Why Mobile DevOps matters — and how to actually adopt it on your mobile team

Broken functionality and bad user experience on mobile very often leads to users leaving negative reviews and uninstalling your app entirely. Whereas most web users will casually refresh the page or leave and return later when they run into issues on a website, bugs and crashes in mobile applications are much more disruptive.

Because responding to user complaints and releasing fixes for crashes or other issues is relatively slow for mobile compared to web, the stakes are even higher. For mobile, testing and other guardrails around quality are critical during the development process and during the release process itself, as are monitoring and hotfix preparedness post-release.

The Mobile DevOps combo of improved collaboration and increased automation helps teams safeguard quality and address issues more quickly when they do arise. Better testing under Mobile DevOps is one key factor: not only is automated testing expanded, but testing in general – both automated and manual – becomes a more integral part of the entire development and release lifecycle. And to catch issues that surface outside of testing, a Mobile DevOps stack that includes monitoring to track user behavior and app performance, and feedback loops (both human and machine) that then feed anomalies back into the system, can have a huge impact both pre-production and in prod.

Improved release performance under Mobile DevOps ensures that when issues are identified in production, teams can ship fixes as quickly as possible. Plus, teams also keep users happy by getting any other new feature work into their hands more often with normal releases that are frequent and seamless.

More than most other kinds of software development, building and shipping mobile apps requires close collaboration between roles that cut across the entire organization. Throughout the development and release lifecycle, engineers, product and project managers, QA analysts, internal and external testers, designers, copywriters, and marketing folks are all involved. In many cases, additional stakeholders from security, compliance, and leadership need to be looped in. There are even interdependencies with entire other teams, for example the backend teams that build the APIs that the mobile app consumes.

Effective collaboration is never easy, but it becomes exponentially more difficult when it has to play out across so many different roles and teams. Naturally, silos exist between the various groups and that can make communication and handoffs difficult and risky.

Mobile DevOps promotes the creation of shared spaces that can bring together the entire cross-functional mobile organization. Beyond Slack and spreadsheets, a mature Mobile DevOps setup will have accessible, unified dashboards or other environments that help any viewer understand the status of mobile work and execute items that call for their input. Shared spaces also take the form of mobile-wide meetings like Lunch & Learns that foster dialogue and knowledge-sharing.

Even when an organization has dedicated Mobile DevOps or release teams, they will be in close contact with the rest of the org to ensure alignment and understanding with product teams and other disciplines involved in the mobile effort. Companies might look to set up rotations that place folks from dedicated Mobile DevOps and release teams onto product-focused teams, and vice versa, to increase empathy.