Hey everyone,

Yesterday we released (and open-sourced) a full production mobile app, and wrote a guest blog about it through Ionic's Blog. It's not everyday we get to see the 'nuts-and-bolts' of a full app, so I figured I'd share it with the community here as well :)

It took around 400 hours to design and build the Ionic 3 app. We used a serverless architecture, Firebase, and Ionic 3.

Why we built it

We're developers - although we always scope work the scoping process can get messy.

It's very easy to be 'peer pressured' (even unknowingly) into changing your estimates when your friends and colleagues think differently. This is exacerbated when you have junior and senior developers in the same room providing estimates together. The junior devs are often afraid to provide real estimates, because they are much longer than the senior's.

We used to use planningpoker.com for scoping sessions; but everyone could see each others estimates and then during a session team members would change their answers to avoid confrontation. This often leads to inaccurate scopes; because the person who's answer wins is not always the person tasked with completing the work.

Why we open-sourced it

It's aggravatingly difficult to find examples of real production applications that are open sourced (but still simple to follow). When I train new team members, I find that going from Angular's "tutorial 101" to building a full application is about a 10 foot step, and no one has 10 foot legs.

So, when the dev team proposed designing and building this tool we agreed to open source it and write about it. It's got some cool features, such as

• Teamwork Projects integration
• Serverless architecture
• Ionic 3 application
• Live scoping via Firebase
• Firebase. Firebase. Firebase. We're loving Firebase :D

We wrote a full guest blog post about the architecture and decisions we made on Ionic's Blog, so rather than re-invent the wheel I'd encourage everyone to read the full breakdown there.

Should you download it?

No - you should Clone it from Github and use it yourself. However; we figured it may be hard to get some project managers on board if it didn't have a least a semblance of an established app. So go ahead, use it if you'd like, but seriously - feel free to take it as well :)

Next Steps

We had a lot of positive feedback from the product; so we'll be releasing another full production app next month (open sourced) and blogging about the process. We don't intend to build any more integrations besides Teamwork because that's what we use internally at OpenForge.io; however, if you are using another tool and would like to create a PR we'd be happy to help support it.

Thanks everyone, stay cool and dev on!

Jedi