Development and operations teams today are under more pressure than ever to develop apps the business needs to make its workforce productive, its partners connected to the resources they need, and to deliver the apps to the marketplace that will make it competitive.
The number of production hours for development is at a precious premium as demand for apps soar and resources remain tight. According to Gartner, the demand for enterprise mobile apps alone will be a $40 billion market by 2016.
Of course, the inevitable happens and the list of designed applications gets backlogged. They get caught-up in budget requests that drag on, and then they get caught in the long list of requested apps in the development queue. A recent survey commissioned by PaaS provider OutSystems found that 85% of enterprises surveyed had an app backlog, with about half having backlogs of 10 to 20 apps.
App Backlog, agile and DevOps
Sure, development and operations teams move as quickly as they can to meet the enterprise demand for new applications, but when there is any deep app backlog, there is the potential for business costs when it comes to lost opportunity, untimely product development, and future missed sales. In a time when agile IT means competitive advantage, any amount of latency that can be cleared from the application backlog is crucial.
Agile development approaches and agile IT departments tried to remedy some of these issues, but didn’t go far enough. Fortunately, DevOps picks up where agile left off in the evolution of enterprise development. And in the face of agile IT, continuous integration, continuous deployment, and the rise of DevOps – operations, development, and infrastructure bottlenecks become minimized – and infrastructure and applications move more quickly, and existing applications are iterated more swiftly.
Of course, DevOps itself, can help to accelerate app deployment, in addition to continuous integration and continuous deployment efforts. And all of the associated deployment automation tools and deployment processes are essential to eliminating manual waste so teams can focus on pressing business demands. This waste can include time burnt on manual process, manual testing, and the configuration of the software development environment.
DevOps-driven organizations have shorter app backlogs. A recent CA Technologies study in fact found that organizations embracing DevOps report a 17 to 23 percent improvement in certain business outcomes, such as increased revenue, and faster time-to-market.
Cloud architectures and easier to master development languages also help, not just infrastructure services, but also platforms that help to free up operations teams and developers to focus on the applications that need to get out yesterday.
Even with DevOps practices in place and automation running full throttle, the business development teams still find themselves having to make difficult choices about which apps to build and deploy. Not all of these apps will survive, in fact, many apps will go unused and dormant. This means that a lot of time can be lost developing apps people don’t want to use, or are too cumbersome to bother to use.
Turning to the Minimum Viable Product
In addition to DevOps, development teams are also turning to approaches such as the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as a way to help identify apps that have real user demand and those that do not. Essentially, the MVP app is an app that consists of only the essential. The MVP provides the essence of the app and what users need to get done and no more. The MVP is a potent way to provide the essential attributes of an app to see if users embrace it before building the app out further. If the app is used, new features can be added over time.
Not everyone is convinced that the gains made against app backlog aren’t necessarily illusion. David Mortman, distinguished engineer, says “DevOps and MVP both have the ability to create the impression that you are solving backlog issues. This is because in both cases you are enabling the development organization to get that first release as early as possible and then to keep iterating it and adding features as the dev group goes,” he says. “This however may not get you to a particular defined endpoint any faster since regardless of the organization there are always resource limitations.”
Still, “One advantage of DevOps and Agile is that they let you interweave development cycles so multiple apps can be worked on faster and each can be incremented more quickly. They also make it easier to adjust priorities between apps more quickly and more quickly identify apps that aren’t meeting the business needs and either deprioritize or eliminate the app before overinvesting in its development,” Mortman adds.
There’s no doubt, based on my discussions with enterprises, app backlog repeatedly comes up as a serious challenge to competitiveness. But by embracing continuous integration, deployment, and MVP development, organizations can go a long way to help clear through, at least the initial stages of their app backlog. What is your organization doing to help clear app backlog? We’d like to hear your experiences and lessons learned.
