An assessment of 1,600 DevOps teams involved in building and deploying mobile applications found that 62% were adversely impacted by manual processes that slowed the rate at which these applications were deployed and updated.
Based on the Mobile DevOps Assessment (MODAS) created by Bitrise, a provider of a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform for building and deploying mobile applications, the metric measured the creation, testing, deployment, monitoring and collaboration phases of building and deploying applications.
The survey also found (44%) of respondents reported their release approval process is mostly or entirely manual, with only 9% having fully automated application releases. Only 22% of teams said they’ve been able to complete internal release processes in less than an hour.
The survey also found that nearly two-thirds of organizations (66%) have deployed applications that can’t be opened in two seconds or less, which is widely considered the accepted level of performance required.
In addition, three-quarters of organizations (75%) required more than two days to address bug fixes. Only 21% of teams said that they had implemented some form of app performance monitoring to keep track of bugs, the report found.
Daniel Balla, chief strategy officer for Bitrise, said MODAS applies many of the concepts from the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics that Google now oversees. Those metrics, however, are not specifically designed to assess mobile application development initiatives, he noted.
It’s not clear what percentage of applications DevOps teams are building today are deployed on mobile devices. But given the emphasis on digital business transformation initiatives, many of these applications are increasingly mission-critical to organizations. The general expectation among mobile application end users is that apps will be regularly updated with new functionality. However, if release processes are largely manual, regularly improving the user experience can become problematic. In addition to the increased likelihood that mistakes will be made, manual processes are often the reason why a vulnerability was introduced into an application environment.
DevOps teams will also need to also consider the level of scale that will be required to support mobile app development, noted Balla. Many of the tools that developers rely on today to build applications were not necessarily designed to enable developers to build and deploy mobile applications at scale, he added.
Finally, most enterprise applications need to run on multiple devices, so the tools used to create these applications can’t focus on applications that can only run on one platform, said Balla.
Regardless of the approach to building and deploying mobile applications, the amount of focus on them within most organizations is high; any issues that arise are likely to be noticed by the highest echelons of an organization. That level of attention can easily put pressure on DevOps teams that frequently work on multiple projects. The challenge and the opportunity now is to create a set of DevOps workflows optimized for mobile applications that almost by definition require much more frequent updates than any other type of application.
