Developers promote success by addressing common issues

With any application project, there is always a certain degree of failure and inevitable challenges that developers and stakeholders will have to work through in the software's lifecycle. This can include anything from bugs in the coding to employees simply not adopting the program. These types of issues can determine the fate of an application and influence business profitability on the effort. It will be important for decision-makers to ensure that their developers have the best tools on hand to effectively mitigate risks and deliver a successful product. By supplying app builders with component suites and other features, they will be more capable to include necessary functions and better support agile development initiatives.

The process of app creation is substantially changing as tools continue to advance and user needs evolve. While waterfall methods are still sometimes used by developers, agile strategies have long since made this approach outdated in a fast-paced business environment. Waterfall development entails an ordered process, where one step must be completed for the next to begin. This often makes the project extend beyond its initial schedule and shoehorns testing at the end, creating a limited amount of time to ensure that the app is viable for staff use. With an agile approach, the user is consulted throughout the process and testing is done at every step to guarantee that issues are caught early.

Dealing with development challenges
Although the app building process has substantially improved, there are still a number of issues that developers can run into throughout the program's lifecycle. According to a recent IDG Research survey, 16 percent of software projects are unable to meet end-user expectations, 27 percent are deployed off-schedule and 21 percent go over their established price point. For businesses with limited resources, these problems can be costly to fix and some cases may require starting from scratch. Respondents cited an inability to identify business needs, faulty requirements and poor collaboration as major sources of project failure. To make matters worse, only 20 percent receive the testing they need as a result of time and resources lost during the development schedule. By adopting a more agile method, management can ensure better quality projects and reduce these losses.

"IT's alignment with the business is the challenge that is top of mind for today's CIOs," the report stated. "Everything starts with communication and proper alignment with the business. Without it, software project specifications are not communicated effectively, leading to failure in terms of schedule, budget and end-user expectations."

DevOps driving agile innovations
If developers run into issues, which is likely to happen, it's up to the DevOps team to repair the failure and innovate their processes to reap true advantages. NetworkComputing contributor Randy Bias noted that legacy operations will no longer compete with vendors offering elastic, on-demand and developer-centric delivery models. Organizations must follow this new agile formula in order to ensure compliance, uphold security and control costs. Developers can do this by utilizing the cloud to deploy software and administer upgrades when required. Through this method, the cost of failure will be much less expensive and app builders will have a lot more options at their disposal to ensure that all users can leverage their program effectively.

"It's this shift toward a new application model that embraces failure that will ultimately demolish the barrier between developers and operators in the enterprise, lead to IT harmony and deliver true DevOps," Bias wrote. "This new model requires a change in thinking around how applications are designed and delivered, combined with a change in thinking around how private clouds are designed and delivered. Neither can stand alone."