As Microsoft PowerApps continues it’s a long march to maturity, it’s important to stop and evaluate where the platform is in regards to developing and managing your PowerApps in the enterprise.
In a traditional enterprise-level organization, you have many tools and strategies available to you when developing, designing, testing, and managing code bases for your applications. Methodologies such as Agile, Source Code Management such as GitHub, and IDE’s like Visual Studio empower developers through the application life-cycle in the most efficient way possible.
With PowerApps, however, the tools are still immature when it comes to enterprise development and management. Remember, PowerApps was designed for business users to create their own mobile apps. That is the core audience. In a perfect world that would hold true, but what experience tells me is those business users:
A. Don’t always want to learn how to make apps.
B. Don’t want to devote time to learning PowerApps.
C. Don’t want to be responsible for supporting any created apps, if A and B don’t apply to them.
So, realistically, most organizations will turn to IT departments for the development and management of these authorized PowerApps that will run in the organization.
I have outlined my thoughts and strategies to help you be effective in designing, creating, testing, and supporting PowerApps in your organization. (Please note: This is in no way indicative of Microsoft’s view of how to go about this. It’s based on my own experience with PowerApps).