Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
In today’s current technology scenario, mobile app developers are always on the lookout for the latest IT innovations to stay on the competitive edge. To make the process of developing mobile apps more efficient, mobile service providers have adopted mobile DevOps.
Mobile app development adopts the latest trends, technologies and tools for developing intuitive mobile application across different platforms as well as industry verticals. There are many mobile developers who are experts in the development of hybrid and native mobile applications across the platforms for end-to-end mobility, such as iOS, Android and Windows. Service providers aspire to achieve the business objective of the clients through leveraging people, processes and the latest technology.
Why Mobile DevOps
There are so many discussion and articles on mobile app development and how mobile DevOps practices could be integrated, adopted with existing processes and even how to use efficient resources that are beneficial for organizations. However, little has been said about why mobile DevOps could make a difference to companies that strive to enable their IT, development and operations to integrate with business goals.
DevOps is vital for modern app development and delivery. However, leaders in the mobile application development and IT operations should address the unique collaboration, testing the release and analytics needs of mobile DevOps environments.
Mobile DevOps for a Mobile Apps Developer
The mobile DevOps discipline needs important business and technical decisions to be usable and to provide value for organizations. To get all critical pieces together and allow continuous mobile DevOps workflow, potential problems and bottlenecks should be identified. Nevertheless, mobile DevOps has its pros, as well.
For a mobile developer to win the loyalty of mobile users, it must ship the right applications to the right customer at the right time. One has to continuously ship high-quality software and continuously listen and learn from users, providing them features before they know that they want them. Agile development methods are not enough; to win in mobile application, a developer needs mobile DevOps. It combines great automated tooling with a “continuous everything” culture.
The Pros of Mobile DevOps
Mobile DevOps has a number of advantage, including:
- Shortens release time. DevOps, it’s been said, is about collaboration across teams, something that was not managed properly with the old waterfall practices. Actually, mobile DevOps is more than that. The simplified processes, when operations and development come together, could enable organizations share information between the teams and others and considerably shorten the time from the design-development phase to the actual release. Iterative cycle during development enable more frequent deployment of code, get new regressions tested, verified and released faster than regular phase-by-phase process. Mobile DevOps offer a faster path of fixing occurring problems with the product. Once enhancements and features implemented for each build are done, continuous integration with the right test setup provide a faster solution to problems.
- Enables creation of better applications. More time spent on making new features, advantages and benefits for users simply are enabling the creation of better user experiences. User experience is the true differentiator today in the competition of the mobile apps popularity. Only those that enable delivery of experiences that users expect could remain in the competition. One of the most important things in doing DevOps is enabling instant feedback and reporting, transparent visibility to development and regression testing is paramount. This provides the mobile team an easy way of troubleshooting issues faster and fix, refactor and optimize user experience.
- Saves time and make use of efficient resources. Faster features delivery, new build and updates are achieved when operation environments such as development, staging and production are stable and the operating environments work easily for development. This itself makes the whole mobile app development process more productive and helps maximize business advantages. One enabler of mobile DevOps is automation. Automation is available from source code management to testing and development tools and further to actual mobile app monitoring in production.
- Provides multiple tools options. There are hundreds of thousands of tools that mobile applications are developed with daily. For any kind of feature, there should be a tool that could help build, test and deploy a certain part or feature of the app. Nonetheless, for good reason, some tools are used commonly by the mainstream. Most of the tools used and mobile DevOps processes that establish mobile DevOps core facilitate continuous integration, continuous release as well as continuous deployment. Part of the process is app release automation tools, which help up packaging and deploying app from development to production using automation. These tools help mobile DevOps flow to produce capabilities for implementing continuous delivery for even huge number of releases. Release management tools enable organizations to plan and to execute releases, offer a single collaboration portal for all stakeholders and provide traceability for a release and its components across all the build and delivery pipeline stages.
- Could dodge inefficiencies and bottlenecks. The major idea behind Mobile DevOps is to make things transparent and efficient, boost internal communication and help in building better products or applications. When mobile DevOps practices, processes and tools are in line, several bottlenecks and inefficiencies could be avoided, such as:
- Inconsistent development environments
- Stability and maturity of workflow
- Manual interventions
- Lack of operational practices
- ‘Old way’ and ‘new way’ integration
- Competing/misaligned procedures and lack of ownership
- Old-fashioned or manual testing process.
Mobile DevOps is capable of transforming how an organization handles the development process for the better. It is no wonder it has become the way of the future for mobile organizations. The DevOps approach principle puts emphasis on people and culture above tools and processes; thus, bringing business owners intimately to the design process can boost the success of the process. Organizations have to embrace a combination of collaboration and integration tools from both parties. Seamless interaction unlocks full benefits of the method and could ultimately contribute to overall business and operational success.
About the Author / Drumit Shukla
Dhrumit Shukla has been working as Business Development Manager in a software development company named TatvaSoft since 5 years. He is profoundly skilled and well experienced in providing software development services on various technologies ranging from Microsoft .NET to JAVA, Salesforce, BizTalk, SharePoint, PHP, Open Source, iOS, Android, Pentaho and more. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
