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Tag: app development

Citizen Developer Movement Gains Steam
It’s been about a year since we covered how the rise of the consumerization of IT had extended beyond cloud services and devices to application development and the advent of the Citizen Developer from rarity to mainstream. The momentum of citizen developers in the enterprise has only increased in the past year. And the move is proving to provide much needed faster time to market for enterprise apps.

According to the “QuickBase annual State of Citizen Development Report,” a survey completed this summer of 153 North American enterprises that develop and use custom business applications, the need to rapidly develop new apps is one of the leading reasons why non-developers in business roles are rolling up their sleeves and developing some of the apps their companies need.

As readers of devopsy.kinsta.cloud are aware, app backlogs are a big concern. Reportedly, many organizations have app backlogs that range from weeks to months to years. Rather than wait for an IT department that is struggling to meet—or even catch up with—app demand (largely fueled by the thirst for mobile apps), they are turning to low-code and no-code development platforms that enable anyone to develop without understanding a formal language.

How do enterprises support citizen development? They do it mostly by providing employees a place to build apps in cloud-based, low-code platforms. Some of the highlights from the QuickBase report include:
- Developing a custom application using traditional development methods requires more than two months on average for 67 percent and more than six months for 31 percent of application builders.
- Citizen development platforms are seen as capable of developing 26 different custom applications for a variety of top use cases including asset management, project management, IT help desk, inventory management, contact management, workforce management, service management, compliance management, contract management and facilities management.
- Organizations consider the top benefit of no-code citizen development to be the ability to maintain and update applications faster than the more than two months required by 35 percent of traditional developers.
The acceleration of app development and the fact that citizen developers help to move app ideas from the bottom up in an organization are why many IT leaders say citizen development is a catalyst of the innovation enterprises need. As Michael Beckley, CTO of Appian relayed to associate Tony Bradley in his story, “Citizen Developers Can Benefit an Organization“: “The best-designed products have always been built with the needs of the user from the outset. Who better than citizen developers to design software that enables organizations to transform customer experiences, launch compelling new products and manage risk efficiently? Citizen developers are motivated by the opportunity to create a new reality, not merely accepting the workplace as they found it.

“Citizen developers are most successful when supported by IT,” Beckley continued. “One critical area where IT can help is in promoting reuse and modularity in the applications and business processes that citizen developers build.”

That’s the key to success, going forward, in my view: The organizations that succeed with citizen development will be those that wholeheartedly embrace the movement and cultivate it, with IT’s help and guidance.

In the QuickBase survey, among the broad population of app developers surveyed, the majority reported being able to deliver their apps in less than a month. Compare that to traditional IT developers alone, 67 percent of whom reported it takes more than two months to build an app and 31 percent reported more than six months. This is probably why 80 percent of respondents said that development speed was one of the top reasons for embracing citizen developers: The QuickBase survey found that 42 percent of their users are able to build apps at twice the speed of traditional development.

With results like that, it’s just a matter of time before every large organization embraces citizen developers to clear app backlogs and innovate more rapidly.

— George V. Hulme
November 14, 2016
Trust, You Must: 8 Tips for Adopting CI/CD

We have done continuous deployment (CD) for four years, and enable many of our customers to do continuous deployment with quality assurance (QA). We’ve helped tons of companies adopt and optimize their CD setups. We’ve found that continuous deployment is all about trust — augmented with processes and infrastructure.

To that point, here are some common tips for adopting continuous integration (CI)/CD that I find myself sharing frequently:

Use a CI Tool

This sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many companies try and roll their own. Don’t. There’s no upside for your company—and infinite downside. We love Circle, but there are plenty of other great options. Most are at least somewhat prescriptive when it comes to workflow, which is important when you’re getting started.

Do Unit Testing

It’s always worth reminding everyone that continuous deployment is simply continuous integration applied to deployments. To do continuous integration, you need good unit test coverage. If you haven’t got a solid base of unit testing and continuous integration already, you’re not ready for continuous deployment.

Have Solid Production Monitoring

Bugs and regressions will get shipped; it’s inevitable. Put a system in place, by looking at the data in production, to tell you when a regression or bug was shipped. Tie this into automated rollbacks, so that if a significant performance or key performance indicator (KPI) regression (i.e., signups per minute) appears, your CD system rolls back to the most recent stable version while your team investigates.

Trust Your Team

We talked about the infrastructure requirements, but if you don’t have trust, then continuous deployment isn’t going to work for you. Trusting your team is about giving your developers the freedom to make mistakes, deploy as they see fit and check each others’ code. It is possible to combine continuous deployment with a culture of hierarchical permissions, but we have yet to see that truly work.

Remove Red Tape from the Code Review Process

Your team should review code changes, typically through a pull request, which goes hand in hand with trusting your team. Developers should be trusted to choose the most qualified and insightful person to review their code. One of the most common mistakes among teams trying to adopt continuous deployment is that they only let one or two “senior” developers review the rest of the team’s code, “bottlenecking” all releases. Don’t make this mistake.

Involve Developers Closely in Production Operations

The most common mistake we notice among companies that don’t make a successful transition to continuous deployment is that their development organizations are siloed. Dev and Ops should be joined at the hip. Have your developers deeply involved in the setup and definition of your CD infrastructure, and half the battle is already won.

Shift Left: Test Early and Often

Your team needs constant feedback. Think of your QA objective as getting the right feedback in the right hands at the right time. When it comes to deployments, this means knowing what’s working and what’s broken as the breaking change is made. The sooner you uncover the bug after it’s created, the easier it is to fix. The best companies doing continuous deployment have comprehensive unit test and integration test coverage that runs before any code hits the staging server.

Treat Staging as Your Holy Place

The final pre-production environment is usually known as ‘staging.’ A common mistake is to have developers ship new code direct to staging, while figuring out if the new code is ready to go live. This is a terrible idea. As soon as more than one developer is trying to ship their changes, your Slack channel will blow up with cussing and recriminations. Isolate the pre-production environments to each project, and enforce the “staging as ready to go live” philosophy. This way, integration testing can happen at a self-defined pace, without anyone else’s release being blocked.

About the Author / Fred Stevens-Smith

Fred Stevens-Smith is Co-founder and CEO of Rainforest QA, a quality assurance-as-a-service startup backed by Storm Ventures, Rincon, Andreessen Horowitz, Morado and Crosslink.

May 5, 2016
Minimum Viable App Doesn’t Mean Minimum Security

It’s estimated that the total market for mobile apps will hit $143 billion this year. A big portion of that budget will be enterprise mobile app development. By next year 25 percent of enterprise IT budgets will be aimed at their mobile app efforts. Yet, despite these efforts, most enterprises are still falling behind in their mobile app development pipelines by 12, 15 and even 20 weeks.

To help clear that backlog and meet their internal mobile app demand, more enterprises are focusing on delivering the mobile apps with the features that hold promise to produce the most return on their efforts; that is, the apps that people likely will use and will do the most, for the least investment, to help to improve their daily work lives and productivity. Or, this minimum viable product (MVP) is the minimum required in an app to prove out its app concept.

But when moving apps out quickly, enterprises risk skimping in areas of quality and especially security, which can pose a risk to data that should be handled with care, notes Isaac Potoczny-Jones, research lead, Computer Security with security research and development firm Galois.

“There’s definitely a lot more development in mobile happening,” says Potoczny-Jones. “I think the [security] best practices in mobile aren’t as well-developed as best practices for the web. I think that’s getting a little bit better, and there’s a very fascinating challenge with security [with MVP] because security is a non-functional requirement.”

Of course, apps must be developed with good mobile security—including app password management, server side controls, cryptography and other best practices—in mind. The OWASP Top 10 Mobile Security Risks provides an excellent overview of common mobile risks and associated mitigations.

One of the challenges with mobile security testing is that the best practices and associated processes are not well understood by most, at least not yet, and quality mobile security testing tools are not deployed in many organizations. Plus, those organizations using some of the common mobile security testing tools find that they don’t always suffice and they often have to build their own automated toolsets.

The risk with fast-tracked MVP apps is that they never get anywhere near a security test before being shipped to production. But these apps—just like any other apps that get near enterprise data and networks or may access sensitive, confidential or regulated data—must be vetted, threat modeled and tested (static and dynamic app testing), along with the usual quality tests. And with MVPs, it’s just as important that this testing be an integrated part of the process from the beginning.

The best way to achieve this, of course, is through awareness and secure code training with developers.

Companies may want to consider creating an MVP development guide that could detail security considerations for the MVP. Such a guide could help developers determine what security best practices to follow, as well as what apps need to be sent to the security team for reviews—and when.

Potoczny-Jones says there’s no reason, except for maybe carelessness, why MVP apps are being built with minimum security considerations, as most lean development methodologies have security testing built into their processes. “Once you get these teams to include security testing being a part of [what they consider] ‘being done,’ which I don’t think a lot of people have, then they’re going to do the right things. You’re either going to start to build security either into the user stories or the acceptance testing,” he says.

That’s for sure, and it shouldn’t be left to the end of the development process. “You can’t leave it to just be at the end of the process. If you leave security testing toward the end, naturally your schedule is going to slip. You’ll find that there’s a lot more work to do. Then you’ll be in this unfortunate position of having to decide whether to fix things and let the schedule slip, or choose to let something go out the door that’s not secure,” Potoczny-Jones says.

February 10, 2016
SolarWinds Powers Instacart’s DevOps Efforts

Instacart is an Internet-based home delivery service for groceries. Its mobile app and website enables consumers to leverage its service, which operates in 17 cities across the country. Customers order through the app, and Instacart’s personal shoppers fulfill those orders at local stores. Forbes magazine named Instacart the Most Promising Company of 2015, citing its growth since the company’s 2012 inception, notes Nick Elser, director of Engineering at Instacart.

DevOps touches critical business applications at Instacart, including the apps and APIs for both iOS and Android mobile operating systems. It also supports back-end systems such as processes rooted in machine learning that assign grocery lists to shoppers and a pipeline that retrieves retail partner product data about available grocery items nightly.

Key Mobile Development Challenges & Goals

The Instacart DevOps shop is tasked with maintaining infrastructure in software, expanding the current business apps through innovations, and scoping and building future software for the company and its services. “We needed better infrastructure-monitoring solutions in place to save time and help scale parts of the infrastructure as the company continued to grow,” says Elser.

Elser and his team looked at SolarWinds‘ capabilities, and were enticed by the Librato cloud-based monitoring tool’s potential to safeguard the performance and uptime of the company’s mobile APIs. “Our customers demand a high level of reliability from their consumer services,” says Elser. “Librato ensures the reliability of our mobile APIs by keeping a close eye on the health of our internal/external services.”

Instacart hoped to use SolarWinds to support its infrastructure-scaling efforts. By enabling Instacart to leverage aggregates of logging data and statistics reports, Elser and his team could focus on creating an increasingly innovative and fruitful grocery delivery service. “We wanted to concentrate on scaling our operations, fleet of shoppers and metropolitan presence, as well as identifying processes that would enable us to move faster as a team,” explains Elser.

Applying SolarWinds Tools

With the software libraries they needed already present in the programming languages and environments they had on hand, implementing the SolarWinds tools to serve Instacart’s intended goals was relatively pain-free. One tool, Papertrail, required only a minor adjustment to existing config files to forward log records.

Papertrail log management tool eased logging duties for the entire Instacart infrastructure. “I could have Papertrail on all my boxes, give it an endpoint and it would be aggregated into different buckets based on host names,” says Elser.

Instacart also added SolarWinds’ Pingdom solution to notify the team about website downtime issues. This enabled the team to gauge real-world user experiences with uptime and to assess synthetic transactions for issues that could concern customers. “Pingdom was the most flexible uptime monitoring tool my team could find,” says Elser.

Librato also proved worth the effort, thanks to its many value-adds. “We received a lot of free advantages with Librato because it came with Amazon CloudWatch integration,” says Elser. This made it fairly trivial to add instrumentation to our apps.”

Using Librato ultimately enabled Instacart to create graphs to identify correlations in event data—instances where some relationship exists but falls short of cause and effect. Instacart could then use that data to pinpoint and resolve security breaches. “We also use the Librato CloudWatch integration to monitor database loads, as these affect the infrastructure’s health,” says Elser.

By integrating Librato with Heroku and AWS CloudWatch and applying other SolarWinds apps, Instacart gained visualizations of important infrastructure elements and transparency into its entire software stack for monitoring stack health.

Other Tools

Instacart also uses other tools to help its DevOps, including Crashlytics mobile crash and usage tracking application, Urban Airship mobile push notification tool, Branch.io deep-linking application and the Rollbar exception tracking tool.

January 18, 2016
DevOps and continuous innovation accelerate the evolution of technology

DevOps tools and principles have dramatically increased the pace of innovation and enabled the organizations that have embraced them and used them most effectively to achieve a major strategic advantage over competitors. The more the world runs and relies on software, the more DevOps can be the engine to automate and facilitate change.

There was a time it took almost half a day to build a single car. Henry Ford managed to bring that down to two hours and 30 minutes thanks to the assembly line, but for over a hundred years most of the changes year to year in automobiles have required retooling manufacturing plants so updates and modifications are developed at a relative snail’s pace. Then Tesla came along with a car that is more or less just a framework for the software that runs on it and that can have new features and capabilities the next day through over-the-air software updates.

John Jeremiah, technology evangelist and team lead for HP Software, was quoted in a post earlier this year saying, “It was just a few years ago when nobody had heard of Uber. Now, every single taxi company or taxi service is under pressure to react to a company that owns no taxis. Why is that? It’s because they’ve used software.”

Tesla has an advantage over other automobiles because it can change the way its vehicles work or improve them with new features at the push of a button. Uber has an advantage over the traditional taxi industry because it has streamlined its service through a mobile app available on hundreds of millions of mobile devices and it can modify and improve the way it works with a simple update. Software has increased the ability for organizations to adapt more quickly and DevOps accelerates that evolution even faster through continuous innovation and the automation of routine tasks.

There will still be things that require physical change—an updated vehicle frame in the case of Tesla or a new feature that relies on cutting edge technology only available in the latest smartphone models in the case of Uber. Software alone can’t do it all.

The areas where software makes a difference, though, DevOps has a major impact. A recent study conducted by Gene Kim and a team of researchers found that organizations that have embraced DevOps tools and principles effectively have 8,000 times faster lead times and 30 times more frequent deployments than their peers. They also have 12 times faster mean time to recovery when issues arise and are twice as likely to exceed profitability, market share and productivity goals. Those are all significant statistics that impact the bottom line and separate the companies that win from their struggling rivals.

Companies that can harness the power of DevOps and continuous innovation to develop new apps and capabilities faster and that have the capacity to push those updates out to existing customers have a significant advantage over competitors still slogging through “innovating” the old-fashioned way. It’s hard to compete with companies that are deploying 30 times faster than you and have twice the profitability and market share.

August 25, 2015
Mobile App Development Will Soon Grow More Enterprise-Focused

As the global mobile app market begins to swell, many consumer-focused developers inexperienced in the ways of enterprise development will soon follow the money to become better initiated, a new report out this month explained. Until then, the more mature types of development methods and tools that enterprise developers depend upon are still relatively scarce in the mobile app development community.

According to analysts with VisionMobile, which recently released its Developer Economics State of Nation Q3 report, mobile developers accounted for 12.6 percent of the global developer population in 2013, but the number of developers in these ranks is expected to grow to close to 5 million in the next three years. As things stand at the moment, more than two out of three mobile app developers currently target consumers. And even among those 27 percent who do focus on business users, 11 target individual business users—the independent BYOD early adopter type that many an IT department has struggled to keep up with.

That leaves just 16 percent of the mobile app developer population focused on the enterprise, with about half of them working in the enterprise environment and the other half in third-party or freelance situations.

Given those demographics, it is no surprise how few tools the entire class of mobile app coders uses during development. Currently, just 9 percent of these developers use any kind of automated app testing tools, only 16 percent use crash and performance monitoring tools, and just 21 percent use beta testing tools. Even the use of cloud computing tools lags, with just under 30 percent using services such as AWS or Heroku to aid their development.

It’s a perplexing problem, according to the report’s authors.

” Developer tools add value at every step of the developer journey from prototyping through to customer support,” the report stated. “It makes sense that hobbyists with no intention of making money from their apps would avoid tools that might incur costs at some point. However, 26% of developers that are interested in making money don’t use any third party tools.”

This could potentially change as the economic incentives for more mobile app developers to shift to the enterprise and business users push them to create the more dependable apps features that these users demand.

According to VisionMobile, overall the app economy stacked up to $53 billion in 2012, and its analysts predict 28 percent growth annually through 2016, when the market will reach $143 billion. Currently, the enterprise market leads the pack in terms of revenue generation opportunity, with developers focused on enterprise audiences far and away leading the pack in revenue from their apps, followed by those focused on individual professionals.

“Smartphones and tablets were introduced as consumer-first technologies, which led to developers initially building consumer apps. Now a growing number of enterprises are adopting mobile technology; this is all businesses, governmental and non-profit organizations, not just large corporations with IT departments,” the report said. “The platform owners are providing clear signs that there is much greater enterprise adoption and significant opportunities for developers to come.”

In an earlier report this year, VisionMobile predicted that the business and productivity market will double in size by 2016, reaching $58 billion by then.

July 31, 2014