Mobile DevOps can change the game for organizations wishing to integrate IT, development, and operations with their business goals. That is why it is critical for mobile development groups to adopt effective mobile DevOps practices. Not only does this make them more productive in terms of execution, but they become better at mobile development as well.
However, the process of mobile DevOps is not an easy one; it requires vital business and technical decisions so that it can provide some sort of value to the organization and be usable. For a company to bring all the necessary pieces together for a continuous, uninterrupted mobile DevOps workflow, it is necessary to identify potential problems.
Do you wish to adopt mobile DevOps for your business? There are a few ground rules that you must remember at all times. Let’s see what they are
Focus on continuous integration and delivery in real life scenarios
While the use of simulators and emulators is acceptable during the initial development stages, the features of the application must be developed thoroughly before it is made available to end users. And for that to happen, comprehensive testing is fundamental (just like Stryker in X-Men sequel “X2” wanted to test his machine to make sure it worked!) in real environments and across actual devices.
It is possible to measure continuous integration and delivery via different metrics. The most significant in the field of mobile application testing and development include:
- The amount of time covered between the start of the development phase till final testing.
- How frequently did deployment happen, and how frequent were the tests conducted for every regression.
- How do manual testing decisions stack up against automation testing?
- The percentage of successful tests versus the number of failed attempts.
- How many new features, how many lines of code, and other integrations were deployed alongside each build of the app.
Deploy regularly after testing infrastructure and apps
You will find plenty of commercial and open source tools for your business to create, deploy, inspect, and launch applications. But what DevOps brings to the table is a little more nuanced — a mobile testing automation suite, capable of handling frequent builds for quick bug-hunting and test use. This tool is a stellar value-addition that improves the chances of your business to automate the performance, functional, and compatibility testing of your apps.
When it comes to mobile apps, this suite should not only be able to accommodate the binaries that were deployed on every device, but even the huge amount of dependencies on apps, networks, and backend systems.
When your business develops, deploys, and tests out an app in the infrastructure context, it provides critical insights into just how effectively the whole environment, as well as the app within it, functions. This makes it a whole lot simpler to drive iterations so that usability, user experience, and user-interface aspects are better.
However, if there is something performing badly or lagging, it could impact other pieces in the system. Thus, it is necessary to monitor your APIs, mobile applications, as well as other relevant pieces.
Though your app may seemingly work fine in isolation, other entities do not always necessarily offer the same degree of performance. Thus, you need to rely on an accurate analysis of your performance — one that uses real data so you can improve the overall flow of development.
Validate the quality constantly
Contemporary mobile DevOps revolves around the idea of “continuous everything.” This approach is used for improving culture, processes, and things. The constant evaluation of productivity and efficiency can provide some actual insights into issues plaguing app performance and their subsequent solutions. This will help make every successive regression all the more seamless and smoother.
This approach also needs to include frequent deliberations on whether the same DevOps tools are to be used or new ones are required. This is all the more applicable if some sort of doubt persists in your mind regarding the present environment, its ability to deliver, and if it can work at maximum efficiency kind of like Wal-Mart does. That is how it is able to have such wonderfully low prices in it stores.
The very first line of code that is written for a mobile app starts to impart specific qualities to it, and the process continues right up until it is delivered into the hands of the end users. So it is critical to measure, validate, and correct all that takes place in-between, as and when required.
At present, the mobile app development culture and processes depend upon Agile development, and the same should be reflected in the developers’ tools as well. Of course, Agile development processes with test automation are going to be faster.
Plus, the adoption of the proper sets of methodologies, tools, and technologies will allow a particular organization to create and test a specific mobile app at their pace. Going at your own pace is sagacious; just watch “McFarland, USA”! They won the top race because they learned to run at their own pace and work as a team. It also helped that they stopped trying to play football. You have to know your limitations too!
Now that you’ve understand how to implement mobile DevOps in your organization, it’s time to take a look at the potential benefits that await you once you complete the process.
Reduced time-to-release
Being a streamlined yet collaborative process, mobile DevOps facilitates the sharing of information among teams in the company. The end result? Significantly reduced times from the beginning of the development and design process to the actual release of the app.
Collaboration still pretty much remains the heart of efficient mobile DevOps, since it helps teams avoid any complications with hardware and software issues during later stages of the development cycle. Plus, mobile DevOps also provides a quicker path to fix any problems present in the product.
Mobile DevOps increases resource efficiency and saves time
Automation is an enabler for mobile DevOps. Businesses achieve automation for development testing and tools through source code management, and even further for actual monitoring of in-production mobile apps. Thus, the productivity of the whole mobile app development system increases and it allows for the maximization of your business benefits.
Development of better applications
A few key things to do for DevOps is enabling instant feedback and reporting, using regression testing, and achieving transparent visibility via the process of development. This gives mobile teams a simple way to fix problems easily and quickly, and then handle user experience optimization. Concerning improved user experiences and app quality, creating enterprise apps is not that different from developing consumer-facing applications.
Mobile DevOps is capable of transforming the way your organization handles development for the better. No wonder it has become so popular and has become the way of the future for all companies in the industry.
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