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Role of DevOps in Mobile Application Development
-Nancy Khullar
“DevOps is not a Goal, But a never-ending process of continual improvement” — Jez Humble
As the quote suggests, the human race has always been revolving around finding solutions. Referencing from the invention of the wheel to sliced bread, we have explored this world enormously with no end in sight.
Have you ever wondered about the beginning of the internet era?
From minutes to load and now, seconds to download, the advancement has played its vital role. We have transformed from snail’s speed to lightning speed. The internet, which was rarely accessed by few through desktops, is now widely accepted through smartphones. In fact, CISCO has found that worldwide mobile users are populating 2 times faster than the global population. In order to meet this increasing demand, the enterprises came into action to develop apps that could cover worldwide.
However, matching the pace to launch applications and make an everlasting impact on the industry, many important features were left behind. Accordingly, the crucial components of versatile application improvement, for example, the application advancement, security, the nature of code, deployment, automation and practicality were left as a second thought.
The flood has at last settled down and today application advancement organizations have taken the inside stage. In this evolving scene, it has become imperative to concentrate on the components that were recently ignored and adjust new procedures that give quality arrangements lower costs.
And, that is where DevOps come into play.
But, before rushing onto the role that DevOps play in mobile application development. We need to know about “What is DevOps?”
What is DevOps?
DevOps simply comprises two words: Development and Operations.
Before understanding the problem statement that DevOps is trying to solve, we need to understand what DevOps is not actually. DevOps is not a tool,neither a software nor a programming language that you can learn.
DevOps is moreover a philosophy, an outlook of working for an association with the goal that new highlights reach to the millions of users as early as possible.It is a way of deploying the product from development phase to the production stage.It is a cutting edge approach that overcomes any barrier between development and operations. It involves better coordinated effort between all the patrons that deal with software. In simpler terms, it guarantees everybody dealing with the venture is in the same spot. So all the departments or teams engaged with software development are associated successfully. It assists speed with increasing the procedure and dispose of pointless expenses.
Benefits of DevOps:
DevOps has brought the turn of events and tasks to the same spot.
Before DevOps, programmers used to develop the whole code and afterward pass it on to the operations team.
With DevOps process, duties are distributed equally among various teams with a solitary objective that each team has a clear visibility of application performance.
Implementing DevOps offers:
- Consistent Software Delivery
- Improved Customer Experience
- Quicker Resolution of Bug Fixes/Problems
- Higher Employee Engagement
- Automatic build creation
- Automatic Development without human interaction
- Quicker delivery of the product
- Can proceed with unit testing and run all the test cases present in system automatically
- Progressively stable environment for easy deployments
- Provides test code compatibility on different python version
- More Opportunity for Innovation
- It has helped in reducing some bottlenecks such as :
- Conflicting development process
- Absence of proprietorship
- Manual testing process
- Insecurity in work process
What makes DevOps efficient?
Implementing DevOps for mobile application development involves executing the six fundamental components that integrate the entire process together and yields the best results.
Continuous Business Planning
It refers to joining the ends of various teams working altogether starting from developers, project managers to operations staff and different stakeholders. It helps to get everybody on a similar stage to finalize the scope of application.
Continuous Integration
Continuous integration, on the other side, guarantees that the code put together by one developer gets along with the code put together by the other developer(s). Basically, DevOps asks for frequent builds which need to be integrated with the latest code.
Continuous Testing
Testing is a significant piece of the SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle). Testing guarantees that the quality of the product delivered at the end-user must not be hampered in any case. DevOps automatically run the test cases without any human interaction.
Continuous Monitoring
A mobile app performing well in a test environment might fail in a live environment. The reasons for these failures can be multiple, for example, memory, network, power and so forth. It is important, in this manner, for developers to ensure that consistent observing is done by means of outsider SDKs for log, crash report, etc to discover the root cause of the problem.
Continuous release and deployment
The continuous release refers to the training that ensures the code is deployed to the production environment by pushing each change to the production environment automatically.
Continuous deployment is the following stage of continuous release. In constant deployment, each change that has been endorsed by continuous testing gets deployed to the production condition consequently.
Continuous user feedback and organization
Feedback today is practically quick and can spread to different individuals in a flash. Good feedback can increment both the mindset and the market for your organization, legitimately affecting your corporate image.
Continuous feedback is fundamental to application release and deployment because it assesses the impact of each release at the user end and afterwards makes an evaluation report and give it to the DevOps team to improve the future releases.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, there is nothing of the sort as a separate DevOps for mobile application improvement. DevOps is a general methodology that works for all segments as well as various types of application improvement.
Though there are certain difficulties involved in implementing DevOps for mobile applications. But, there are also additional advantages that make the whole journey worth it.
