DevOps for Mobile App Development - Considering the Human Side

DevOps is being hailed as the next great wave in mobile app development, and with good reason. It’s a technique that stresses communication and collaboration between development and operations inside organizations, and focuses on quality assurance and delivery. But mobile app development poses a unique set of challenges for DevOps, and so many enterprises have been somewhat slow standardizing on it. Gartner Research Director Jason Wong says that a Gartner survey found that “only 42% of those who have implemented [DevOps] indicated that DevOps is used to support mobile app development.”

When implementing DevOps for mobile app development, it’s important to consider the human side.

If you’re looking to use DevOps for your mobile app development, or already use it, we’ve got some great advice for you from Grzegorz Ziemoński in his blog post for DZone, “The Human Side of DevOps.” Ziemoński notes in the blog that DevOps is based in large part on Agile software development, and a key part of it is automation. But he warns that focusing single-mindedly on automation can leave out what he believes is absolutely vital to any DevOps deployment: the human side of development.

What exactly does that mean? First and foremost, it means true, full collaboration. He warns that automation only pays off after DevOps is fully implemented, and that can take quite a long time. Until then, he says, “You will have a lack of automation, developers who don’t know how to use the full potential of available tools, infrastructure problems, legal issues, and much more. At the beginning of the road, you might have nothing, actually.”

He adds, “The world won’t wait until your infrastructure is ready. This is the point when the ‘collaboration’ word shines out. You can either join your forces, solve the problems together, and find out the best solutions for all sides, or you can stay in the 'us and them’ mentality, throw things over the wall, and blame the other side.”

His conclusion is well worth reading in its entirety: “In my humble opinion, if you make it all about automation and forget the people, it will never be true DevOps. It will always be the Dev and the Ops separately. Only the true collaboration of both sides can lead to optimal results, especially when we’re at the beginning of the DevOps road.”