Why should use DevOps approach in software development
App development teams that practice DevOps deploy 30x more frequently, have 60x fewer failures and recover 160x faster. – Puppet Labs 2016 State of DevOps Report
DevOps has been quickly integrated into the life of software development companies. Allowing to get quality products faster and with strong team cohesion, DevOps practices have gained high popularity in the technical environment.
However, what is DevOps? What are the advantages of DevOps? Why should apply to a custom mobile/web development company that uses DevOps in the working process? How does it break the gap between development and operations?
What is DevOps
The term DevOps was originally mentioned by Andrew Shafer and Patrick Debois in their talk on “Agile Infrastructure” at the 2008 Agile Toronto conference. From 2009, DevOps methodology became a mainstream through a series of “devopsdays”.
Recently, many mobile and web app development companies have realized the need for DevOps and started adopting the practices in their work.
DevOps is a software development culture and a set of practices aiming at the unification of development (dev) and operations (ops). DevOps is based on monitoring of all stages of app development process, from deployment and integration to product design, testing, and release.
Another important thing is to build a strong collaboration and achieve a high level of synergy – by creating a dialogue between all specialists involved in the working process, including designers, project managers, programmers, QAs, business analysts, and even customers.
The main goals of DevOps
The main objectives of DevOps practices are to speed up the processes between IT specialists, build a culture of strong cooperation, and make software product development cycle faster and without quality loss.
Coming up in the working process with team cohesion, automation, and constant monitoring and improvement, DevOps provides app building process with flexibility, agility, and transparency.
DevOps goals also include:
- Shortened time lead between fixes
- More successful app releases
- Improved maintainability of operational processes
- Enhanced product quality, reliability, and security
- Faster time to product recovery in case of app (new release) crashes
With DevOps practices integrated, mobile and web app development companies get a deployment frequency increased, project management improved, errors minimized, and issue resolution accelerated.
What’s important, all kinds of organizations can take advantage of DevOps integration. Otherwise, those businesses that don’t (or can’t) overcome the gap between development and operational teams are much more likely to lose above-mentioned benefits and fail in the competition with other companies.
The principle of Continuity
DevOps helps accomplish many objectives in record times, making the app development process faster and raising the product quality. At the foundation of DevOps is continuity, that touches all software construction stages and improves collaboration around it.
In DevOps, the principle of continuity is realized in various processes, inclduing continuous delivery, continuous testing, continuous integration, continuous monitoring, and continuous feedback and optimization.
1. Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery is the development practice of running every code change through automated tests, creating successful application builds, and promoting them up to production stage using automated deploys. Though the practice isn’t easy, it helps create, test, and deploy apps more quickly and with minimized risks.
2. Continuous Testing
Continuous testing in DevOps is an essential part of building software solutions, that represents the process of executing automated tests enabling to provide continuous feedback on business risks in the latest application build.
Since testing occurs continuously, app development teams can fix bugs on time and prevent defects from progressing to the next step of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). As a result, continuous testing helps QA engineers reduce their time and efforts for app debugging and stabilization and deliver quality software products faster and easier.
3. Continuous Integration
Continuous integration is the practice implying app development teams to frequently integrate new or changed code into a shared code repository. Then, each check-in is verified by an automated build, enabling developers to identify and correct errors immediately.
There are many other advantages of continuous integration. The process also allows to avoid last-minute chaos at release dates and long tense integrations, reduce the time for bug fixing and pay more attention to implementing features, and solve other integration challenges.
4. Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring is the custom mobile/web app development practice, used for defining risks and weaknesses in the application. The product is under constant monitoring which allows engineers to correct errors on time and make required improvements. The result is high-quality software that meets customer’s needs and expectations.
5. Continuous Feedback & Optimization
In today’s high competition software delivered faster and with a higher quality guarantee you neither high income nor user satisfaction. In developing successful applications it is user feedback that takes the center stage.
What your users say and think about your product gives the understanding of how to change and improve it. Thanks to continuous user reaction measurement you will be able to build the app that would meet their expectations and gain success and popularity.
In DevOps, the practice of сontinuous feedback and optimization facilitates and enhances application release and deployment. It is crucial when it comes to continuous delivery: specialists estimate the effect of the release and add necessary improvements, thus making each subsequent release better than the previous one.
Why do you need DevOps
DevOps provides web and mobile app development companies with many advantages: it helps them save time and efforts for building, testing, and deploying applications, increase product quality and team collaboration, avoid anxiety related to last-minute problems at the release time, and significantly improve the user experience.
Customers highly benefit from using DevOps approach too. They always know how ready their product is, can receive and check out the latest builds, resolve any misunderstanding at once, and be strongly involved in the app development process. What’s more, clients get their applications faster, while achieving their goals and adding value to the end users.
In our work, we use the best practices and methodologies helping us develop successful solutions that meet your expectations. If you have some questions or need recommendations, feel free to a reliable software development company!