Within any (mobile) team, we always analyse our efficiency: how many story points did we complete, how many errors or bugs are returned and how quickly can we bring new features to our customers?
There are many things that have an effect on our efficiency. For example, good and proactive communication at the beginning will lead to less frustration and more complete deliverables. The efficiency of a team is also highly reliant on the processes the team has in place: clear and solid processes can support the team and increase their efficiency. This is where DevOps plays a vital role. DevOps (combination of Software Development and IT Operations) is aimed at continuous delivery with high quality software. Basically, it means there are automatic processes in place that help the team of developers to continuously deliver their work which has been tested and deemed of high enough quality. In practice, builds will be automated, tested and deployed.
This process can be automated, meaning the process will be accurate, thorough and supportive throughout the development lifecycle.
One tool you can use to automate the build-test-deploy process is called Jenkins: within this tool it is possible to set up pipelines. With pipelines, you can have different environments for different purposes: you can have a development pipeline solely for the developers to work in, an alpha pipeline for quality assurance officers, a beta pipeline for specific users who can test the first versions and a production pipeline that is meant for all the users. This is an example of a pipeline structure: the app will have to go through all the phases before the users will receive the updates, meaning the code will be tested thoroughly and bugs can be fixed before users receive the newest updates.
How does this specifically increase your team’s efficiency? Bugs will be found and solved prior to moving the app to production, manual deployment is not necessary anymore and a level of code quality can be warranted. A good DevOps process, such as the one you can create through Jenkins, requires time and energy to make sure it is solid, but the effort will be well-paid back by an increase in efficiency.
Want to learn how you can automate the build-deployment process for your project using Jenkins? Follow our training!
