Kinvey, an enterprise Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) company brought Digital Lifecycle Management (DLM) to mobile application development process.
While enterprise development teams and IT teams started to embrace agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for continuous integration and continuos delivery (CD/CD), mobile application development teams are yet to take advantage of the agile development methodologies. Kinvey, the enterprise MBaaS platform is attempting to bring agility to mobile application development by enabling collaboration among frontend developers, backend developers and IT administrators.
Mobile application development is complex. With diverse set of devices, operating systems, platforms and frameworks, rapid iteration of feature set is difficult. Since parts of design and development are outsourced to agencies and system integrators, collaboration among the stakeholders is key to the success of application development.
According to a Kinvey blog post, the following factors increase the complexity of mobile app development -
- App dev teams are comprised of both internal front-end and backend developers, plus developers from external SIs and agencies,
- Apps are being built for a complex matrix of OSes and device-types, so an app now lives across experiences instead of just one form factor, and
- The lifecycle is governed by different enterprise policies — while connections to backend systems take longer and have to be signed off by IT, front-end development happens with fast & agile processes with many iterations (we call this “2-speed IT”)
Digital Lifecycle Management (DLM) makes it easy to clone the environments used by the frontend developers and backend developers. The teams can work independently on the environments and Kinvey will synchronize the changes between the environments.
DLM enables IT administrators to setup and manage development, test, staging and production environments while enabling collaboration between the two teams.
Sravish Sridhar, CEO of Kinvey said, "Our enterprise customers use a combination of internal developers, system integrators and development agencies to design and build applications that access different backend systems, and live across various operating systems and devices."