Technology has forever changed how we do business as a society. It has changed how we communicate, collaborate and a variety of other things. However, in order for companies to use these technologies and tools, there needs to be companies to make them. As a result, the software market is almost $500 billion.
As you could imagine in such a new and fast-moving industry, there are a lot of trends in the software development space. One, in particular, that is becoming very common and popular is continuous development. Continuous development is when a mix of continuous testing, delivery, deployment, and integration takes place in the software development process.
But just what type of benefits does continuous development have and how does it bring value to companies? With all of that in mind, this article is going to go over the value that a company can get by having a continuous development process.
Quickly Find Errors and Rectify Them
When creating and deploying software, errors are bound to occur. These can be small and relatively unnoticeable, or can potentially ruin your software. Catching these bugs or errors before they become an issue to end users is incredibly important. Unfortunately, if you are only testing or checking for bugs manually at certain times, things can easily slip through the cracks.
This could cause them to be missed, and eventually wreak havoc on your customers and users. Your company or products could not only get some bad press on social media, but you could also lose a lot of customers.
However, if you utilize continuous development (which included testing), you will become aware of the bugs ASAP, before deployment has taken place. There are a variety of tools that can also help you identify bugs or errors, such as Loggly. Loggly, which is created by a popular brand in the application logging industry, can help centrally manage your logs and help you find root causes or these issues.
Make Quicker Updates
As a company who creates software, apps or tools, the work doesn’t stop once you deploy or deliver a product. Once it is deployed, updates need to be made. These can address issues, add new content and do a range of other things. Normally, the updating process can be cumbersome and take a while.
But using continuous development can help it occur seamlessly and easy. Because the code is constantly being updated, tested and developed, making updates will only take a fraction of the time. Sometimes, it can be as easy and simple as clicking a button to push through the update that has already been tested and integrated.
Increase Productivity
Another valuable thing that continuous development is that it can greatly increase productivity. Lots of development-related tasks are quite mundane and time-consuming and can waste a lot of time. Developers want to code, not deal with all of these extra tasks. So by having an automated continuous development pipeline in place to handle these more mundane tasks, developers can be more productive on tasks that matter.
In addition to getting more done in less time, productivity can have a positive effect on teams. Productive people are generally happier people, and this will help your employees be more engaged and love their job. So in addition to getting more done, your team should be in a better mindset and headspace when continuous development is in place.
We hope that this blog post has been able to help you define the value of a continuous development process. More and more companies are likely going to start adopting continuous development for the many benefits it can provide.
