Did you know that according to McKinsey & Company, app-related revenues will touch $70 billion by 2017, with 268 billion downloads?
The demand for mobile app development services of every sort is at its peak. Being a new way of accessing web content, consumers want more than fundamental functionalities from mobile apps – including user interfaces and user experience. It’s the “age of the customer” as Forrester says, and enterprises need to not only meet their expectations but exceed them if they want to stay ahead of the competition.
Drawbacks of existing mobile app deployment practices
One of the main difficulties of developing and deploying mobile apps is covering a lot of changes into one large deployment. This customary waterfall method of development is also widespread in enterprise application development. A company nearly spends six to eight months gathering requirements, six to eight months in development, six to eight months in testing, after which they put their large application into production. The difficulty is, during all that time, the development teams working on it may miss requirements, lose track of components, and even omit part of the build. So, in order to reduce any risk, the company implements a rigorous and multifaceted governance process.
The majority of the companies want to take this similar approach for mobile development and deployment as they want their application, whether for their user base or employees, to be successful. In reality, the app does not have to be perfect, it simply has to be user-friendly and intuitive. Most of the enterprises don’t understand this, and it results in a time-consuming, laborious, and expensive endeavor – and, often, a delayed one.
Why adopting DevOps is the best approach over others
DevOps is a powerful process of addressing the deployment challenges of multiple operating systems, multiple mobile devices, and consumerization by encompassing the agile development methodology to rapidly deploy functionalities necessary for successful mobile apps. Besides, using DevOps makes testing a shared responsibility of the entire team, and automation testing helps developers to ship code changes rapidly without compromising on quality.
Moreover, every platform has different characteristics from a deployment point of view, so, whichever platform you choose for the successful delivery, you should be able to identify, track, capture, and test every single change. And the continuous integration capability of DevOps helps in checking and updating the change that is made in the source code management system.
Benefits of DevOps for mobile application development and deployment:
- Ensure system uptime
- Capture changes
- Automate processes
- Identify and resolve problems faster
- Provide transparency of workflow
- Gauge the performance of the delivery channel
- Accelerate time to market
- Provide high-quality customer experiences
DevOps is indeed the best approach for delivering mobile apps and so, companies want to get started without delay. Therefore, it is important for everybody in the team to understand that the objective is not perfection; but an improvement. This facilitates in initiating everything in the right way, and the progress becomes faster and much better.
DevOps & agile development: they are different
In mobile development, DevOps and agile are broadly used terms and most of the mobile teams make use of either of these ‘practices’. However, there are differences in how organizations adopt both agile and DevOps culture in their daily activities. Also, some of them may even see agile and DevOps in a similar manner. But that’s not completely true.
If you compare the communication system of agile methodology and DevOps – the agile way of performing tasks includes more scrum meetings, daily activities where everyone is on the same page. On the other hand, Mobile DevOps endeavors to involve more documents and specifications where practices, checkups, and operational instructions are given. No doubt, both are well communicated and collaborated internally, to help in shortening the time to market, with reduced risk.
Some useful DevOps tools:
Since DevOps is a cultural shift and it relies on collaboration between different stages such as development, operations, and testing, there are several tools that fit into one or more software development and delivery process.
Mobile app development is complex, and it is definitely challenging to keep up with the present-day demands. Approaching the mobile app lifecycle methodically with these DevOps tools will make sure you are on the path to delivering a successful mobile app. Remember, the main goal should be to create automated reusable and iterative processes to speed up efforts and reduce redundancies. You must not leave mobile app testing for the last minute and have a real-time testing and monitoring system ready for production apps. Stay focused on implementing a continuous delivery practice with an automated build, test, and deploy practice to accelerate mobile success.
The final say
Undoubtedly, DevOps has gained significant traction as an advanced mobile application development approach, offering robust, user-friendly, and fully- featured mobile apps for your business. Hence, companies want to take advantage of the mobile market by providing users with apps that make enterprise mobility deployment easier using DevOps. With a DevOps approach, you can quickly make changes, and organizations can carry out refinement and updates of their apps rapidly. So, if you wish to have end-to-end large-scale mobile application development, then Hire DevOps Engineers at Softweb Solutions.
