Mobile app development may be a relatively new field compared to software development, but just like its predecessor, it’s evolving quickly.
Just one example of this has been the rapid growth of DevOps, though even that burgeoning field is beginning to change quickly. If you’re in DevOps, it’s crucial that you understand how that’s happening.
Collaboration Has Become Crucial
In the past, working in app development or operations often meant doing the majority of your work in a bit of a vacuum. For many developers, their day started with a meeting to go over the status of their software before they would spend the next eight hours largely on their own.
Now, with the rise of DevOps, collaboration has become essential between teams. In fact, your team’s performance will probably benefit just as much from their collaborative abilities as their software development skills.
Depending on your DevOps team, better collaboration could mean a lot of different things.
However, one crucial area where it will be essential for app developers is with handoffs.
Here are two ways your development and operations teams can collaborate on making them better:
- Agree on a clear definition of what “done” looks like
- Turn each handoff into a meeting, where the involved teams can discuss the project, especially any new challenges they’ve found
Above all else, treat your DevOps team as one cohesive unit, not two that are simply working together. Members should never be strangers, so whenever possible, bring them together to facilitate open communication.
DevOps Requires Shared Responsibility for Every Project
One of the biggest reasons app development companies don’t see greater results after transitioning to DevOps is because they don’t achieve true integration of development and operations.
Instead, it’s common for someone on the development team to simply throw something over to operations without accepting accountability for their efforts (or lack thereof). Now that “everyone is in operations”, this can be easy to overlook.
The way to keep this from happening is by eliminating ambiguity in your DevOps team. This means clearly defining the development pipeline and everyone’s role within it. Pipeline automation tools like JFrog and Docker Registry allow developers to promote code to production only if it passes required quality gates at each stage.
Either way, this level of automated accountability needs to be provided publicly, so everyone is on the same page about what the team’s goal is and which parts each member are responsible for completing.
It’s more important than ever for each member of a DevOps team to accept responsibility for what the other members are doing. That means constant collaboration and holding everyone responsible for the DevOps team’s outcomes.
The Future of App Development
The future of app development lies in DevOps.
While that should give you a lot to look forward to, it also means your app-development team needs to be quick to collaborate and hold each other accountable.
More than anything, app developers who understand that DevOps is really just streamlining the path to a finished product – and not a completely new approach – should have an easier time evolving and finding success for years to come.
