Mobile devices have become the go-to devices that many people use to access the Internet and digital services in the last few years. The trend is set to continue as more businesses and organisations make the shift to developing mobile apps for their users.
These days, mobile app development is a huge need for many businesses. They’re looking for ways to deliver quality products and services to their customers. For this reason, IT companies now offer mobile app development services, focusing on development cost, security, code quality, maintainability, flexibility, and more. IT companies have learned they must deliver a strong product, but at a lower price.
It’s from this need that DevOps was developed.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a software engineering approach that focuses on effective collaboration between team members, including project managers, developers, and operations staff. The goal behind DevOP is to ensure each team is working on app development using the same platform.
The goal is real-time collaboration and communication between teams, leading to faster development and release of products.
The Benefits of Adopting DevOps for Mobile App Development
There are many benefits that go along with using DevOps, including improved communication, testing, and more.
1. Increased & Improved Communication
DevOps brings development and operations teams together. It implements continuous communication about the version of the app being released next.
The process allows QA teams to continuously test and provide feedback to the development team. The result is that a product may be launched faster than in the past.
2. Efficient Use of Resources
DevOps also encourages the use of automation for everything, including code management to development platforms and testing tools. Automation is key in DevOps for each task.
When development and deployment processes are automated, the team’s utilisation of resources becomes more efficient. This can lead to a faster production time—DevOps work to make better use of resources, resulting in launching products more efficiently.
3. Continuous Testing & Monitoring
As an app is developed, it’s necessary to test the application on different operating systems, such as Android, Windows, & iOS. Testing must be regular and consistent to be effective. If this process is done manually, it becomes slow and irksome. This may slow down the entire development process.
With DevOps, continuous testing and monitoring are automated and it’s possible to find and fix bugs and errors quickly.
4. Work Environment Stability
When developing mobile apps, it’s essential to add new features regularly. However, this process requires plenty of effort.
However, with DevOps, there’s more transparency in the process. For example, the dev team knows which feature the QA team is testing. On the other hand, the QA team knows which new version should be released next.
For this reason, DevOps can bring stability to the work environment, leading to improved productivity.
Challenges to Adopting DevOps for Mobile App Development
While there are plenty of benefits that go with the adoption of DevOps for mobile app development, there are also some challenges that must be considered.
Multi-Platform Support
These days, a mobile app needs to work across several different operating systems. Multi-platform support requires developers to deal with each platform’s technical and business specs separately.
For this reason, managing and collaborating across multiple platforms can be challenging. And it can be more difficult to adopt DevOps for a company.
Continuous Integration & Delivery
Continuous integration and delivery are two more challenges to adopting DevOps. There’s a lot of pressure on delivering apps rapidly. For this reason, a company may take the agile approach instead of using DevOps. What’s more, if there’s a need to develop a hybrid or native app, things become even more difficult.
With DevOps, it’s necessary to process all changes immediately for all kinds of mobile OS. The build and configuration are different for each one, so it’s necessary to have several servers to handle multiple builds.
Dependency on App Stores
Another challenge to DevOps is that it’s not possible to build a mobile app and have it installed on a specific device. Instead, it’s necessary to develop apps for different app stores, such as App Store for Apple and Google Play Store for Android.
When an app enters the store, it must be approved, and the latest version of the app is featured in the app store, where people can download it.
However, there’s a problem with the concept of continuous delivery. The issue is it is necessary to submit the app for approval and wait for it to be deployed into the app store again. Instant deployment doesn’t happen.
In this scenario, DevOps can be more challenging.
Crucial Factors to Keep in Mind for Mobile DevOps
There are a few key factors to bear in mind when adopting mobile DevOps.
Continuous Integration & Delivery
The first key to adopting DevOps is to use the principles of continuous integration and delivery. It’s necessary for developers to make feature integration easier for other members of the team. For this reason, all development aspects need to be transparent. This includes text files, scripts, documents, and more.
Doing so ensures the operation team is able to plan the development and delivery process seamlessly.
Continuous Testing & Monitoring
Next, it’s crucial to implement continuous testing and monitoring. If you choose to go the manual route, it’s not possible to test the app in real-time. However, focusing on test automation can make it possible to test apps in a natural environment and offer real-time feedback.
Automation testing also makes it easier and faster to find bugs and solutions that improve the product.
Quality Check & Delivery
It’s crucial that a developer constantly checks the reviews and feedback from the different app stores. It’s also necessary for them to read the comments of different users to find and understand problems they’re having with the app.
With this information, the developer can improve the new version with a bug fix and value-added features based on the reviews and feedback.
Following quality checks and delivery processes can ensure continuous development and delivery of mobile apps.
Summing It Up
DevOPs is a modern concept that can help an organisation deliver high-quality products and services. It’s all about the efficient use of resources while improving communication and collaboration between teams.
The end result is better mobile apps and end-users, while your business provides faster delivery at a lower cost. What could be better than that?