Mobile Devops has become an emerging trend in the app development industry. Over a decade ago, when the app market was untapped, the prime focus was simply to make a presence and not emphasize on the quality and other relevant aspects such as speed and security.
Today, ideas are not sufficient alone to capture a market. App needs to provide a seamless experience as the benchmark of satisfaction has gone upward over the years. Devops has been a game changer in both software and app development that provides a win-win scenario for all the stakeholders.
It has resulted in a new level of agile development and the methodology is now being religiously embedded in the app development. That’s what Mobile Devops actually is. And this article will go in detail about its approach, the advantages and challenges in Mobile Devops.
What is Devops?
The effective collaboration of developers, testers and project managers in order to facilitate a faster app development life cycle is called Devops. It bridges the communication gap and enables faster releases. And the probability of bugs creeping in the final stages of development is also reduced dramatically with the help of Devops.
How can Devops improve Mobile App Development?
The landscape in mobile app development has shifted rapidly with more focus on speed, security and cross-platform accessibility. And this is why mobile devops has now become the fulcrum of mobile app development these days.
Earlier, a large amount of time was dedicated to development and the larger code base was tested less. With devops, the frequency of deployment is more. It’s a modern approach that allows for seamless transition from conceptualization to deployment i.e. a shorter time-to-market without compromising on user experience, security and other quality aspects.
Advantages of Mobile Devops
Reduce the release to market time
Real-time collaboration allows for speedy communication across developers, testers, operation teams and delivery teams. Even if there are iterative cycles of development and changes, the Devops approach allows for quicker release in the market.
Better use of resources
Devops both in Software and app development relies heavily on automation for source code management and testing. This also allows for efficient use of the resources.
Remove the Bottlenecks
With more transparency, productivity is enhanced and the bottlenecks are easier to isolate and improve. With Devops, clear accountability helps in keeping a tab on the pace of the project. Miscommunication, which often arises between the development and testing team, are often easier to resolve.
More feedback
Real-time collaboration allows for instant feedback, operations continuity and also allows the stakeholders to voice their opinions, thereby allowing more innovation and employee engagement.
Challenges in Mobile Devops
Mobile market is divided into a wide range of platforms with different versions. This also means a different set of challenges for the developers and testers for various technical specs, OS versions and form factors. Even the likes of IOS now have multiple variants.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
Both CI and CD are important aspects of agile development. The change in codebase implemented by the developers needs to be processed at the earliest in order to allow a margin of error from the tester side.
Releasing via App Store
Different app stores are the outlets for downloading various apps. They need to comply with various terms and conditions related to privacy and security. Apple has even gone to the extent of locking its devices to prevent direct installation of the app by the app developer.
‘Pull’ deployment
Changes and upgrades embedded in the newer version of the app may make it appealing to the users but the updates require the intervention from the user. “Push” deployment is notable in the software industry however apps rely on “Pull” deployment. Developers have little control of which version of apps the user wants to keep using. This forces them to provide continuous support and troubleshooting for the previous version of the apps.
Best practices of Mobile Devops
Using Automated builds and Deploy scripts
As opposed to running the build through IDE, developers should set up automatic builds with the help of scripts. These scripts should be able to run on different build servers. The builds should be assigned versions so that they are easy to be identified and reproduced by any team member.
Testing each module thoroughly
Testing needs to be done exhaustively on different mobile devices as opposed to doing them only on simulators. Automating the Regression testing is essential in order to not only save time to also get quality output.
The root cause of any app crash can be deduced much efficiently when the developer knows the contextual information such as location, device characteristics and etc. related to the module which crashed. This can be done by capturing the crash and analysis logic.
Why AmpleWork for Mobile Devops?
Mobile app Development has been our forte. The amalgamation of technical skills and business acumen allow us to provide more value than just the mobile app development. We have worked extensively on trending industries by integrating the latest methodologies and Devops that have allowed for faster release to the market and innovative functionalities.
Conclusion
The process of Devops is not separate in itself for Software and App development. However, app development needs an extensive approach in order to test various versions of different platforms. Streamlining the development, testing and quality assurance is the prime purpose of Devops which allows for not only speedy release to the market but also for continuous improvement through updates.
