According to IBM, mobile apps can improve productivity by 45%. As a result, many companies are developing and deploying mobile apps to their employees, customers and business partners. Companies adopting this approach are likely to find the concept of DevOps necessary to manage the life cycle of mobile apps.
"Within the corporate environment, there are two critical success factors when it comes to developing and using mobile apps: an efficient software development process capable of delivering high-quality software fast; and the ability to deploy and monitor the software well," says Ziaan Hattingh, managing director of IndigoCube, a company that focuses on improving the productivity of the application life cycle in large organisations.
"By helping to eliminate many of the structural inefficiencies typically found in the application life cycle, a DevOps approach can help improve a company's ability to build, deploy and manage mobile apps dramatically."
Another factor that is likely to drive take-up of DevOps is the fact that while many companies outsourced the development of their first generation of corporate mobile apps, there is a move to bring development in-house. This trend is being driven by the realisation that business-critical software enables competitive advantage. "Leading companies view efficient software development and deployment as a core competency, and research indicates that these companies consistently outperform their rivals in the market," says Hattingh.
DevOps aims to bridge the gap between "development" and "operations", typically two groups that have few established lines of communication and different reporting lines on the corporate organogram. This communications gap often results in mismatches between software and the infrastructure on which it has to run, and thus is responsible for overruns in both time and money. DevOps addresses the entire life cycle of all applications, of course, but the challenges of developing mobile apps make it a particularly attractive approach.
Chief among the challenges posed by mobile apps is the complex set of interdependencies between the app, back-office systems, the corporate infrastructure and a large universe of devices. Even though corporates can, in theory, limit the number of operating systems and other variables it supports, such an approach will limit the effectiveness of a company's mobile strategy. It's also a fact of life that mobile operating systems themselves are updated much more frequently than conventional operating systems.
Mobile apps are also likely to increase data traffic on the corporate network quite substantially, and of course, raise all sorts of concerns about security and device management.
In short, the mobile apps life cycle will definitely benefit from increased communication between development and operations teams. This two-way communication will enable the development team to write code that is better aligned with the infrastructure (including planned changes and upgrades), while the infrastructure/operations team can better plan for the likely impact of planned apps.
"Companies that are developing apps need to improve both the quality of both the development and operational processes. The transparency provided by a DevOps approach offers a way to meet those goals," Hattingh concludes.
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