devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • Nylas Announces Workflows: Pre-Built Templates for Automating Tasks in Software Applications

    Leading Productivity Infrastructure provider introduces new solutions that help developers quickly build workflow automations in their applications without writing custom code.

    SAN FRANCISCO – February 17, 2021 – Nylas, a pioneer and leading provider of Productivity Infrastructure solutions for modern software development teams, today announced the launch of Nylas Workflows. Nylas Workflows are pre-built, composable templates that allow software developers to quickly orchestrate end-to-end workflow automations across a broad range of applications, such as  CRMs, Applicant Tracking Systems, Tele-Health Platforms, and Digital Supply Chain Management.

    Workflows allow developers to automate manual tasks such as scheduling appointments with healthcare providers, sending shipping notifications across channels like email and SMS, and updating databases with important customer information. Furthermore, Workflows extend the Nylas platforms’ automation capabilities from email, calendar, and contacts to integrate with business applications such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.

    “It’s our mission to create solutions that reduce our customers’ time-to-market, improve their customer engagement, and boost both their development teams and end-users’ productivity,” said Gleb Polyakov, CEO of Nylas. “Knowledge workers in roles like sales, legal, finance, HR, and healthcare lose valuable time toggling between tools and navigating inefficiencies in the software that they rely on to do their jobs. With Nylas, our customers have shown that they can improve their end-users’ productivity by 20% or greater overnight by removing the friction out of their user experiences.”

    Nylas provides Productivity Infrastructure solutions for more than 600 customers across 22 countries, such as Upwork, Wix, Dialpad, and Comcast. This announcement follows Nylas’ expansion of its platform capabilities to include AI/ML workloads, the introduction of the first-ever program to simplify the Google OAuth security verification process, and the launch of its On-Prem offering for enterprise customers.

    For more information on Nylas Workflows, please visit www.nylas.com/products/workflows.

    About Nylas

    Nylas is a pioneer and leading provider of productivity infrastructure solutions for modern software. Over 50,000 developers worldwide use the Nylas platform to quickly and securely build productivity features into their applications. With Nylas, developers get unprecedented access to rich communications data from their end-users, pre-built workflows that automate everyday tasks, embeddable UI/UX components for fast front-end development, and comprehensive security features – all delivered via a suite of powerful APIs that make integration easy.

    Nylas was founded in 2013 and has raised over $55M to date from 8VC, Spark Capital, Slack, Citi Ventures, Round 13, ScaleUP, Data Collective, Fuel Capital, and SV Angel. Nylas customers span from large enterprises such as Ceridian, Hyundai, Fox News Corp, Hubspot, and Move.com to high-growth start-ups like Dialpad, Pipedrive, Lexicata, and Qualia. Learn more at www.nylas.com

  • Project OWL announces new release of ClusterDuck Protocol to build emergency mesh networks

    An opportunity for developers to use, test, and contribute to an open source communications systemthat provides connectivity in the wake of disasters  

    By Bryan Knouse, CEO & Co-Founder, Project OWL

    Despite the pandemic, the power of the open source community of developers working together virtually around the world has helped Project OWL(Organization, Whereabouts, and Logistics) advance the ClusterDuck Protocol(CDP) wireless technology in the past year.

    The CDP project provides a system to manage an ad-hoc mesh network of Internet-of-Things devices (Ducks) based on LoRa (Long Range radio) that can be deployed quickly and cheaply. Project OWL invented the technology as part of the inaugural Call for CodeGlobal Challenge in 2018.

    In March 2020, Project OWLlaunched the open source ClusterDuck Protocolproject together with IBM and The Linux Foundationto provide a home for the community and to expand the ecosystem to additional stakeholders around the world.

    Today we are excited to announce four technology updates for our users, and we invite developers to help us improve the hardware, software, and analytics that drive them, to help provide connectivity wherever it’s needed in the wake of disasters.

    What we are announcing today

    DMS Lite Dashboard GitHub 1.0 release: The DMS (Duck Management System) Lite Dashboard is Project OWL’s offline data collection platform for the ClusterDuck Protocol. It’s an open source dashboard for viewing a mesh network in the browser.We’ve released version 1.0 and call on developers to improve and extend the architecture. All the data sent over a ClusterDuck network can be collected by the DMS Lite to visualize network activity and data provide analytics for remote and offline areas.

    Refactored object-oriented codebase: The updated library supports many additional hardware platforms, so you can use various new types of devices. Developers can extend and add their own hardware to fill the roles in the mesh network depending on what they have, or prefer, to use.

    New Android app:A mobile app that local authorities, first responders, and affected individuals can download. The ClusterDuck app provides Bluetooth connectivity to a nearby Duck device instead of connecting to its local WiFi point. Bluetooth connectivity will help provide stronger security and utilize significantly lower energy while providing another channel for emergency response communication. Developers can help us improve the Android app and begin on an iOS version.

    More resilient communications format and protocol: We are releasing a new message format together with an updated protocol for connecting devices and relaying messages. This makes the platform more efficient, reliable, and performant in adverse conditions. It also strengthens support for additional transport options, including satellite connectivity.
    Ourrelease notes include details on the message format, new device support, and updated documentation for these and other new features.

    Open Source Community Engagement

    It’s been very inspiring to see the response from the open source community since open sourced the ClusterDuck Protocol under the governance of The Linux Foundation last year. The open source community has grown to hundreds of contributors from around the world, and there is always an opportunity for people to join in the conversation on ourSlack workspace and GitHub repository.

    Three developers, who connected with us through the community, are New York-based Zachary Neuhaus, Portland-based Amir Nathoo, and Dallas-based David Mandala. They have been integral to the development of the additional connectivity options, object-oriented refactor, and better message format and protocol.

    Developers who are new to the project will have a more seamless experience thanks to the added capabilities. With faster and easier access to the open source technology, we hope more individuals around the world can get involved, build their own networks, and continue to build the protocol with us as we try to bring connectivity to the people and places that need it most.

    IBM’s Ongoing Mentorship

    Since winning the 2018 Call for Code Global Challenge, IBM continues to mentor our team to implement open source best practices, for example, by helping us innovate in the open source upstream ClusterDuck Protocol and integrate that downstream into our own Project OWL packages, similar to the successful Red Hat model.

    They have also been instrumental to the expansion of our network of partners. For example, Project OWL won a grantthrough The World Bank’s TechEmerge Resilience India Challenge in early 2021, and is in discussion to test our technology with the State of Disaster Management Authorities (SDMA) of Himachal Pradesh in the mountainous Himalayan region. This will be an invigorating engineering challenge for us, as the terrain in this region is unlike the vast and versatile deployment sites we encountered working with IBM Service Corps in Puerto Rico and multiple North American locations.

    OWL is looking forward to returning to field tests around the world together with local stakeholders in 2021. We are also open to working with new partners to test and improve our open source codebase to ensure it can make an impact wherever it’s deployed by Project OWL or others.

    How you can get involved today

    This is a great time for developers in the open source community to take part, regardless of where you are in the world or your level of technical expertise.
    OWL is seeing demand from local governments as well as organizations in the public and private sectors, which is driving innovation and helping us expand to more industries. We invite you to join the community today:

    ·        Visit the website to learn more about how you can contribute to the ClusterDuck Protocol open source effort: www.clusterduckprotocol.org
    ·        Find the codebase on GitHub: https://github.com/Call-for-Code/ClusterDuck-Protocol
    ·        Join the conversation with developers around the world: www.clusterduckprotocol.org/slack

  • TigerGraph Raises $105 Million to Accelerate Graph Analytics on the Cloud

    Record Funding for Graph Database Category, Led by Tiger Global, Signals the Next Wave in Analytics to Fuel Powerful Insights for Artificial Intelligence

    REDWOOD CITY, CA – Feb. 17, 2021 – TigerGraph, provider of the leading graph analytics platform, today announced it has raised $105 million in Series C funding, the largest funding round to date within the graph database and analytics market. The round was led by Tiger Global and brings TigerGraph’s total funding raised to over $170 million.

    The investment reflects TigerGraph’s growth and the massive potential as businesses continue to move to the cloud. With the transactional and analytical workloads moving to the cloud made possible by companies like Snowflake, Confluent, and Databricks, TigerGraph is quickly becoming the graph database of choice to connect, analyze and learn new insights from the data. With its distributed native graph architecture, TigerGraph helps organizations scale fast, analyze many different aspects of data to be used with each other to form new models and generate new insights. These new patterns and insights enhance a company’s analytics or machine learning capabilities and can be deployed anywhere with multi-cloud flexibility and support the data security requirements for regulatory compliance.

    Over the last 12 months with the COVID-19 pandemic, companies have embraced digital transformation at a faster pace driving an urgent need to find new insights about their customers, products, services, and suppliers. Graph technology connects these domains from the relational databases, offering the opportunity to shrink development cycles for data preparation, improve data quality, identify new insights such as similarity patterns to deliver the next best action recommendation. Data-driven solutions require intelligent apps and connected data that leverage powerful graph engines to connect, analyze and learn from the data companies are storing in the cloud.  These events helped TigerGraph experience massive growth, more than doubling revenues and customers over the past year. It has also continued building a very active and fast-growing developer community, receiving the highest markets in a recent analyst report — TigerGraph was named a leader for Graph Data Platforms in the analyst report.

    “By 2023, graph technologies will facilitate rapid contextualization for decision making in 30 percent of organizations worldwide,” according to Gartner.1 Mark Beyer, Distinguished VP Analyst with Gartner shared the following in a Gartner report regarding the adoption of graph  technology in the enterprises, “To Graph or Not to Graph? That Is Not the Question — You Will Graph.”2 Organizations of all sizes are adopting Graph-based analytics and AI by leveraging the relationships in the connected data to drive better outcomes. TigerGraph is galvanizing the graph and AI community, organizing the first open industry  Graph + AI Conference featuring presentations by innovators including UnitedHealth Group, Jaguar Land Rover, Intuit, Intel, Xilinx and Accenture. TigerGraph is deeply involved and on the steering committee for the development of the Graph Query Language standard, GQL along with other database vendors such as Oracle and Neo4j, and will enthusiastically support the GQL standard immediately upon finalization.

    “For over 40 years, business’s #1 data management challenge has been how to easily ask business questions across all of their data in real-time to guide their operations. The human brain connects data to derive new insights and helps us decide what to do next. TigerGraph’s mission is to power an enterprise brain with graph and AI that discovers these new insights within the enterprise data stored in the cloud and on-prem,” said Dr. Yu Xu, founder and CEO of TigerGraph. “TigerGraph is leading the paradigm shift in connecting and analyzing data via scalable and native graph technology with pre-connected entities versus the traditional way of joining large tables with rows and columns. This funding will allow us to expand our offering and bring it to many more markets, enabling more customers to realize the benefits of graph analytics and AI.”

    TigerGraph’s innovation has been recognized with several recent industry awards and accolades including:

    The company will use the funding for product innovation and development to better support its customers, including TigerGraph Cloud on Google Cloud Platform (available March 2021), plus further multi-region support on AWS and Azure.  It is also expanding its global reach with local support in Asia and Australia/New Zealand. Meanwhile, the company will scale up with additional hiring in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC to meet increased product demand. The company is hiring in every department – apply now at https://www.tigergraph.com/join-us/.

    Helpful Links

    1 Gartner Press Release, Gartner Identifies Top 10 Data and Analytics Technology Trends for 2020, 22 June 2020

    2 Gartner, Graph Steps Onto the Main Stage of Data and Analytics: A Gartner Trend Insight Report, 14, December 2020

    About TigerGraph                                                                                                          

    TigerGraph is a platform for advanced analytics and machine learning on connected data. Based on the industry’s first and only distributed native graph database, TigerGraph’s proven technology supports advanced analytics and machine learning applications such as fraud detection, anti-money laundering (AML), entity resolution, customer 360, recommendations, knowledge graph, cybersecurity, supply chain, IoT, and network analysis. The company is headquartered in Redwood City, California, USA. Start free with tigergraph.com/cloud.

     

     

  • Moogsoft Joins the Datadog Marketplace to Instantly Deliver Actionable Insights About IT Incidents

    The Datadog-Moogsoft integration allows DevOps, IT Ops, and SRE teams to rapidly address service impacts identified by the Moogsoft Observability Cloud and Datadog monitoring and security platform

    SAN FRANCISCO — Feb. 16, 2021 — Moogsoft, the AI-driven observability leader, today announced a new integration with Datadog. Available through the Datadog Marketplace, this new integration enables IT Ops, DevOps, and SRE teams to easily start ingesting events and metrics from Datadog into the Moogsoft Observability Cloud.

    Datadog’s monitoring and security platform provides metrics, traces, logs, and more to provide observability for modern environments. This new integration allows SREs, IT Ops, and DevOps pros to instantly see context-rich Moogsoft-generated incidents from across the full stack in either platform, boosting service availability. Put simply, it slashes the time an SRE must spend sifting through data to get to the cause of a service outage.

    Time spent triaging alerts and identifying incident root cause impairs the value DevOps practitioners and SRE teams can deliver to organizations. Using this new integration, customers can leverage Moogsoft’s algorithms in conjunction with Datadog’s insights to automate the identification of critical, actionable data, then correlate meaningful alerts into context-rich incidents that they can quickly resolve from within the Datadog Incident Dashboard.

    “We hope that this new partnership between Datadog and Moogsoft will enable us to better achieve the true purpose of AIOps, including the ability to detect anomalies as soon as possible and manage the knowledge to mitigate incidents quickly when they occur,” said Diego Devalle, Global Head of Product and Engineering at Guidewire Software.

    “Customers rely on Datadog to quickly be alerted on production issues and help them find resolutions,” said Ilan Rabinovitch, Vice President of Product and Community at Datadog. “The root cause analysis that Watchdog and our partners provide ensures that engineering teams can respond to incidents more effectively. Moogsoft combines Datadog’s findings with those of other toolsets to enrich and  augment the insights available to developers. We are excited to welcome them into the ecosystem of partners available via the Datadog Marketplace.”

    Using this integration, Datadog users can use both platforms to:

    • Achieve more context across incidents: Joint customers can use Moogsoft and Datadog to enrich telemetry from Metrics, Events and Logs APIs, as well as CI data from Datadog’s Topology APIs, with other data from across their environments including configuration database management systems (CMDBs), asset management databases, discovery systems and more.

    • Accelerate identification of root cause: Moogsoft automatically adds key incident information such as location, department, business criticality, service relationships, runbooks and escalation processes.

    • Minimize the impact and time spent on service-impacting outages: Moogsoft and Datadog algorithms automatically surface anomalies to Datadog customers, helping them address incidents before they introduce service impacts.

    • Accelerate Monitoring Transformation: Moogsoft and Datadog automate event correlation across legacy on-premises systems and modern multi-cloud environments in one place, eliminating duplicates and effectively reducing the overall number of incidents across the full stack.

    “The avalanche of data coming from modern environments is simply too much for the human mind to process, and is a major drag on the efficiency of SRE teams,” said Phil Tee, Founder and CEO of Moogsoft. “This integration between Moogsoft and Datadog equips our joint customers with AI to automate the analysis of any data into actionable insights, freeing humans to spend time innovating. Best of all, Datadog users can start seeing these results in the time it takes to make a cappuccino!”

    Additional Resources

    About Moogsoft

    Moogsoft is the AI-driven observability leader that provides intelligent monitoring solutions for smart DevOps. Moogsoft delivers the most advanced cloud-native, self-service platform for software engineers, developers and operators to instantly see everything, know what’s wrong and fix things faster. Founded in 2012, Moogsoft has more than 140 customers worldwide including American Airlines, Fannie Mae, Fiserv, HCL Technologies, SAP SuccessFactors, and Verizon Media. It has established strategic partnerships with leading managed service providers and outsourcing organizations including AWS, Cisco, HCL Technologies, TCS and Wipro.

    Moogsoft® and the Moogsoft logo are proprietary trademarks of Moogsoft Inc. All other products or names may be trademarks of their respective companies.

    For more information about the Moogsoft Observability Cloud and its customers’ success, visit www.moogsoft.com.

  • Pattern89 Delivers Immediate Insights to Improve Marketing Performance and Visibility Through New AI-Driven Capabilities

    Enhanced datasets and end-to-end platform improvements help marketers power their creative decisions

    INDIANAPOLIS – February 16, 2021 – Pattern89, a platform that specializes in creative artificial intelligence (AI) to predict digital marketing performance, announced today new features to enhance brands’ visibility into ad performance. These end-to-end upgrades will streamline and improve its user experience, while allowing marketers to access real-time predictive performance insights and assemble and launch top-performing ad combinations in platform.

    “Marketing isn’t about educated guesses anymore–it’s about data and creativity. Brands and agencies want to use artificial intelligence to unlock the data behind every creative idea,” said R. J. Talyor, CEO and founder of Pattern89. “So we listened to our customers and upgraded both the Pattern89 application and our API to power every creative decision they make.”

    Featured updates include:

    • Predicting creative performance, with improved functionality and datasets of more than 300 billion data points. By analyzing large datasets of digital marketing trends, Pattern89 now predicts the creative insights that deliver winning ad combinations with over 95% accuracy. The new design also helps marketers efficiently unlock their best creative decisions, assemble and launch top-performing ad predictions directly in-platform, eliminating the need for traditional A/B testing.

    • Extending your creative lifecycle with custom performance dashboards and simplified alerts. With customizable creative dashboards, marketers can showcase creative performance drivers across funnel stages, verticals, demographics and more. Pattern89 also optimizes in-flights ads within its dashboards, allowing marketers to see the immediate impact of their ads and surface and complete the most impactful campaign updates with its ‘Do This for Me’ functionality.

    • Launching advanced analytics to help marketers understand the why behind creative performance. Advanced performance analytics across more than 49,000 creative dimensions help marketers understand how their creative impacts ad performance. Pattern89 also showcases how current ads and ad sets are performing relative to their dynamic benchmarks, increasing transparency into AI-powered decisions, and automates highly detailed, client-ready reports.

    • New API to integrate Pattern89’s creative insights with existing marketing automation tools. New API capabilities allow marketers to unlock the power of deep, actionable data insights on ad performance across platforms and verticals. Brands are only beginning to tap into the capabilities of creative AI and these updates would help make this potential a reality.

    These new features will launch throughout Q1, growing Pattern89’s position as the leading AI solution for marketers and agencies who want to maximize creative performance at scale. This announcement also follows Pattern89’s 2021 Creative Forecast, which predicts the digital marketing trends that will perform best this year. For more information, visit www.pattern89.com.

    About Pattern89

    Pattern89 provides powerful, artificial intelligence-driven marketing technology to help brands and agencies discover what creative decisions drive their most impactful digital performance. With creative analysis and prediction algorithms delivering over 95% accuracy, Pattern89 reduces waste by identifying successful patterns and outliers in companies’ ad creative performance data on digital channels. For more information, visit www.pattern89.com.

  • Applitools Visual AI Enables Thunderhead to Deliver Flawless UX Faster

    Thunderhead runs tests 48X faster using Applitools Ultrafast Test Cloud

    SAN MATEO, Calif., February 16, 2021 — Applitools, provider of a next generation test automation through Visual AI and Ultrafast Test Cloud, announces how its Visual AI technology helps Thunderhead create a visually perfect experience in its ONE Engagement Hub. Thunderhead offers it’s AI-driven ONE Platform, a transformational technology for customer engagement and the recognised global leader in the Customer Journey Orchestration and Analytics market. The ONE Engagement Hub helps global brands build customer engagement in the era of digital transformation.

    To read the full case study, please visit: (https://applitools.com/case-studies/thunderhead/)

    Understanding the customer journey is vital to success, but is incredibly complex and challenging to manage. From window shoppers to mobile browsers, there are dozens or more customer touchpoints that can accumulate, and any one of these touchpoints is an opportunity to convert a prospect. This is where Thunderhead’s ONE Engagement Hub provides users with the insight and context into customer behavior that businesses need to thrive. It is critical that Thunderhead continuously delivers a flawless experience to its users so that they never miss an opportunity to convert.

    “Applitools gives our entire team huge peace-of-mind,” said Walt Harris, head of quality at Thunderhead. “We know about the visual impact of our code. Using Applitools makes us more nimble and lets us develop more quickly.”

    Before Applitools, the engineering team at Thunderhead wrote Selenium tests to validate both UI behavior and end-to-end functionality. They had no automation for the visual components of these tests. Small changes to UI code would require significant rewrites in order for tests to pass, and many of these changes to internal element locators had no visual impact.

    By inspecting visual elements, Applitools Visual AI detects actual bugs, ignoring minor visual variances. Making  Applitools much more accurate across browser and operating system changes without time consuming false positives. After implementing Applitools, Thunderhead discovered an ease of test development they had not previously experienced. The code used to validate the content on screen was replaced by a simple call to Applitools, which captured the entire screen and compared it with the last approved version. Via AI, the meaningful differences were highlighted so engineers could easily fix or approve.

    Thunderhead realized the following outcomes: 

    • Faster builds with test execution times down 48x – from four hours to five minutes using the Applitools Ultrafast Test Cloud
    • Saves time with less code to write & maintain
    • Increases in developer productivity by testing earlier, eliminating time consuming context-switching
    • Peace of mind with massive increases to test coverage
    • Faster time to market by enabling developers to focus time on creating more features and delivering more value to their users

    “We are pleased to see the incredible impact Applitools is having on Thunderhead and its software development team,” said Gil Sever, co-founder and CEO at Applitools. “Thunderhead’s ability to deliver flawless experiences to their users is paramount to the success of hundreds of global companies. We’re proud to help them along their journey and look forward to creating more ways for the Thunderhead engineering team to deliver new and improved features to their customers.”

    To learn more about Applitools Visual AI please visit: (https://applitools.com/applitools-ai-and-deep-learning/). Or, contact a testing expert at Applitools to learn more.

    About Applitools

    Applitools delivers a Next Generation Test Automation Platform through Visual AI and Ultrafast Grid. We enable engineering teams to release high quality web and mobile apps at incredible speed and at a reduced cost.

    Applitools Visual AI modernizes important test automation use cases — Functional Testing, Visual Testing, Web and Mobile UI/UX Testing, Cross Browser Testing, Responsive Web Design Testing, Cross Device Testing, PDF Testing, Accessibility Testing and Compliance Testing — to transform the way organizations deliver innovation at the speed of CI/CD at a significantly lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

    Hundreds of companies from verticals such as Tech, Banking, Insurance, Retail, Pharma, and Publishing — including 50 of the Fortune 100 — use Applitools to deliver the best possible digital experiences to millions of customers on any device and browser, and across every screen size and operating system.

    Applitools is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with an R&D center in Tel Aviv, Israel. For more information, please visit applitools.com.

     

  • LinearB and Clubhouse Partner to Help Dev Teams Continuously Improve Software Project Delivery

    LinearB Software Delivery Intelligence provides team-based performance metrics
    and project insights for Clubhouse customers

    LOS ANGELES AND NEW YORK, February 16, 2021 – LinearB, the team behind Software Delivery  Intelligence, and Clubhouse, the collaborative home for modern software teams, today announced a partnership to help software development teams continuously improve project delivery by providing a complete picture of product and engineering lifecycles. Technical integration between the products will offer dev teams detailed project visibility and team-based metrics by correlating data across projects, code, Git activity and releases.

    Sign up for LinearB and Clubhouse today at: (https://linearb.io/clubhouse-and-linearb/) 

    “Unfortunately, most project management and metrics tools today were designed with a top-down mindset and create more work for developers. Dev teams need tools that reduce friction and interruptions.” said Ori Keren, co-founder and CEO of LinearB. “Coupling LinearB Software Delivery Intelligence with Clubhouse team-focused project management provides data-driven insights to gauge project progress in real-time and better focus team resources on the work that matters most.”

    “We’re partnering with LinearB to help make work more enjoyable and efficient for each and every software team, regardless of their size,” said Zach Ozer, VP of Engineering at Clubhouse. “Task management shouldn’t be a task in and of itself. A more collaborative project management approach paired with visibility into the right dev team metrics helps streamline and refine existing team workflows.”

    LinearB uses code, Git logs and releases to automatically construct and visualize detailed progress timelines for open project issues with zero manual inputs and synchronizes updates to project systems eliminating costly developer interruptions. The platform automates the collection and display of team and project performance metrics that typically takes data engineers hours to compile manually.

    Clubhouse provides modern software teams with project management that enhances and complements their existing workflows. Managing a team’s tasks shouldn’t itself be a task, which is why Clubhouse avoids overwhelming their users with feature bloat, instead providing an intuitive and enjoyable project management experience that software teams genuinely enjoy using. That’s why thousands of software teams use Clubhouse to plan, manage, and collaborate on their software development work — from planning software to shipping software.

    Using LinearB and Clubhouse, members of product and engineering teams are empowered to make better decisions by getting insights delivered to them proactively. Features from the integration include:

    • Pulse timeline view provides detailed visibility of every feature, bug and chore by showing a live feed of activity from branches, PRs and releases for Clubhouse stories.
    • Workflow definition + alerts enable real-time improvement of active projects by highlighting blockers, delays, high-risk code, and branches merged without review for Clubhouse stories.
    • Shadow work detector empowers more accurate team planning and time allocation by finding developer work in Git that is not attached to a Clubhouse story.
    • Advanced cycle time dashboard enhances the native Clubhouse cycle time view to add bottleneck detection by visualizing the time across individual development phases – coding time, PR pick-up time, PR review time and release time.
    • Advanced team-based metrics help leaders measure performance and drive improvement of team and project quality, efficiency, focus and health in the context of their Clubhouse iterations.

    “Pulse gives us a unified view across the state of our codebase and the state of our projects in Clubhouse. It’s a key source of ground truth.” said Chris Brookins, VP of Engineering at Appcues. “It’s easy to see project updates and key metrics that were difficult or impossible to get before.”

    About Clubhouse

    Clubhouse is the collaborative home for modern software teams. Thousands of companies worldwide use Clubhouse to plan, collaborate and build better software together. The company is headquartered in New York City and backed by Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures and other top-tier investors. For more information, visit https://www.clubhouse.io or follow Clubhouse on Twitter @Clubhouse.

    About LinearB

    LinearB believes dev teams need new, data-driven approaches focused on team and project performance — not static project management metrics. To advance better ways of working and team performance, its Software Development Intelligence gives team leads useful data to ensure the right work is done faster. At the same time, developers have the freedom and autonomy to work how they want. For more information, visit www.linearb.io.

     

  • Rollbar Research Shows That Traditional Error Monitoring Is Missing the Mark

    Survey Also Reveals That Fixing Bugs and Errors is Developers’ Leading Pain Point

    SAN FRANCISCO – FEBRUARY 16, 2021 – New research from Rollbar, provider of real-time error monitoring Software as a Service, indicates that the overwhelming majority (88%) of developers feel that traditional error monitoring falls short of their expectations. The December survey of 1,000 developers also reveals that fixing bugs and errors in code is developers’ No. 1 pain point.

    “This research highlights the extreme challenges that developers – and their businesses – face when addressing software bugs and errors,” said Francesco Crippa, vice president of engineering at Rollbar. “Traditional error monitoring simply doesn’t cut it in a world in which software has become an important aspect of how everything in society works.”

    Gen Z developers were the age group most likely to complain about the old-school approach to error monitoring. Ninety-four percent of developers in the 18- to 24-year-old cohort admitted that traditional error monitoring doesn’t adequately meet all of their requirements.

    And they’re not alone. More than three-fourths (79%) of Boomer developers agreed. Propeller Insights, which executed the Rollbar study, defines Boomers as people who are 65 or older.

    The larger survey group said that traditional error monitoring is less than ideal because:

    • It requires them to manually respond to errors (39%)
    • It takes them too long to find all of the details they need to fix bugs and errors (36%)
    • It focuses on system stability and not enough on code health (31%)
    • It makes it difficult to detect errors (29%)
    • Its approach to error aggregation is either too broad or too narrow (23%)

    Manual Processes Make Fixing Bugs Time Consuming and Developer Work Unpleasant

    Software allows for innovation, industry disruption, digital transformation, and positive outcomes for businesses and society. But it can also leave developers stuck in the weeds.

    More than a third (38%) of developers said that they spend up to a quarter of their time fixing software bugs. Slightly more than a quarter (26%) said that they spend up to half their time fixing bugs. Eight percent of those surveyed said that they must dedicate up to three-fourths of their time to fixing bugs. Developers in the West tend to spend the most time fixing bugs. A tenth of the group in the Western U.S. said that up to 75% of their time involves such pursuits.

    This is a major struggle for developers, as reflected by this next survey statistic: 44% of developers said their biggest pain point is fixing software bugs and errors. Millennial and Gen Z developers indicated that they find such efforts particularly painful. Nearly half (48.3%) of Millennial developers said fixing bugs and errors is their biggest pain point. Nearly as many Gen Z respondents (45.8%) said that they consider this the most painful aspect of their work.

    In fact, nearly two-thirds of all developers said they would rather do an unpleasant activity than fix errors. More than a fourth (26%) said they would rather pay bills. More than a fifth (21%) said they would prefer going to the dentist. And 20% would rather spend time with their in-laws.

    Developers Are Spending Too Much Time Fixing Code and Not Enough Time Writing It

    Even more problematic is the fact that developers said that fixing code takes time away from more important work. Nearly a third (32%) of developers said they spend up to 10 hours a week fixing bugs instead of writing code. Sixteen percent said they spend up to 15 hours a week and 6% said they have to dedicate up to 20 hours a week fixing bugs instead of writing code.

    More than half of developers (55%) said that if they didn’t have to spend so much time fixing bugs, they would have the time to build new features and functionality. Forty-two percent of the total survey group said they would be to do their job if not for the time spent on fixing bugs.

    Manually Responding to Errors Creates Personal and Professional Problems for Developers

    The Rollbar survey suggests that having to manually respond to errors is taking a huge toll on developers’ job performance, morale and even their overall quality of life.

    More than a third of developers said if they didn’t have to spend so much time fixing code:

    • They would spend more time with their family (37%)
    • They would exercise more (33%)
    • They would get a full night’s sleep (31%)

    Nearly a third of the survey group (31%) said that manually responding to errors makes them feel frustrated. More than a fifth of developers (22%) said they feel overwhelmed when using manual processes to address errors in software. Nearly as many (17%) said it leads to burn out.

    Some developers experience even stronger reactions. More than a tenth (12%) said it elicits feelings of resentment and 7% said it makes them want to quit their jobs. The desire to quit due to such processes was more pronounced with developers in the West – 9% of this group said that manually responding to errors makes them want to find employment elsewhere.

    Business Suffers Too Because User Complaints and Software Errors Are Bad for the Brand

    Despite all the time and pains developers take to fix code, errors and bugs still go undetected. Unfortunately, users often find these problems before developers and their employers do.

    Nearly two-thirds of developers (62%) said they have found out about errors from users reporting through the app. Worse yet, software users may air their complaints in public forums. A quarter (25%) of developers said that they have heard about errors from users sharing these issues on social media. An even larger share of the older developers indicated they have had this experience. More than 70% of developers ages 45 to 64 and nearly 83% of developers older than 65 said that they have found out about errors by users complaining on social media.

    Other times, developers said, they learn about software bugs and errors from media reports or even straight from the top – via their company’s CEO. Seventeen percent of developers reported that media coverage clued them in about errors in their software. More than a fifth (21%) of the developers in the Rollbar survey said they have heard about errors from their CEO.

    Nearly nine in 10 developers (89%) agree that undetected errors can take a big toll on the business. More than a fourth (26%) of developers said that their employers have lost a significant number of users due to errors in software. The same share (26%) said software errors damage their company’s reputation and its ability to attract investments, and nearly a fifth (18%) said that undetected software problems anger their company’s existing investors.

    “Software is now at the heart of every business, so they and their investors understand the value of providing great user experiences,” said Brian Rue, CEO and co-founder of Rollbar. “But software is made of code, and code isn’t perfect. Bugs and errors are inevitable. But with continuous code improvement, the developers responsible for mission-critical applications can not only identify bugs, and their root cause, faster, they can automate the steps to remediate them. That way, they can spend less time monitoring, investigating and debugging code and more time innovating to deliver business outcomes. Our Continuous Code Improvement Platform has been a game changer for Rollbar customers, who are now releasing into production five to nine times more often than before, while lowering their error escape rate and catching any bugs that do escape before users even notice.”

    To get free access to Rollbar forever, click here.

    About Rollbar

    Rollbar is the leading continuous code improvement platform that proactively discovers, predicts, and remediates errors with real-time AI-assisted workflows. With Rollbar, developers continually improve their code and constantly innovate rather than spending time monitoring, investigating, and debugging. More than 5,000 businesses, including Twilio, Salesforce, Twitch, and Affirm, use Rollbar to deploy better software, faster while quickly recovering from critical errors as they happen. Learn more at Rollbar.com

     

  • ACE Selects Four Blockchain Innovation Challenge Winners to Expand Economic Opportunity to Underserved Learners

    Phase 1 winners in Arizona, Nebraska, Texas, and Utah will each receive $150,000 to apply emerging technology to empower social and economic mobility

    Washington—Feb. 11, 2021—The American Council on Education (ACE) today announced four winners for the first phase of the Blockchain Innovation Challenge, a $900,000 competition funded by the U.S. Department of Education to identify ways that blockchain technology can help disadvantaged learners gain more control over their educational records and more equitably access economic opportunity. The winners are collaborations involving K-12, higher education, technology providers, and public agencies that will pilot new applications of the nascent technology to facilitate more secure, streamlined sharing of learning records and create stronger connections between education and work.

    “The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the urgency of exploring new solutions that can better serve learners at every stage of their educational journey,” said Kara Freeman, senior vice president and chief operating officer of ACE and a member of the Education Blockchain Initiative Steering Committee. “These initiatives seek to reach underserved populations and improve economic mobility with a more just, equitable system by leveraging new technologies to improve information-sharing and expanding Access.”

    The Phase 1 winners of the Blockchain Innovation Challenge include:

    • Student1, in collaboration with the Nebraska Department of Education and Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, to create comprehensive learner records for the one-third of all Nebraska K-12 students who are involved with multiple state educational, judicial, or behavioral services. Other Nebraska state-level partners include Children and Family Services, Behavioral Health, Juvenile Court, Job Corp, and the Department of Correctional Services.

    • Texas Woman’s University, to establish a consortium of institutions in the North Texas region that use a shared credentialing platform to allow students to store and share their educational records with colleges and employers. Partners include the University of Texas-Arlington, Texas A&M University-Commerce, North Central Texas College, Carrolton-Farmers Branch Independent School District, and GreenLight.

    • The Lifelong Learner Project, Powered by Teachers, to develop a digital wallet in which teachers can store and access their credentials, certifications, and learning resources and securely share these verifiable credentials with entities such as state licensing systems, human resources departments, and learning management systems. The project is led by RANDA Solutions, in partnership with the Utah State Board of Education, ETS, Digital Promise, University Instructors, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Blockframe, Fluree, Evernym, Velocity Network Foundation, IDRamp, PhilosBDL, UPD Consulting, IATC, Credential Engine, and IMS Global.

    • UnBlockEd, led by the University of Arizona along with Georgia Institute of Technology, Fluree, and the Gardner Institute, will create an open transfer exchange that will empower college students by streamlining transfer credit recognition, leading to more efficient and equitable transfer articulation processes.

    The Blockchain Innovation Challenge is part of the Education Blockchain Initiative, which launched in 2020 with funding from the U.S. Department of Education to explore the potential of distributed ledger technology to equitably empower learners to translate their educational outcomes into economic opportunity. ACE is partnering with the Presidents Forum, which managed the application review and selection process, to provide technical assistance to the winners. Independent reviewers and the Education Blockchain Initiative Steering Committee evaluated the proposals using a rigorous, three-round review process that emphasized three main criteria: quality of design, technological approach, and sustainability.

    “Now more than ever, our nation must be willing to explore and implement new innovations that help underserved learners more seamlessly transition between education and employment,” said Paul LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire University, chair of the ACE Board of Directors, and member of the President’s Forum. “These projects demonstrate the potential of blockchain as a new and promising tool to do just that: empower learners to share their skills and pursue opportunities for economic mobility, while also forging tighter connections between education providers and the world of work.”

    Phase 1 winners each received $150,000 to establish a minimum viable project this spring that demonstrates the potential to implement their solution. Those selected to continue to Phase 2 will share an additional $300,000 to fully implement their pilot Projects.

    For more information on the Blockchain Innovation Challenge and the Education Blockchain Initiative, please visit https://www.acenet.edu/Research-Insights/Pages/Education-Blockchain-Initiative.aspx.

    About ACE

    ACE is a membership organization that mobilizes the higher education community to shape effective public policy and foster innovative, high-quality practice. As the major coordinating body for the nation’s colleges and universities, our strength lies in our diverse membership of more than 1,700 colleges and universities, related associations, and other organizations in America and abroad. ACE is the only major higher education association to represent all types of U.S. accredited, degree-granting institutions: two-year and four-year, public and private. For more information, please visit www.acenet.edu or follow ACE on Twitter @ACEducation

  • Keysight Technologies Enhances Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence Platform with High-Speed Computer Vision

    Real-time testing of iOS applications emulating human behavior improves the quality of the digital experience

     

    SANTA ROSA, Calif., February 11, 2021 – Keysight Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: KEYS), a leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world, announced the latest release of the Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence (DAI) platform that enables organizations to automate the testing of high-speed applications which optimizes the delivery and quality of digital products.

    In a digital world, users demand a flawless experience from software and applications. Keysight’s enhanced DAI platform enables enterprises to automate and test high-speed iOS applications through a new real-time Computer Vision service. The Eggplant DAI platform recognizes visual information and responds to changes with millisecond accuracy, simulating and testing the actual experience. This dramatically improves the performance of applications that require an immediate reaction, including gaming, autonomous vehicles, financial trading platforms and medical systems.

    Eggplant DAI is the first artificial intelligence (AI) -driven automation solution to integrate computer vision to test and evaluate high-speed iOS applications. This capability will be rolled out to additional operating systems in the future.

    New enhancements to the Eggplant DAI platform include:

    • Enhanced self-healing test assets: Uses AI to automatically add new image variants as the underlying application under test evolves, further reducing the cost of asset maintenance.
    • Interactive Insights from Real Users: Provides access to data insights spanning; bounces, conversions, demographics, duration, load time, page impressions, revenue and session analytics. The new reports includes enhanced visualization and filtering capabilities.

    “Delivering digital experiences that delight now determines business success,” stated Gareth Smith, Eggplant General Manager. “Organizations finally have a way to meet the needs of the most sophisticated users who will not tolerate even the slightest glitch or performance issue. These enhancements demonstrate our proven ability to automate every aspect of the testing lifecycle intelligently.”

     

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