Simplifying Mobile Application Development with Continuous Delivery

In recent years, mobile application usage has evolved and grown tremendously. Unlike core IT systems (ERP, HR, etc.) that are under the close scrutiny of corporate IT, mobile applications come with very different requirements. What’s valuable and efficient today might not be what’s valued tomorrow: these more dynamic applications have to evolve constantly and adapt to user requirements if they are to avoid becoming legacy applications. As a consequence, developers have to be in a constant “discovery-mode” for trends in user requirements, experiment with what works or doesn’t work and iteratively improve the application.

What about mobile application development is challenging? A number of additional constraints apply to mobile applications that traditional packaged software developers do not face.

The last four points, in particular, reinforce the importance of rigorous testing for mobile applications before a new version is released.

In light of the complexities inherent in a mobile application environment, development not only requires a zero-friction development and deployment environment, but it also requires an environment in which extensive automated mobile application testing and qualification can occur, all in the same pre-integrated fashion.

Using the power of continuous integration and continuous delivery, you can solve all of these problems, accelerating your ability to deliver quality mobile apps at scale.

The underlying philosophy of continuous delivery is to always be release-ready. That is, the software is in a state at all times where it is ready to be released, if a business decision was made to do so. This might not be what you want to do for a variety of reasons – that’s fine – but the idea is to make sure your application is as stable as it can be at all times. 

The only practical way that applications can be release-ready at all times is to have all of the release processes, from code to production, fully automated and pre-integrated. If the processes have to be manually executed and maintained, the overhead cost and friction make it challenging to maintain a constant release-ready state. The mindset that frequently exists in typical packaged software environments (“Let’s start integration and testing of our application three months before release date”) doesn’t work in the mobile world.

To that end, two concepts are extensively used in a release-ready environment: continuous integration and continuous delivery. 

In old-style waterfall development, testing activities take place sequentially as a phase near the end of development and before production release. However, Continuous integration (CI) is a process by which testing activities take place in parallel with the development process, continuously.

 

With CI, whenever a developer performs a code change, a complete series of tests is initiated to make sure the code change doesn’t break the application. If the tests fail, it is easy to spot the issue and resolve it. Understand that the term “test” doesn’t simply mean basic unit tests: a CI server is able to coordinate a very sophisticated set of tests, gated by previous results (unit tests, integration tests, smoke tests, mobile testing, load-performance testing, security testing, etc.).

The result of leveraging CI is that it leads to higher quality and greater agility. 

Continuous delivery (CD) is the natural extension of CI, where the output of a CI cycle is pushed to a testing, staging, pre-production or production environment in a fully-automated fashion. This makes it possible to try the next iteration of the software in a real-life situation or, in the case of an internal deployment to production, to quickly deploy a new version of an application with no IT friction. 

Deployment can happen in stages (such as in Blue-Green testing) and can be automatically rolled back if something goes wrong. Given that no friction is involved in pushing a new release to production, deployment can happen frequently, for incremental feature changes.

The obvious consequences of leveraging CD is that it leads to safer deployments, is an excellent discovery/validation process for new features and provides much faster time-to-market.

Incorporating Continuous Delivery into Development

Consider the following best practices in your mobile CD activities:

It is clear that mobile is here to stay. As more and more businesses and consumers use mobile applications, the applications will increase in sophistication. To keep up with business demand and be successful in their markets, development teams will have to support the world of mobile development by adapting automated development technologies, processes and team culture. 

Mobile application development teams should:

Finally, you must automate the testing process, itself – check out automated applications for testing various devices, form factors, operating systems and for the distribution of beta releases. There are a number of tools and services available today for these important – and very tedious – activities. For example, SOASTA’s TouchTest service runs fully-automated, gesture-aware tests to ensure that the all-important user experience remains consistent across application builds, device types and form factors. You can also run tests against software emulators or actual devices, using locally-tethered devices or device clouds (like PerfectoMobile, Keynote, and AppThwack provide), and integrate with leading beta test distribution, A-B testing and analytics services such as TestFlight, HockeyApp and Vessel.