Smartphones became a part of our collective consciousness a decade ago with the launch of Apple’s iPhone and the impact of the device continues transform entire industries. We now shop for homes, find our next date, and discover the newest restaurant around the corner right from our fingertips.
The application market is also a noisy one, with millions of different experiences available for download from any of the retail marketplaces. According to Dynatrace, the average applications on a smartphone is 41 – a 28% increase from last year. Not only are users looking for more experiences, but they are also willing to experiment with the right application to fit the right need.
However, every piece of new technology comes with its set of imperfections. Technology is bound to fail, caused by both human error and device compatibility. Dynatrace reports that 62% of users have experienced a crash, freeze, or error while 47% experienced slow launch times. While failure seems to be universal, the patience to rebound from such errors is not, with 79% of respondents indicating that they would try the application once or twice more before moving on to a competitor.
With such a short window of patience, development teams face the pressure of delivering satisfying technology while meeting strict deadlines and launch windows. One way to fight the fatigue is to transition into DevOps, a philosophy of continuous innovation and deployment in conjunction with collaboration and communication. Here are three ways organizations can leverage DevOps:
- Close communication: Dynatrace’s survey showed that 84% of users believe in application ratings. With community satisfaction at the heart of customer interests, it’s important for marketing and engineering to be in sync with any news of crashes or errors. DevOps enables a constant flow of communication between the two teams to ensure fast error correction.
- Continuous Everything; In a waterfall development environment, development happens iteratively. In a fast-paced world, this means a mobile application error may take some time to rectify. On the other hand, leveraging a DevOps mindset means that any issues are corrected immediately, avoiding any customer backlash.
- Automation: In the development process, human error can always lengthen the ability for an organization to go-to-market. One way DevOps ensures avoidance of error is through automation of tasks including quality assurance. Automation can also be used to gather user analytics for data including application load time, dwell time, and crashes.
Are you using DevOps to develop your mobile applications and accelerate time to market? Let us know about your experience in the comments below.
Move to Mobile Today
Is your organization looking to develop for mobile? Reach out to sales@perficient.com to learn more about our Perficient Digital practice and how we can turn your ideas into reality. Download our guide below to learn about how you can also combine your cloud adoption with DevOps.
Learn more about our practices here.
