The world is moving at a faster pace, and all companies are trying their best to leverage modernized technologies and build great digital solutions that help them earn revenue.
You know, according to research, people swipe through their phones 58 times daily, whereas Americans hold a staggering average of 144 times a day!! Sounds interesting.
But why are people more into their phones? The comfort and ease they experience through them is unexplainable.
According to research conducted by Statista, the global app market is projected to reach $756 billion by 2027, with a steady Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 8.58% from 2022 to 2027.
An Android app development company is continuously working on bringing the best digital products for their customers, and to achieve this, they are integrating the best IT tools that are best in terms of usage, and results.
All of the IT tools that they utilize help them to streamline the processes of developing an app, enhancing the collaboration within the external team or internal along with automated testing for minimizing the bugs and saving up time to a great extent.
In this blog, we are going to explore the ways that this integration is boosting efficiency within the domain, and productivity is produced for continuous delivery.
1. Version Control System (VCS)
The first category is the Version Control System, which is the foundation to application development enabling the companies to keep track of the teams, bringing in change for a great collaborative approach.
The change can be done on the code of the app due to the different versions of the application. Hence, by integrating the VCS, like, GitHub or GitLab, app developers can work on the features in parallel, merging the code seamlessly and reverting them to the previous versions without putting in any other excessive efforts.
Therefore, this smooth integration ensures that the codebase remains the same, and stable even when the project scales up.
Examples of VCS include: Git, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket
2. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Tools (CI and CD)
The next tool integration that we’ve explained is CI and CD which automates the process of integration of code changes, running the tests, and deploying the application in a real-time environment where people could use it.
All of these tools are used for the maintenance of the quality and reliability of the codebase. Hence, the integration of CI.CD pipelines enable the app developers to ensure that all the changes done are tested automatically, and deployed to a staging environment where people can use and try it out.
Therefore, this type of automation reduces the risk of human error and saves the time required by humans to do it manually, accelerating the release cycle and enabling rapid iteration along with feedback.
Some of the top examples of such tools include Jenkins, CircleCI, Travis CI, and Gitlab CI.CD, and Bamboo.
3. Automated Testing Tools
An app development company after working on the app development will try to leverage the expertise of the testing teams to ensure that no bug remains unsolved.
With automated testing tools, it’s essential to ensure that the quality of the application is the same throughout the cycle and its integration into the CI.CD people allow the team to run unit tests, integration tests, black box testing, white box testing, stress testing and a lot more automatically.
Companies are now hiring automated QA testers who know how to make use of these tools and omit the manual testing phase to save time and effort.
Some of the top examples of such tools include; Selenium, JUnit, TestRail, Postman, Appium
4. Collaboration and Project Management Tools
Fourth, we’ve efficient collaboration based on the project management tools that has brought ease for the scrum masters and PMs to manage and track the progress of the projects through tools like Jira, Trello, and Asana.
These tools help the teams and PM along with BAs to manage the tasks online, track the progress, and prioritize the work based on the urgency of tasks; given by the clients. By integrating these tools within the processes, companies can get better results and the chances of errors are minimized by 80%. That is a great initiative.
Overall, this effort enables them to get real-time updates and have seamless communication with the teams, reducing the bottlenecks, and if someone is stuck somewhere; it’s solved instantly without thinking twice!
Some of the great examples of project management tools include; Jira, Trello, Asana, Slack, Microsoft Teams
5. Containerization and Orchestration Tools
Lastly, we have containerization tools like Docker package applications and their core dependencies into an isolated environment, ensuring that the development is consistent throughout all modules.
If we talk particularly about orchestration tools then, Kubernetes helps them to manage and scale the containers into a clustered environment, and this integration helps in streamlining the deployment processes, improving the resource utilization and simplifying the management of complex applications.
Some great examples of containerization tools include; Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker Compose
Carrying forward to the ending of the blog, let’s give it a closure with the best practices discussion for tools integration:
- It all starts with a solid foundation where tools like VCS and CI/CD prior knowledge is necessary, and this would bring a great deal to the developers.
- You can automate repetitive tasks to save time and effort like testing, deployment and infrastructure management to minimize errors.
- Try to choose the tools that can work together and the integration is done smoothly into the existing company’s workflow hence, it won’t bring any additional cost.
- Try to use tools like Jira and Asana for better team collaboration and task management; keeping everyone aligned and informed.
- Don’t forget to monitor the performance of the tools and the processes, and make enough adjustments to improve efficiency and productivity.
And we are done for the day!
The mentioned and discussed IT tools within the blog are fair enough for achieving efficient app development, and the continuous seamless delivery of the application. From basic version control to CI/CD to automated testing, these tools are bringing ease to the lives of IT companies.
Now they can manage high-quality work, and bring in reliable software solutions with fewer bugs. Anyhow, be careful while choosing any tool for integration within the process, moreover, try to accelerate the workflows, reduce the manual errors, and deliver a better app for the end users.