The number of mobile devices have reached today in the world 3.8 billion and will grow more in the future. This exponential growth of smartphone users leads to app development services growth and makes the development industry a stable and reliable domain to invest in. There is no significant evidence to show the trend may fall in the future.
Technology is advancing every second today and making the world shift on digital platforms.
In the old days, the IT industry’s focus was on fulfilling the mobile devices market’s demand and making their digital presence strong. But now, the game level has increased. The elements like data privacy, cost included in the app development, maintainability, and other aspects were left behind but need to be in focus now.
The mobile app development industry’s expansion is surging and putting things at the center which were neglected previously. The centered elements become responsible for reducing the cost, improve development processes and methodologies, introducing DevOps to the world.
DevOps is the latest smartphone app development approach, enabling a consistent development cycle from the beginning till the final app production. It breaks the traditional barrier that holds the development companies to opt for the optimized development cycle ensuring benefits for all. The transition from the waterfall SDLC to agile software development simplifies the things that create problems that sometimes are irreversible.
What is DevOps?
DevOps fill the gap between two worlds that are development (Dev) and operations (Ops). It creates better collaboration between the people who are contributing to the application development. In other words, the DevOps’ purpose is to bind everyone on the same page, which makes the interaction and connection between team members effective and progressive. The process gets the speed, and unnecessary things become vanish.
The 6C’s of DevOps Methodology
DevOps talks about continuity. Continuously development, production, and interaction. There are six significant components of DevOps improving the app development quality. The six Cs are:
Continuous Planning
Planning things continuously bring the team on the same platform. The team members can be game developers, app developers, business analysts, project managers, team leaders, testers, and operation departments. Everyone who is part of the project in any way becomes part of continuous planning. They decide the project scope and the end goal they want to meet.
- Continuous Integration
Continuous integration refers to the development team. The focus in this C is to build a bug-free product by applying the best programming practices. The program and logical scripts which developers write should be digestible by the operation team.
- Continuous Testing
Testing is the fundamental aspect in any area. Whenever a company develops a game or app, they must test every module and elements built in it to give a user an app’s best error-free version. Automation also becomes part of it, where the tester automates many things using digital tools.
- Continuous Monitoring
Monitoring lets us identify the bugs and errors in an app. When we do continuous monitoring, almost all the bugs get recognized in the development phase, and the struggle that the team usually faces in the final stages fades away.
- Continuous Delivery
As DevOps bridge the gap between the development and operation department, developers develop the project’s small modules and deliver them to the operation team continuously in the process. It increases the probability of releasing an app on time or even before.
- Continuous Deployment
When the developer sends its code to the testing team, they go through it and perform a different kind of testing to ensure a bug-free version. The code enters the production environment when it passes all the tests.
Highlighted Benefits of DevOps
- Identifying and Fixing Problem in Faster Way
When you found out a new app, you download and install it to try it out. If the app does not work correctly and crashes, almost every user will delete it in the first place, then sharing their bad experience with it on the App store’s review section. Is this what you want, same with your app?
‘Yes’ is not the answer, of course. These scenarios were common before the DevOps incorporation in the company’s core. When the organization gets activated with the DevOps, the rate at which issues appear reduces significantly, and the process flows in the optimized direction.
- For DevOps, Silos are No Longer Existent
Silos are now no more present today. Those days are gone. The communication level enhances between the team, including all the processes. Everything happens seamlessly. DevOps cut down the old methodologies, which were not that much effective with the modern innovative approach necessary for today’s industry needs.
- Utilization of Resources becomes Efficient
Resources need to be utilized very efficiently to achieve the desired product at the minimum cost. Automation is an integral part of DevOps to streamline the process. The automation begins from the base code to develop app testing tools, boost the production, and ensure continuous iteration, fast deployment, and quick release.
- Effective Collaboration and Interaction
Every team needs a channel where every member updates what they have done in the project so far and what they are currently on. They want a platform to discuss things effectively and quickly. A collaboration channel helps every individual included in the project to visualize things and see what is happening.
DevOps application in mobile app development makes controlling and monitoring easier along with reducing the time. The six C combination makes an ideal development environment for the business.
- Modern Toolkit
For the enhanced smartphone app scalability and quality, DevOps gives immense features and a creative toolkit. It aids the continual delivery when releases are significant in number. Moreover, the management tool combines everything on one channel to bring traceability to the process.
- Scale (Bonus)
The best utilization of DevOps is visible in Netflix. DevOps is the primary source of its power. The amount of traffic the platform handles is enormous and requires high scalability at its core. That’s the reason Netflix made their circle with DevOps. They developed and altered their system on AWS. It let them scale substantially even in the AWS environment.
To Wrap Up
DevOps benefits are widely spread and result in leveling up the game. It is not responsible for improving one or two aspects in the development cycle, but the whole structure gets revamped, resulting in an enhanced process, better collaboration, and a quality product on time with minimal cost. Having the DevOps enabled in the root boosts the organization’s effectiveness and fastens the drive to meet the business goal.
Keep in mind that the same strategy does not work best for every business as they are different in nature and operate on a different scale. The best workaround to find the best is to experiment. Begin with the Scrum or Agile, then incorporate CI/CD and DevOps. Like we iterate in app development, the development process also needs iterations. Always amend and update the process, monitor them, and analyze how it affects team growth. Tweak it where necessary to change the game.