Delivering Digital Experiences on Mobile Devices

Delivering digital experiences on mobile devices is no small feat. It’s the discipline of not only removing obstacles from the path that leads to quickly producing software, but also increasing the pace down that path. It considers the 3 pillars of DevOps: flow, feedback, and continuous improvement. By identifying the bottle necks and problem areas in the workflow used to develop a software product, and addressing these problems, we can boost productivity. It’s by our feedback systems that we can pin point problems and apply fixes and improvements. Problem areas can be in various forms, but we immediately care about toil¹.

Sniffing out toil is a part of this discipline, and ultimately this discipline falls under the domain of Release Engineering.

Release engineers define best practices for using our tools in order to make sure projects are released using consistent and repeatable methodologies. Our best practices cover all elements of the release process. Examples include compiler flags, formats for build identification tags, and required steps during a build. Making sure that our tools behave correctly by default and are adequately documented makes it easy for teams to stay focused on features and users, rather than spending time reinventing the wheel (poorly) when it comes to releasing software. — Dinah McNutt

Providing an amazing digital experience is about building and delivering great software products. It’s about understanding source code management, compilers, build configuration, automated build tools, and package managers and installers. You can see this means carrying deep knowledge of multiple domains, for example software development, configuration management, test integration, software tooling, system administration, and customer support.

Truth be told Release Engineering is both broad and deep in its reaches. It takes a special team of people that collaborate with all the major stakeholders of the digital product: product managers, software developers, devops engineers, just to name a few.

¹Toil refers to those manual, repetitive task that can be automated, and are a part of the product development workflow. When considering the elimination of toil other criteria are considered like the toil being: tactical and not strategic (it should be a response to something that is measurable), void of enduring value (i.e. no permanent improvement is gained from repeating the task several times), and scalable (does task load or complexity grow linearly or faster with the growth of the project).