What Is the Role of DevOps in Mobile App Development?
This article explores what role DevOps in mobile app development plays and how it helps developers and businesses.
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If you implement DevOps in developing apps, you can achieve impressive results.
Why?
DevOps empowers the app development process with high team collaboration ability, enhanced efficiency, and faster product delivery. Perhaps, this is the top reason why business owners and developers are now embracing DevOps in the mobile app development lifecycle.
The global DevOps market size is also projected to reach $32.7 Billion by 2028 at a CAGR of 24.5%. This is because of the growing adoption of DevOps in application development and other sectors.
So what role does DevOps in mobile app development play, and how does it benefit? Is this a sign of the advent of a new shift in the app development industry? Let's know it.
What Is DevOps?
DevOps is the integration of software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). It is a set of practices that focuses on reducing the app life cycle to produce optimum results. DevOps involve cultural philosophies, tools, automation, and practices that combine the processes between IT teams and software development.
What Makes DevOps Different From Agile App Development?
Traditional mobile application development is employed in agile development methodology. Most mobile app development companies and developers either use choose Waterfall or Agile in their application development lifecycle. DevOps has also been running in the software development industry for many years. But its usage in the mobile application industry is on the rise.
It has evolved as one of the top mobile app development trends. Companies today implement DevOps in mobile app development or Mobile DevOps for creating apps. The purpose is, however, the same here. But, DevOps practices are completely different from agile practices.
It is because DevOps primarily emphasizes collaboration, integration, and communication between development and operations to enhance the speed of application development. It incorporates techniques to automate the processes, accelerate the speed, and align the teams to achieve maximum results and efficiency.
Benefits of Implementing DevOps in Mobile App Development
On the other hand, the agile methodology works on continuous development and testing iterations. The agile app development approach classifies solutions into different smaller parts. These parts are then later combined for final testing. Hence, it mostly focuses on continuous development and testing iteration.
Whereas DevOps goes beyond agile. It not only involves continuous development, and continuous testing but also continuous planning and integration, continuous monitoring, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. And due to these extensive abilities, DevOps provides many benefits for developers as well as app owners:
- Reduced development time and faster time to market.
- Maximum utilization of resources.
- Remove bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
- Better team collaboration.
- Get quick feedback.
- Improved UX
- Develop the best quality mobile application.
- Eliminate potential risks associated with app development.
These are the reasons behind the increasing implementation of DevOps in mobile app development. Top mobile app development companies and businesses are adopting Mobile DevOps in their app development environment. And they have achieved great results in their mobile apps through this approach.
How DevOps Helps in Improving Mobile App Development?
1. Automating the Entire Process
DevOps focuses on enhancing efficiency by automating various processes. From gathering requirements to development and monitoring, every stage is equipped with automation capability. With Mobile DevOps, app developers integrate automation in their pipeline and detect any potential problems before its inception. For this, there are various CI/CD tools that developers or software engineers can use to manage the created pipeline and eliminate errors and ensure a flawless app deployment.
2. Continuous Planning and Integration
In Mobile DevOps, continuous planning requires the combined participation of the whole mobile app development team to determine the scope of work for app projects. This gives the flexibility to identify the real problems and their practical feasibility. And continuous integration makes sure that the code is written flawlessly. This continuous planning and integration make the app development dynamic and error-free due to collaborative effort.
3. Continuous Testing and Monitoring
In traditional app development or, at present, mobile app testing is performed manually on emulators and simulators rather than in a real-world scenario. However, this does not give 100% assurance that the app will perform exactly in the real world as the way it did on emulators and simulators. But Mobile DevOps enables developers to automate their testing to optimize their process and identify all errors or bugs without fail. As a result, it gives a flawless mobile app delivery.
4. Quality Control
By employing DevOps in mobile app development, the dev team gets better control over the quality of the app. Since Mobile DevOps involves continuous testing and monitoring, it allows users to measure and validate every aspect of the code, features, and functionalities of mobile applications in the middle of the development phase. This ensures that every step of your mobile app development perfectly meets the defined quality standards.
Final Thoughts
Mobile app development is getting more advancement with the growing adoption of new technologies. As businesses today look for faster and more cost-efficient app delivery, the emergence of DevOps in mobile app development is certainly promising. And it is obvious since DevOps empowers the entire app development process with innovative and upgraded capabilities. Therefore, the role of Mobile DevOps will be at the top in near future. However, its expansion is in the evolutionary stage; for creating a mobile app with DevOps methodology, you will need assistance from an expert mobile app development company.
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