DEVOPSdigest

We know that DevOps is becoming essential in modern application development and delivery. It bridges the gap between development and operations within an organization, and emphasizes communication and collaboration, continuous integration, and quality assurance. Building, testing and releasing software can take place more quickly, more often, and with more reliability.

But alongside its clear benefits, DevOps brings unique challenges when developing and operating a mobile environment. Mobile app developers and development teams face a unique set of requirements relating to collaboration, testing, and release. Technology fragmentation, disparate back-end systems, updates that require user action, and poor instrumentation can impede the DevOps process and become critical roadblocks to agile mobile development, ultimately impacting app retention and the bottom line.

Success in a mobile environment means overcoming these DevOps challenges and keeping pace with the rigorous demands of the marketplace. Employees and customers demand the same quality experience from the apps they use at home, as they do at work. This puts tremendous pressure on development teams to serve internal stakeholders to increase productivity, while also serving external customers to increase engagement.

It is impossible for organizations to test every situation that may occur in the field with mobile applications, so crash analytics are vital to a successful digital strategy. At a time when releasing new code several times a day is becoming the norm, spending hours hunting down bugs the old-fashioned way is proving to be less and less sustainable. 

It has been reported that mobile app developers spend up to 75 percent of their time debugging rather than working on new front-end features or functionality. Crash and bug reporting tools help ease these burdens by offering mobile app developers continuous video capture of user interactions in live apps so that developers can see first-hand the actions that led to the bug or crash. As Gartner points out in the Cool Vendors in DevOps report, the most important element isn't just that something went wrong, but understanding why and what led up to the incident.

Product and brand managers, developers, QA staff, and digital strategists seeking to drive customer responsiveness and ensure positive customer ratings should consider adding a bug and crash reporting tool to their DevOps tool chest.