Companies are custom-building mobile enterprise applications to enhance employee productivity on smartphones. DevOps.com recently spoke with Dennis Vickers, director of Software Solutions at data center services and solutions provider Datalink about this trend and where DevOps fits in to the process.
DevOps.com: Why does applying smartphones to business initiatives require so much additional custom-built software?
Vickers: Companies have developed and designed legacy software to group things that need to get done together into applications. With mobile application development the focus is more granular in terms of functionality. It’s not that the applications that we designed for the legacy environment don’t fit on the smaller screen, though they don’t. It’s really that the whole concept of having a group of functionalities in a single application doesn’t really work in a mobile environment. You need to rethink the way that not only your applications work but really the way that you do work. You need to think more in terms of granular work than accumulation of work.
In finance, for example, you might have an application that combines accounts receivable, accounts payable, even expense management. You would have an application that would have all of that functionality in it. For mobile apps, what would make sense is to break out the expense management part of that and make that a mobile app that allows users to be able to use their smartphones to actually capture expenses as they’re incurred, as opposed to having to save a receipt or remember what your expenses were and then go back to an application and fill that in later at the office.
DevOps.com: How do you apply DevOps development approaches to provide usability on mobile devices for the most needed features and functions of in-house applications?
Vickers: Mobile applications tend to be single functions focused on getting something done. Users are much less tolerant of anomalies in the software, whether that anomaly is a bug, a poor user interface or anything that is undesirable about the application. They’re not nearly as willing to look for workarounds with a mobile app as they are with legacy applications.
You have to have a continuous delivery approach with mobile applications because the time frame between deliveries has to be accelerated. You have to automate that process. We’ve made good use of some of the automation tools, specifically Puppet, around doing continuous delivery. We use tools for source control and QA (quality assurance). Some type of automated delivery process is critical because the turn time for release has to be shortened. There’s just not a willingness for users to wait long periods between releases.
DevOps.com: Can you discuss the custom-built software project where you developed a custom equipment maintenance app that feeds into the customer’s proprietary maintenance application?
Vickers: We developed that for an aerospace company that had a requirement to provide field service for one of the Department of Defense systems. They had to be able to maintain large pieces of equipment. We had to build an application that enabled them to be at the equipment and do the data collection that they needed at that time. It walked them through the data collection process right then.
Before that, they had a paper process where they would print out instructions, go out and write down the information that they needed to collect, and then go back and enter that into an application. This allowed them to be able to do that closer to the actual event, which cut transcription errors and data collection errors and made the whole process much more efficient. That was an extension of a legacy app that added quite a bit of value.
DevOps.com: For that Department of Defense project, were there particular development tools or approaches in DevOps for the software?
Vickers: We used an agile methodology where we iteratively released the software and did test and review and then essentially layered the application. We provide a layering process as we build and add features to the application. We delivered to the customer through an automated process using Chef. We use Jenkins to do some release management, but we often revert back to Chef or Puppet.
What we haven’t done a lot of yet, which I think is important and I see growing in the mobile platform, is monitoring. I think that monitoring is an important part of DevOps. I haven’t seen that move into the mobile environment nearly as much as I think it needs to. I think it will happen in the short term. I think there’s some good monitoring tools out there that are coming online or that are maturing and are going to be adopted for mobile app dev.
DevOps.com: There was another project where you custom-built a jobs app that enables union members to apply for posted jobs without going into the union hall.
Vickers: We developed a mobile app so union members can review jobs that are available and request the job through the app. They can receive job assignments and electronic tickets to go out and do that job. It saves traveling down to the union hall on a regular basis and makes the whole process much more efficient.
The only difference in that project is that we needed to integrate with the back end through an API. The tool we used to help us interface with that API and manage that API integration was Postman. We use it for testing, managing and documenting APIs we build or work with.