A DevOps Approach to Mobile App Development
Every business is now serious about having a branded mobile presence to drive growth and build a reputation. But when it comes to app development, many companies still aren’t sure where to begin.
The DevOps approach has completely transformed the mobile app development scenario, and it’s a good option for any business looking to create an app. DevOps facilitates collaboration between developers, operations staff, and project managers to better fulfill the objectives of an enterprise app development project.
Bringing together the development and operations teams on the platform has solved many problems in mobile app development. These are some of the key benefits of a DevOps approach:
- Continuous delivery
- Improved customer experience
- Quicker bug fixes
- Enhanced employee engagement
- Fast product delivery
- Increased stability of the development environment
- Easy and smooth deployments
- More opportunity and time for innovation
- A boost to efficiency
To adopt a DevOps approach for your app development, you need to consider these important factors.
Continuous Planning
When you are planning for a new mobile app that will be representing your business, get every functionary of your company, including developers, operations, project managers, and various other stakeholders, on board. Make every team member involved in planning and deciding the development scope.
Continuous Integration
Continuous integration is about integrating the code of one group of developers with that of others. A DevOps approach allows various teams to build different parts of the app and continuously integrate them for testing and evaluation. This approach encourages faster development while building the app.
Continuous Testing
Mobile app testing is a tricky affair because the test outcome can be different from simulators to actual devices, and you have to incorporate manual testing beside automation testing tools. To make it more challenging, the same app needs to be tested across multiple versions of all popular operating systems. A continuous monitoring of the testing results is needed across devices, users, tools, and OS versions. This approach helps deal with the multiplicity of the testing scope and problems while still ensuring continuous value addition.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery is a key DevOps practice that encourages constantly updating the production environment with the changes that can influence the outcome.
Continuous Deployment
Through continuous deployment, the DevOps project helps to deploy the changes to the finished app automatically. This keeps the app updated continuously by bringing changes to the live app in real time.
While adapting to the DevOps approach of developing a mobile app has its share of challenges, the benefits are worth the effort.