Mobile gaming is a booming market with projected revenue to reach 102.8 billion dollars in the next two years. Due to these exponentially growing figures, businesses are investing thousands of dollars into the game app development market. It’s worth noting that the mobile game market is one of the highly competitive industries right now. With thousands of mobile games already ruling the hearts of avid gamers, it’s not an easy task to develop a game that gains overnight success. Apart from a unique idea and a reliable mobile game app development team to accompany you on the journey, you must choose the right development approach to turn your idea into reality. While there are many development approaches you can implement for your mobile game, DevOps is at the top of the list. In this article, we are going to discuss the importance of DevOps in mobile game development and how it can help developers build successful mobile games with less hassle.
What is DevOps?
Before proceeding further, let’s first understand what DevOps means. To put it in simple terms, DevOps is a set of rules that are defined to bridge the gap between software development (Dev) and general IT operations (Ops).
The idea is to bring all the development and operation teams together and keep them involved throughout the development process. Since DevOps eliminates isolated team structures, the development and QA team have the power to work together and ensure seamless and fast delivery of the project.
Another advantage of DevOps that makes it comparatively more successful than traditional methodologies is continuous testing. As opposed to Agile development, the development team tests the features as soon as they get deployed. This gives them the opportunity to eliminate bugs right away and keep the code clean, avoiding unexpected headaches in the long run.
DevOps – What Makes it Better?
When it came to developing a mobile game in the past, many developers opted for agile development. No doubt you can build working mobile games with Agile implementation in 2021, it has many drawbacks that completely overshadow its benefits. For instance, agile methodologies mainly focus on iterative development with testing scheduled at the end of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
Since mobile games have a complex architecture and too many modules, delayed testing can slow down the overall development process and put the final deployment on hold. Moreover, mobile games, like regular smartphone apps, fall under the category of end-to-end applications. Since users install mobile games directly on their smartphones, releasing daily updates for the game may damage the user experience. This is when DevOps comes to the rescue.
By implementing DevOps, you can bring collaboration to the table and make both the development & QA teams work together to decide on major updates. This way you can build a user-centric mobile game that keeps the players engaged and helps you establish a strong identity in such a competitive market.
Some of the additional benefits of DevOps for mobile game development include:
1. Easy Resource Allocation
In contrast to the traditional agile development approach, DevOps ensures complete automation in both the development and operational phase of the SDLC. Since automation acts as the epicenter for DevOps, resource allocation becomes a hassle-free task for project managers.
Based on client priorities and deadlines, managers can allocate the right resources for specific modules of the game. Also, since automation governs the testing phase as well, DevOps ensures fast deliveries of each module.
2. Continuous Testing
Speaking of testing, DevOps provides a better testing scope to the development teams. As we mentioned earlier, DevOps focuses on continuous testing, which means that unexpected bugs can be eliminated at the early stage of the Software Development Life Cycle.
The game development team tests each module as soon as it’s integrated into the mobile game and keeps the functionality top-notch. Developers and testers can closely monitor each module of the game to ensure that it doesn’t affect the user experience at all.
Moreover, QA teams can implement DevSecOps, an evolved version of DevOps that prioritizes app security along with seamless user experience and fast deliveries. In this situation, the testing and security teams can work together to eliminate all security loopholes and offer secure gameplay to the end-users.
3. Continuous Monitoring
Mobile games commonly have an extensive codebase. So, manual testing (followed by traditional development methodologies) is not an ideal solution to remove errors.
But, thanks to continuous monitoring in DevOps, both developers and the QA team can use automated tools to continuously monitor each module of the game, and repair the broken code structures immediately. The primary objective behind continuous monitoring is to remove all the potential bugs in the development phase itself so that the end-users can enjoy a seamless user experience.
4. Enhanced Usability
Usability is one of the most crucial factors that can decide the success of a mobile game. If your end-users don’t find the game interesting, they’ll most likely abandon it within a few days.
With DevOps, you can avoid this situation by responding to customer feedback more quickly. Given that development and QA teams work together, they can analyze the user response and integrate new features to make the mobile game user-centric.
5. Fast Deliveries
Game developers strive to provide fast deliveries to clients. If you already don’t utilize a time-tested development approach, DevOps implementation can help you reduce the overall development time and deploy your projects before the deadline.
Conclusion
The days of traditional development methodologies are over, especially if you want to get a slice of the multi-billion dollar gaming industry. To launch successful mobile games, it’ll be crucial to keep user engagement your top priority. DevOps in Mobile game development gives developers the ability to execute mobile app development through continuous integration, collaboration, and monitoring. As a result, they can develop mobile games that offer addictive gameplay and don’t ruin the user experience with unexpected bugs.
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