Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 04 | Page 81

FINAL WORD WHEN ASKED ABOUT HIRING PRIORITIES, 27% OF RESPONDENTS WHO ARE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR MOBILE DEVELOPMENT RESOURCE REPORTED THAT THEY WERE PLANNING TO HIRE PEOPLE WITH BACK-END INTEGRATION SKILLS. microservices approach has demonstrated its value, from both an agility and a performance perspective. Node.js+Express has become a de-facto technology stack for implementing these services and thrives in a polyglot environment. Whilst microservices communicate between themselves using RESTful APIs and lightweight messaging, they also provide modern wrappers for legacy enterprise systems. A microservices approach has the advantage of allowing app components to be rapidly developed, deployed, updated, and retired, to suit the needs of customers and employees. A variety of development teams can easily collaborate on building these autonomous services to serve specific business requirements, while enterprise IT teams focus on managing sensitive data, applications and systems in the back-end. Agile In contrast to waterfall methods, which have traditionally characterized enterprise software application development, agile approaches involve shorter, more iterative development cycles that elicit early and continuous feedback across the app www.intelligentcio.com development lifecycle. This happens to go hand-in-hand with the mobile ethos of “build fast, build repeatedly.” As organisations try to build an app, deploy it, test it, and iterate on it, they are transitioning from waterfall towards agile approaches. However, it’s a journey and not all companies have reached the point of true agile development – but they are getting there. In moving towards this more agile approach, organisations recognise the need for greater collaboration between people with different skills, including input from the users, or the business. Combined with continuous development, deployment, monitoring and measurement of mobile apps, this collaborative approach has exciting potential for app success. Apps are constantly evolving, with elements added and retire [