The Importance of DevOps in Mobile App Development

DevOps is growing vital in modern application development, operations, testing, and delivery. It is no longer a niche strategy. DevOps methodology is embraced by a quarter of leading names in the Forbes Global 2000 list. The mobile application connected with DevOps bridges the gap between development and operations. It emphasises over communication and collaboration, constant integration, QA, and delivery with automatic deployment. The developing, testing, releasing, and upgrading of mobile apps can occur swiftly and more certainly.

Gartner estimated DevOps market size would be over USD 10.31 Billion by 2023. DevOps solutions' market demand amidst enterprises is expected to gain tremendous traction due to the escalating need for fast, high-quality mobile application delivery. 

Leaders globally are openly welcoming DevOps, especially in mobile app development with a unique set of requirements into collaboration, development, testing, operations, release, and analytics. Read on to understand the role of DevOps in mobile app development.

What Is DevOps?

DevOps blends artistic philosophies, methods, and tools that enhance a company's readiness to deliver mobile app development services with swiftness. It helps the mobile app development lifecycle to evolve and improvise quicker than companies with traditional development methodologies and infrastructure.

Before the DevOps approach, the traditional techniques lacked a healthy, coordinated effort within various development teams, which ultimately led to extra time in development and budget violations, resulting in customer dissatisfaction.

Benefits of DevOps in Mobile App Development

Before DevOps, it wasn't very easy for companies to manage separate development and operations teams on a mobile app development project. In the absence of collaboration and sync, the team would always encounter multiple obstacles and limitations in many ways, which constantly challenged the growth and innovation in a company. 

Most companies preferred to opt for the agile methodology instead of any other traditional approach. However, it wasn't enough; many testing, monitoring, and delivery issues delayed the entire project deployment. It would take hours of error solving and bug-fixing to resolve problems, sometimes even of a higher magnitude. Due to this disconnected sync in teams, the clients would suffer on time and cost.

Mobile app development in DevOps is a fast-paced approach that concentrates on interaction, integration, testing, deployment, automation, and analysis. It's a holistic approach that nurtures close working between expert developers, testers, and the QA teams, along with operations. 

DevOps offers easy-to-use automated solutions during the process at each phase reducing chances of human error. It makes mobile device management accessible and simple to execute. DevOps encourages the app's ability to plan, develop, install, and launch on a mobile device seamlessly.

One of the most significant benefits of using DevOps is guaranteeing that the development and the operations teams work as one. This methodology brings in so many benefits in terms of efficiency and teamwork, and more. 

Here's a quick list of benefits:

Better collaboration: DevOps offers better collaboration with your team members where development and operations work hand-in-hand on implementing. 

More time for innovation: You get better at interpersonal skills allowing you to have more time for innovation and thinking out-of-the-box.

Stable environment for deployments: DevOps brings stability in the development and operations, so also, as a result, offers a more stable environment to make deployment of your project easy.

Quick and on-time delivery: With better team synergy, more work is done within less time with fewer challenges, so delivery always lands on time.

Prompt error and bug fixes: With DevOps, you are in sync on all ends, making it an ideal environment to promptly resolve bugs and errors without restricting and slowing down in further phases.

Enhanced user experience: When like-minded experts come together in the DevOps process, the project gets delivered with an overall enhanced user experience, which is vital for every mobile app development.

Phases of DevOps: Essential Elements of Mobile App Development

Companies are always competing in the race to cater to the exponentially advancing smartphone market. The standard formula here is to utilize the power of outreach, presence, and higher engagement with customers, which ultimately boosts sales on the digital platform. 

However, many companies rush into this standardization and miss out on a few vital portions of the process such as the quality of the code, code security, opting right methodology, hiring the right pre-vetted experts or an extended team, building the mobile app roadmap, the costs of the mobile app development, and more. Here's where DevOps for mobile apps steps in.

Let's understand how you can adopt DevOps for your mobile app development with this phase-wise process.

Phase 1: Continuous Planning 

The first phase blends the entire project with planning and working side-by-side. The whole team is involved, developers, testers, operations, even the business analysts on a common platform to plan the mobile application's scope end to end. While the like-minded and stakeholders are in sync, the plan is reliable for your project.

Phase 2: Continuous Integration

The integration stage is where the developer community refers to as “CI” focusing on an error-free collaborative approach to ensure high-quality code is written. All the best practices and standards for version control are in place. DevOps helps the team put together and integrate only the best and latest code to make it bug-free.

Phase 3: Continuous Testing

Of course, testing is the secret sauce to this entire mobile app development process to ensure the high-quality and all criteria are stringently met for your top-notch product. The continuous testing phase in DevOps does just that. It offers faster solutions to problems, predict it beforehand and resolve instantly, which improves the overall project result. Testing guarantees glitch-free, bug-free, and error-free product delivery without any human intervention. 

Phase 4: Continuous Monitoring

Consistent monitoring is vital to ensure the mobile app is developed and is emerging at each stage as per desired project requirements and needs. It keeps checking the possible roadblocks or bottlenecks your team might encounter, such as memory drain, downtimes, crash reports, SDK logs, etc.

Phase 5: Continuous Delivery

Every company has a standard process for delivery practices. When your team actually makes realistic expectations and works along the process accordingly, there is no disconnect or delivery delays. So instead of firefighting, you can actually focus on on-time delivery. Thanks to DevOps, this phase ensures the mobile app is delivered on time. Remember to keep it realistic.

Phase 6: Continuous Deployment

After all, deployment is the ultimate goal we all love to achieve with as few errors, bugs, and of course on-time delivery. Hence, when it comes to DevOps, companies find this approach more viable and feasible. A more accurate approach to mobile app development shrinks all possibilities of any failures, quality problems, delays, security issues, time, investment in a project, and more. 

Wrap Up

DevOps boosts your team's collaborative performance as your strength and works its magic in improving the overall development cycle. This DevOps approach helps you to improve the overall quality, save time, resources, and cost. 

The whole structure is now executed with the innovative approach that works in stages but reflects on the overall success of the business goals you desired for your company. DevOps methodology represents many future advancements in the mobile app development arena.