App development has become an important aspect for any enterprise as tabs and smart phones take over the way we interact with companies. The way enterprises interact with both their customers and their employees has significantly changed with the adoption of mobile technologies and cloud computing. As a result, it has become crucial to successfully develop and quickly deliver stable (quality) applications with regular updates. This could be updates twice a month or much more often as users constantly expect enhancements to their apps. As a result, it is business critical to start with a solid app development strategy.

To stay relevant in the market today, it is absolutely imperative for businesses to keep evolving their offerings making app experiences more innovative and unique. But this becomes a major issue as it is extremely difficult to continuously enhance the user experience while maintaining high levels of quality. One of the main barriers in this situation is the fact that many enterprises rely on outdated app development practices which end up being a snail paced development process. This is mainly because of programming and operations teams not communicating and working well together.

Embrace Agile App Development

The introduction and adoption of Agile development protocols is a great solution to improve customer app delivery. Agile just makes it easier to add flexibility as it is leaner and highly accelerated when it comes to programming. All this is possible because Agile enables transparency when it comes to project deliverables, resources, and costs. Further, it is also easier to anticipate issues that may arise and also helps to evaluate current procedures. It speeds up repetitions as the development is focused on completing small blocks of work on a regular basis.

As a result, it is no surprise that Agile development has become more popular among various organizations. By using Agile, simple changes to an application can be completed (in theory) within a week rather than months. Adoption helped work on development projects quickly without getting stuck in the planning phase, made it easier to meet deadlines, and stay within the allotted budget. But Agile isn’t the cure for all problems related to improving app delivery. Agile was only meant to be the initiator of a cultural shift that is currently taking place within IT and its role in business.

Add DevOps to Operations

In order to meet project goals, it’s important to add DevOps as the Agile development infrastructure. Agile will enable the app development team speed up development and delivery, and DevOps will allow the operations team to keep up and encourage system utilization rather than preservation. DevOps is still an idea that businesses simply don’t understand and as a result it is underutilized. Agile only helps to speed up the development and delivery of the app, but what businesses really need is to accelerate all phases of app delivery.

Without the adoption of DevOps, Agile will fall short of expectations as there will be a significant lack of collaboration between the app development team and the operations team (and usually the quality of the changes may also be poor). Further, any congestion that comes up can’t be cleared by the operations team by using Agile alone.

If your competitors’ offerings are better, it will have a direct impact on your profits. Further, employee engagement may also be affected even outside of the IT department. Employee engagement via internal apps is increasingly becoming a crucial part of the employee experience and is also a tool to build loyalty.

Greater communication and collaboration with programming and operations teams will help them better understand each other’s roles and understand how they fit into the process. With customers expecting quick updates, it has become essential for teams to work well together.

Change Company Culture Before Changing Tools

In order to encourage DevOps adoption, it is important to change the culture within the organization. One way to do this is to bring both IT operations and Agile app development teams together to propose the advantages of provisioning, configuring, and releasing via scripting.

Automation is important when you have loads of code to deliver from development to production systems. If you have millions of lines of code, it is basically impossible to test it within a day. When thorough testing is possible through virtualization and automation, it is easier to fix errors quickly and stay proactive before production and release.

Further, adopting this approach will enable frequent apps QA and testing that enables quick iteration. DevOps is about quality and speed, so a culture change within an organization can have a huge impact on customer experience. But this may cause some issues at large organizations as developers generally shouldn’t have full access to production data or production code. As a result, it might not be adopted in fields like banking and finance. But if these enterprises understood how Agile and DevOps worked together, it may open the door to more enhanced adoption of this technology.

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