The integration of DevOps with mobile application development process

The mobile technology world has disrupted the way people live. For organizations, it facilitates unparalleled and bigger reach to the target audience, boosts service standards, better communication and cooperation among company staff as well as supports business transformation opportunities within the organization. Enterprise mobility adds liquidity to enterprise processes, and boosting its global reach. Mobile apps development is an essential component of each and every enterprise strategy today.

CUSTOM MOBILE APPLICATIONS DEVELOPMENT

Mobile apps development companies sculpted numerous solutions, from project inception to the launch. Custom application development services are focused strictly on working with the client requirements as well as provide the solution required.

MOBILE MICROSOFT DEVOPS

DevOps is not a process or a technique, but rather an approach to enable simple app delivery form inception to production. Before its emergence, it was typical for organizations to maintain distinct develo9pment as well as operation teams. The lack of collaboration and communication between teams was in a lot of ways a challenge to innovation and growth within a company. The separation of operations and development was vexing for companies adopting agile development, since using agile methods boosted the amount of new app builds for developing, testing and deploying by numerous orders of magnitude. Rather than the delivery of a new built to the operations team in every few months, developers produced builds every few hours as well as deliver release candidates at higher frequencies.

DEVOPS MICROSOFT FOR MOBILE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

DevOps employs similar principles, whether coding enterprise web apps or mobile applications. It’s important to include the mobile development team when adopting DevOps for the organization, even if the mobile team is a small part of the company or adheres a different development process. This is particularly true when developing mobile apps as front end to existing enterprise services and apps. Moreover, it’s also true whether the application is consumer-facing or meant for internal use. Mobile applications that directly interact with enterprise services and apps should be first-class citizens in the DevOps lifecycle. As new features are added to a service or an app, the teams could integrate them into the mobile app easily.

THE DEVOPS CHALLENGE

Although the basic DevOps principles are the same for mobile and enterprise applications, mobile apps do present particular challenges to the process. The challenges include the following.

1. Mobile apps as enterprise front end. Mobile applications, particularly enterprise B2C or business-to-employee apps, typically contain little business logic on a mobile device itself. Instead, B2C or B2E mobile application serves as a front end to one more apps that are already in use by the organization, like transaction processing systems, customer acquisition systems and employee HR systems too. The mobile application delivered to numerous platforms as a hybrid or native apps, has to be developed and delivered in conjunction to the backend LinkedIn platform services. The challenge is to holistically think of all the apps in the organization and coordinate the build and release cycles and processes.
2. Support for multi-platform. Mobile applications do not have one environmental target. Most apps target several devices, dealing with different technical specs.
3. Continuous delivery and integration. Due to the strong business motivation to deliver mobile apps to market faster, development projects for mobile typically have very aggressive timelines. An inception-to-delivery period of a few months or weeks even is common. The pressure is in delivering mobile apps rapidly in the adoption of agile methods to most successful projects. Continuous delivery and integration are vital elements of almost all agile projects.
4. The app store. In many instances, a mobile app could not be deployed directly to a device. It should go through an app store. Apple introduced this application distribution model and locked devices to avoid direct apps installation by app vendors or developers. Device manufacturers have followed suit.
5. Pull’ and not ‘push’ deployment. Majority of traditional deployment operates on a ‘push’ model wherein operations could push out a new app version, be it a web app or any other server-based app. The process of updating mobile applications is a ‘pull’ process, however in which most cases, users should choose to update their apps themselves. Developers of mobile apps have less control on which version of the app an established user keeps on the device.

There’s no such thing as a separate DevOps for mobile applications. DevOps is an approach, which works for all components and apps. Mobile applications do have certain challenges and needs that should be addressed. Adopting best practices in development enables organizations to adopt the DevOps process across the mobile app development teams, help in delivering high quality mobile applications and allow continues innovation and improvement as well.

Dhrumit Shukla is Business Development Manager with TatvaSoft - a custom software development company. He writes about Technology Trends, experience working with B2B and B2C clients.