks.
Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform or Docker help new developers manage their development, testing, and production environments more efficiently and in a repeatable way.
Mobile-focused CI/CD tools such as bitwise can assist newcomers with specific tasks related to building for mobile, including cross-platform builds and signing identity management. All they require to get going are connecting their repository, retrieving project settings from it, and then configuring build configuration.
As we've mentioned, successful onboarding strategies aren't only about processes. They're also about the tools that you use.
CODERS, for example, is one such tool.
CODERS offers several features to meet the challenges of developing for mobile devices, including:
CODERS is a mobile CI/CD software reported to make onboarding mobile developers much more accessible. Here are some examples:
Also Read: Navigating The Talent Pool: Tips For Hiring iOS Developers
Joe Reda is the CTO of BitBakery software, an outsourced provider of development for companies. Reda explained: "CODERS was chosen because multiple developers are working on mobile applications at once; therefore, we needed a repeatable process that allows any developer to build applications, test, or submit builds directly for store submission hire ios app development experts." CODERS allows us to onboard new developers quickly.
New developers can build and release test versions directly into QA without local workflow setup."
CODERS allows startups to save money by not having to buy dedicated devices for iOS builds
Sokari Gilis-Harry is a product manager for Sprinthub, a mobile development agency that caters to non-technical entrepreneurs.
She says: "As a Flutter-first team, we reduced the onboarding cost by allowing them to use existing Windows PCs.
We created a complete Mobile DevOps pipe to implement multi environment workflows. This helps our junior mobile engineers work on parts of a project they understand (such as UI widgets).
At the same time, they learn about the other parts of the project. Without CODERS, we wouldn't have been able to achieve our Mobile DevOps objectives, given our current engineering budget.
Our engineering and development teams are held to high standards. They will surpass expectations if you give them the tools and processes to be successful.
CODERS can help your mobile engineers onboard more easily. Request a demo today to find out how CODERS makes things easier!
Onboarding is only sometimes considered hiring, but this step is essential. If you hire the wrong people, onboarding developers will be a non-issue.
Referrals are a great way to validate the credentials of candidates. You'll still want to look at developer portfolios and previous work, whether you have referrals or not.
You can also check out any open-source projects they've contributed to on repositories such as SourceForge or GitHub. Understanding their previous work will help you better understand their technical abilities and what projects are essential to them.
Remember to underestimate interest. Hiring a developer passionate about your business model, use case, and technology is essential.
This will help them stay motivated throughout their employment.
Interest and passion are key factors when hiring a remote developer. It will be up to the remote developer to fully immerse himself in the team and its challenges without an on-site team manager or team members.
We've had a chance to talk with several startup founders who run distributed teams. All of them emphasize passion when it comes to hiring.
Documentation is crucial when onboarding new developers, particularly those who work remotely. Zapier's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) emphasized this in our conversation.
He said, "Information should be disseminated automatically when needed by design."
You should document all the necessary information to help your team do their job effectively. This includes user guides for commonly used tools, organizational charts, SOPs and common bugs, how to fix them, office setup, software tutorials, and anything else that needs step-by-step instruction.
All of this information can be found in one place to stay organized. A wiki page is a good example. Some have suggested an ebook or a series of tutorials to streamline the onboarding process.
This would require initial planning and investment, but once it was launched, the cost would be minimal, and its utility would last a lifetime.
You have to consider a different realm for documentation for developers. Every dev team needs a standard way to set up their local development environment, including workflow procedures.
Teams should select the workflow framework best suited to their project and programming process. Some popular workflows are GitFlow Feature-Based Workflow and TRUNK-Based Development. You want to incorporate your new developer as soon as possible into this workflow.
Mentorship is a valuable tool for onboarding developers and building a team. More than having a highly-trained, motivated team with an efficient and knowledgeable newcomer is required.
A mentor-mentee relationship will not automatically develop. Mentorship is critical to onboarding new employees and should be carefully planned.
Recruits need someone to contact from the beginning, even before starting. This person should be able to answer all their technical questions, introduce them to the team, and walk them through their first projects.
Assign the responsibility of mentoring new developers to the most senior engineer. They will eventually burn out and resent the added burden and the new member.
It is an excellent idea to let a junior developer handle the task. This allows them to use their skills, gain leadership experience, and ensure they're up to par.
Our dev team quickly transitions new developers into their new workflow at by assigning a simple task they can complete using GitFlow.
The onboarding software engineer or developer can feel a sense of accomplishment and simultaneously help production.
The tasks can be as simple as rebuilding dashboards or writing a new matching algorithm, updating existing features or creating new ones, or anything else to help the new developer become a team member.
It's common for tasks to get defined during the production cycle. This is not a good practice when assigning new tasks to developers. To avoid confusion, the scope of initial studies should be clearly defined.
You should include your new team members in communication before work starts: email chains and Slack channels. Weekly updates are also a good idea.
You can leave them out of all channels at a time. Instead, introduce them to one at a time so they can become familiar with the communication flow.
Schedule regular updates once the developer joins. Prepare to address their concerns and answer their questions.
Weekly updates can also be conducted in a stand-up format, where everyone shares what they did during the week, any problems encountered, improvements to make, and the plans for the following week. Your stand-up meeting should be followed by written notes, which everyone can access.
You should also use one-on-one sessions to keep tabs on your new employees. You can use one-on-ones to listen to your new team members, ask them how they're doing, and give feedback.
Managers should encourage engineers to provide honest feedback. They can share their experiences, what they enjoy, and anything they struggle with.
Onboarding developers require standardized communication and performance expectations. However, integrating new developers into the company culture can add an extra boost to their retention.
Encourage creativity and spontaneity through team-building exercises to make your new developer comfortable.
Zapier uses what they call "pair buddies" to accomplish this. It is a random pairing between two teammates for a 15-minute chat.
Focus should not be placed on the work but on sharing personal or professional experiences to help teammates get to know one another better. The end goal, of course, is to build a stronger relationship.
Virtual beer meeting has been used by other distributed teams. You can have a virtual team-building session with a drink of your choice.
This may seem strange, but this is a great way to make online relationships more authentic.
In addition to spontaneity and regular ceremonies, embrace the idea of everyday events. Ceremonies could include demos for soon-to-be-released features, buddy-coding days, hack days, or anything else.
Hack days allow developers to break away from the regular sprint work cycle and focus on solving problems they are most interested in.
Plan ceremonies to include everyone, incredibly remote team members, and onboarding developers. Rituals bring consistency and allow everyone to showcase their skills and share recent learnings.
They should be something that your team looks forward to.
Combining culture building and ceremony will promote team spirit and personal relationships. This is essential to onboarding new developers into your team's culture.
The culture and attitude of the new hire will be critical factors in determining if they are a long-term success for your team.
Use a code review process to ensure that new team members meet code standards and make suggestions for improvements.
Also, hold periodic discussions about current workflow processes to identify bottlenecks or barriers. Do not measure quantity, but rather quality. A thousand lines of messy, unclean code is better than one hundred lines of clean, tidy code.
Remember that evaluations are not just for the benefit of the manager and company. Feedback is crucial to help new developers and software engineers grow, learn, and work better with other teams.
You should involve remote developers to the maximum extent possible, as they are on-site. With the use of video chats and other virtual office software, all onboarding can be completed digitally.
Even though it takes a bit more work, remote team members can still be introduced to each other and mentored.
If you work with part-time or full-time staff, it is essential to learn about the company. Many companies offer an introductory course or require readings introducing the company's values, mission, and long-term goals.
Remote team members will feel more like a part of the team if they understand the company's goals and values. Remote developers must have a sense of purpose and camaraderie within the group. They will be more motivated, loyal, conscientious, and perform better.
Even after the remote team members have been fully integrated into the company, their goals and workflows must continue to align with its initiatives and long-term objectives.
Hotjar drafts an annual one-page document asking all teams and employees to align their work according to the company's North Star.
Take Your Business to New Heights With Our Services!
By improving user retention by up to 50, a good onboarding process can increase the rate of new users. App onboarding involves introducing users to your mobile application, showing them how it functions and what they can expect.
It also includes explaining why your app will make their lives better. This can be done through account creation, screens, tutorials explaining the features, or other in-app signposts.
It is essential to make this first interaction intuitive and slick for several reasons.
Refrain from treating the onboarding as an afterthought. Twenty-five percent abandon an app within the first use.
This likely indicates that they had a poor experience. We all base our judgments on initial impressions, whether it's leaving a store after entering or judging a novel by its cover.
While a beautifully designed app is essential for first impressions, it goes beyond aesthetics. If your app's user experience is frustrating from the start, it will lead users to believe they will likely have the same experience the more they use it.
Showing users how to use an app will increase their engagement with its features. A user who is highly engaged will have a more excellent lifetime value.
High engagement is another ranking factor. It tells app stores how people feel about your product. This signal determines its position in the app marketplaces.
The number of users abandoning your app is also a ranking factor. The fewer people who delete or ignore your app, the higher your search result placement.
Expect a new developer to perform poorly in the first few weeks. It takes an average employee up to six months to become fully competent.
We have provided some tips in this article to reduce the time.This is not a template that must be followed rigidly but a formula that can be tailored to your project and team.
Coder.Dev is your one-stop solution for your all IT staff augmentation need.