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How Mobile Testing Converts to Greater Earnings

From a business’ sales strategy to the type of coffee it decides to stock in the company lounge, every decision boils down to this: How will it impact this year’s earnings? That’s what makes testing critical for any business with a mobile app: Having a poor-performing app is just like throwing money away.

There are three primary ways mobile testing translates into more cash for the company: corporate image, performance and speed to market. Read on for the details.

Testing and Corporate Image

Treat your mobile application like the face of your brand.

The majority of time people spend on anything digital is over a mobile application. Users spend more time on their smartphones than they do on their desktop and even television. From a business perspective that means any customer, both real and potential, will experience your brand over a mobile app more than on your TV commercials, physical billboards and even website.

They will see you over their phone more than in your store.

Mobile testing makes sure that the lights are on in your business, and that the air conditioner is working. We take for granted that when we enter a place of business everything is working properly. If something is off, we immediately recognize it. The same holds for a mobile application. If a function is not working right or is performing slowly, it will impact the user’s decision whether or not to become a customer.

If it is working perfectly, the larger audience that mobility commands will generate a larger customer interest in your brand.

Testing and Application Performance

The faster the app, the happier the customers.

The instinct for testing applications is to make sure the code itself is working. This is the basis of functional testing. In the age of desktop apps that work directly over the computer’s operating system, or even web apps that work over a local connection, the speed at which your application moved was usually assured.

Mobility has changed the rules. A mobile app working on a portable device can operate over any of the 400 mobile networks worldwide. It can have to brave poor network conditions, being confined to an elevator, or even riding through a tunnel. All of these different environments affect the speed at which your functions execute, which is no longer static.

If a function moves to slowly, the app will be considered broken. In fact, 90 percent of the mobile applications on a phone right now won’t be there in a year’s time. This is the need for performance, namely network virtualization testing: It makes sure your application provides potential customers with a smooth experience.

A smooth experience is the best way to guarantee return business, and retaining a customer is 5 times more cost-effective than acquiring a new one.

Testing and Speed to Market

Time is more important than money—with the right tools.

There are 20,000 mobile devices out there, running on four different type of mobile operating systems, all with their own set of versions both new and old. Every day there are devices and operating systems enhancing their capabilities with expanded capacity and new features. This demands that your mobile application adapt by including new features and capacities that capitalize on what the platforms are now offering.

The key to DevOps is to develop, test, and release the most cutting-edge version of your mobile application as quickly as possible without sacrificing quality in speed or execution.

Even if it is for only a short time, offering features your competitors are not ready to release is like having monopoly on a part of your market: You stand alone. Those customers looking for the best app will have only you to go to.

Mobile testing is the most arduous step in the DevOps process. A quality test automation tool that includes both performance and functional testing, connecting to a mobile lab enabled by a mobile cloud-testing tool, will accelerate your mobile testing while shortening the release time for your latest app incarnation.

Conclusion

In the age of mobile, everything that impacts your mobile application impacts your bottom line. Mobile testing reduces expenses, retains customers and enables your development team to design and release an application that can add solid growth to your company’s coffers.

April 25, 2016
A New Sales Paradigm

— ROELBOB

April 25, 2016
Murphy’s DevOps: The Internet Apocalypse

I’ve been immersed in cybersecurity for a good stretch, since it was known as just “infosec” and “security.” Over time, I’ve had opportunities to work with some brilliant minds and young-gun “hackers” (I’m not a name dropper, so I’ll refrain from using them as SEO-bait). I’ve watched attackers transition from being basement-dwelling teenagers to organized intruders to APTs. At one point or another, I’ve met all of Five Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse: Scam, Extortion, Embarrassment, Theft and Death.

The biggest cybersecurity news story of all time is still Edward Snowden. Fancying himself a “whistleblower,” champion of the Constitution and privacy rights expert, this fugitive data thief accused of espionage by the United States government has done more to force businesses and individuals to think about digital security and privacy than anyone or incident before him.

Snowden aside, there are thousands of other stories about just how fragile our online lives and businesses are. If you were at the DevOps.com Rugged DevOps event at RSA 2015 and caught the presentation by Wired cybersecurity and privacy writer Kim Zetter, “2015 — The Year in Hacks,” then you had a chance to get a great overview of some of 2015’s biggest digital crimes. You might have even noticed the Internet Apocalypse Horsemen riding through.

With an ear to the ground on everything the NSA and APT-using hackers are guilty of, @KimZetter never fails to intrigue readers and live audiences. Whenever you read her stories or listen to her speak, you always walk away reassured that when all the smoke and headlines have cleared, the great deep-down reality is that everything we digitize is subject to the whim of Scam, Extortion, Embarrassment, Theft and Death. If you didn’t have a chance to attend, please enjoy some of the highlights listed below.

China vs. U.S., Spy vs. Spy

She kicked off with the biggest hack of 2015: the one that penetrated the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The full extent of the damage done and who the actual attackers were may never be fully realized. Were they Chinese spies, rogue hackers or a combination of both? What we do know is that it exposed millions of identities tied to covert U.S. operatives and their family members listed on security clearance forms. It may have even exposed personal information on everyone who has ever applied for a job with the federal government. One for-sure lesson is that even after several decades of security product development (with more than 800 available for review at RSA), the world is still in need of innovation in the space.

Men Behaving Badly …

Some might argue that Embarrassment made a special appearance at Ashley Madison, but the fact that suicide was part of that hack leaves me to think that Death was the lead actor there. @KimZetter pegged the data theft as the most brazen hack of 2015. With 30+GB of account information stolen and dumped, login credentials for 32 million accounts purloined, credit card transaction information accessed and even several suicides tied to the incident, the hack again reminded the world that the great deep-down reality is that everything we digitize can be used by attackers to scam, extort, embarrass, steal and even kill us.

From the Keyboards of Babes …

Anyone at the presentation must agree that Embarrassment really stole the show in the hack of CIA Director John Brennan’s AOL email account. Allegedly perpetrated by a teenager, Zetter describes the incident more deeply in her October story: Teen Who Hacked CIA Director’s Email Tells How He Did It

Keep Calm and Internet On

Anyone reading this may be walking away with a rather pessimistic view of our chances of remaining secure online. The truth, however, is that the existence of determined hackers should do no more to stop individuals or businesses from going online than road rage should to prevent anyone from getting behind the wheel of a car.

If any lesson can be learned from news articles pumped out by @KimZetter and her peers, it’s that the world should continue to take full advantage of the Internet but to also take the time needed to apply effective security. Quite simply, we all should keep calm and Internet on …

April 22, 2016
Infrastructure as Code is SDN for Ops

As we continue to recognize the importance of DevOps—particularly its automation and orchestration aspects—to achieve the agility necessary for continuous deployment of apps, the question of how the term “Infrastructure as Code” (IaC) applies to traditionally network-bound systems and services is bound to crop up more frequently. After all, in addition to core IP-based networking characteristics required for an app to communicate and serve up content, an entire ecosystem of app services that support, secure and scale it must be considered.

IaC is driven by the application of development principles to network infrastructure. Configuration, scripts, templates, profiles and the like are treated as code, in that they should be reviewed, versioned and provisioned from a centralized repository (one hopes on-premises) rather than managed as discrete network elements.

In a recent article in TechBeacon, Boyd Hemphill, director of evangelism at StackEngine, noted, “The basic principle is that operators (admins, system engineers, etc.) should not log in to a new machine and configure it from documentation.”

Christopher Null, CEO of Null Media and author of the article, then wrote, ” … But IaC is a concept that extends beyond simple infrastructure automation. IaC requires applying DevOps practices to automation scripts to ensure they’re free of errors, are able to be redeployed on multiple servers, can be rolled back in case of problems, and can be engaged by both operations and development teams.”

The idea is that you can describe any given service as a set of artifacts and deploy (and redeploy) them at will. So rather than set up a system and configure it directly, its configuration any associated artifacts (such as profiles or templates) are treated as code and stored in a common repository. A controller—the orchestrator—is responsible for distributing those artifacts when necessary. The controller uses an API (or protocol such as OpenFlow) to manage the configuration of services across a distributed infrastructure. It’s decoupling the service definition from the service and its platform.

Read that again. It decouples the service definition from the service and its platform and assigns responsibility for provisioning and configuration to a controller. Kind of like decoupling the control plane from the actual forwarding and switching actions (the data plane) and assigning operational responsibility to an external controller.

At its simplest, treating infrastructure as code is separating configuration from the platform and enabling a software-driven or software-defined approach to provisioning, configuring and managing infrastructure. It’s applying the principles of software-defined networking (SDN) to operations, rather than to devices and systems.

But as Null makes clear in his article, IaC goes beyond just automation and orchestration, adopting the best practices of development with respect to code reviews, versioning and management of that “code” to ensure consistent, predictable and repeatable deployments.

It’s all driven by software, ultimately, and deployed by software, and defined by software but always under the auspices of the operational experts: the engineers and architects.

Treating infrastructure as code is basically applying the architectural principles of SDN to operations itself. It’s SDN for ops.

April 22, 2016
‘Admins’: The Movie

In the IT industry, where we are exposed to various levels of incompetence, it is quite tempting to become a little cynical. A few years ago we hit rock bottom. Our patience—not to mention our sanity—lay in the balance. Like many of you, we sought refuge in laughter. We found comfort and comic relief through Kevin Smith’s vulgar yet oddly accurate low-budget movie “Clerks.”

Now, it’s time to pay it forward. As longtime fans of Kevin Smith, we wanted to honor his work by creating an IT spin of a very similar story. That is the genesis of “Admins.” It’s a day in the life of a disenchanted government contractor surrounded by incompetence, idiots and debauchery.

The story centers around Dan, a system admin working for a government contractor, who is forced to come into the office on his day off. His day gets progressively tougher as he discovers mounting technical issues and the reality that his position may be in jeopardy due to cutbacks. Fearing unemployment, Dan sidesteps additional contract work and pursues the holy grail of guaranteed lifetime employment (a.k.a. “a government job”). The allure of job security leads Dan to the crossroads of an ethical dilemma where he and his co-worker, Randy, engage in morally questionable and professionally reprehensible activities.

About the Authors

AARON GOODMILLER – Director | Producer

With a lifelong passion for movies, Aaron got into film making in 2001 when digital video had just started to take off and it became something he could afford to do. Having written and directed three shorts and been a producer on 11, he worked with Eric Espejo on producing their first full length feature together “Ghosts Don’t Exist.” Their current film, “Admins,” is something they have talked about doing for several years. After this they have several other projects is various stages of production.

ERIC ESPEJO – Writer | Producer

Eric has been involved in film since 2002. After writing and directing eight short films, he wrote and directed his first full-length feature, “Ghosts Don’t Exist,” in 2009. He continues to oversee a number of creative projects all while writing screenplays and serving on the George Mason University advisory board for its Film and Video Studies. Eric started delving into indie film by attending the Hollywood Film Institute, where under the tutelage of Dov Simens, he acquired the valuable knowledge of the artistic and business sides of filmmaking. An avid and talented screenwriter, he is currently writing his next movie.

April 22, 2016
Fitting a Square Peg in a Round Hole

— ROELBOB

April 22, 2016
Sysdig raises $15 million in Series B funding to expand container monitoring for enterprises
The containernative monitoring company surpasses 100 enterprise customers

San Francisco, CA DATE Sysdig, the containernative monitoring company today announced a $15 million Series B funding round by existing investors Accel and Bain Capital Ventures. Sysdig will use the funds to accelerate growth, to continue building out its core technology for container and microservice environments, and to scale its operations and worldclass support infrastructure to meet growing demand.

“Containers are the building block for microservices, and represent the next great platform shift for software developers in enterprises of all sizes,” said Loris Degioanni, CEO and founder of Sysdig. “While containers deliver efficiency and agility for developers, they introduce additional complexity for monitoring, troubleshooting, and operating production environments. Sysdig was born to address these specific needs for containers and the microservices built on top of them.”

According to a recent survey, 81 percent of respondents expect their companies to increase the investment in containerbased technology. Respondents ranged from industry verticals including retail, banking/finance, manufacturing, and Internet infrastructure.

Accel Partners and Bain Capital Ventures coled this round of funding. “Containers will address the majority of use cases that heavier virtual machines do today, plus more that virtual machines cannot,” said Salil Deshpande, Managing Director at Bain Capital Ventures, who joins the board of Sysdig. “What’s needed now is software that natively understands containers, applications running within them, and services built on top of them. Sysdig has all of these capabilities and more.”

Sysdig Cloud is based on sysdig, the open source troubleshooting tool that has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of developers, devops, and sysadmins around the world. Its patent‐pending ContainerVisionTM technology provides deep, request‐level visibility inside containers without invasive instrumentation. This approach succeeds for container monitoring where legacy monitoring fails, and at the same time makes monitoring applications and microservices simpler and more robust.
Company sails past 100 enterprise customers

“The service and support I’ve received from the Sysdig team was really impressive. I encourage anyone looking to run containers in a production environment to talk to them first.”
Branden Makana, Senior Software Engineer, CDK Global

“From exploration down to deep system captures, Sysdig has a complete approach to monitoring containerized environments.”
Zachary Smith, CEO of Packet

In less than 8 months since general availability, Sysdig has passed 100 enterprise customers. More than a third of those have signed up in this year alone. These customers represent a broad range of industries and company sizes. For example:

● Industries such as finance, healthcare, media, telecommunications, technology, and consulting are using Sysdig Cloud

● Multiple Fortune 500 companies

● Companies from North America, Europe, and AsiaPacific are adopting thesolutionCustomers are adopting Sysdig cloud for the ability to monitor production environments that require deep visibility into not only containers but also the microservices built on top of them. Chris Crane, VP of Product at Sysdig noted, “Our strategy combines containernative monitoring with native integration across ecosystem players like Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesosphere, as well as cloud providers like AWS and Google. These native integrations customers serviceoriented visibility, and the flexibility to choose the right mix of tools for their environment.”
About Sysdig

Sysdig (Twitter: @sysdig), the containernative visibility company, is creating a new generation of performance management solutions to deliver monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting in a microservicesfriendly architecture. The company’s open source sysdig technology has attracted a community of hundreds of thousands of developers, administrators and other IT professionals looking for deep visibility into systems and containers. Sysdig Cloud is the first and only comprehensive, containernative monitoring solution for applications and infrastructures.
April 21, 2016
What to Expect: DevOps Enterprise Summit London
After the success of the first two years of the U.S. DevOps Enterprise Summit, people have been asking us to host a similar conference in other locations, specifically in Europe. This summer, we’re hosting our first DevOps Enterprise Summit in London!

This conference is for technology leaders who are driving transformations in large, complex organizations. These are successful enterprises that have been around for decades (and, in some cases, for centuries!), with thousands (or tens of thousands) of employees, and billions of dollars in annual revenue. These are organizations with massive and complex daily operations, and all the resulting processes and bureaucracies that come with it. In many ways, these complex operations and bureaucracies are the very things that create the worst-case conditions for DevOps transformations!

We’ve heard amazing case studies from Barclays Capital, GE Capital, Disney, Marks & Spencer, Bank of America, Capital One, Telstra and many more, where leaders have created amazing DevOps outcomes that are more typically associated with organizations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and so forth.

For this inaugural year of DevOps Enterprise Summit London, we’ll be bringing some of our “greatest hits” from the United States, but the rest of the programming will feature DevOps transformations in organizations residing in the U.K. and continental Europe. (And we’re still holding the DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco, so feel free to join us there as well!)

New World and Old World DevOps

The speakers at DevOps Enterprise are pioneering the practices of how large, complex organizations transform and deliver software. It’s my belief that these principles are universal, regardless of what continent or country the organization resides in.

One of the biggest surprises from co-authoring “The Phoenix Project” has been how many people have told me that the book describes their organization, seemingly independent of company size, industry vertical, for-profit or nonprofit or the continent they’re writing from. This validates that the problems that result when Dev and Ops can’t get along are universal.

The good news is that the DevOps solutions we deploy to fix the problems also have lots of commonalities!

It’s always inspiring to hear how these leaders have overcome the challenges they faced. I see our speakers as genuine heroes who have put themselves in personal jeopardy, often risking their careers and livelihoods, to achieve something they believe is genuinely important. They possessed the clarity and conviction that the capabilities they were creating for their organizations were needed to win in the marketplace—or maybe even just to survive.

I think one of the interesting statistics is that more than 25 percent of DevOps Enterprise speakers have been promoted in the last two years—some more than once! It’s a fantastic testament that the organization values the contributions they have made, and their risk-taking and heroism paid off.

The DevOps Movement Matures

Every year at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, I have asked all speakers to share what problems they didn’t know how to fix or the problems that they were looking for help on. What I’ve found is that the answers have evolved. From year to year, we are seeing trends on the obstacles facing the DevOps Enterprise community.

In 2014, attendees’ stated problems were about needing better strategies and tactics for creating automated tests for legacy applications, as well as the culture and leadership aspects during transformation, information security and compliance practices and identifying metrics to best improve performance with DevOps initiatives.

In 2015, the problems were focused on people and organizational design. Examples included the need for effective strategies and methods for leading change in large organizations. Speakers and attendees also wanted to know what the organization charts looked like for organizations successfully adopting DevOps. What were the respective roles and responsibilities, and how had they changed from more traditional IT organizations?

Now, as we approach DevOps Enterprise Summit 2016, we are seeking to address the next phase of challenges facing the community: What are the modern architectural and technical practices that every technology leader needs to know about? What are the technology practices for managing infrastructure, environments and automated testing? And what are the transition patterns to get there?

From the HR perspective, how do you go about reskilling the workforce and employing these new design patterns? Lastly, we are seeing compliance and security discussed more often, including: What are concrete ways for DevOps to bridge the information security and compliance gap to show auditors and regulators that effective controls exist to prevent, detect and correct problems?

The programming committee always invites a handful of speakers to return from year to year. While to some this might appear redundant, it’s actually quite fascinating to witness their journeys unfold. It’s like an episode of, “Where Are They Now,” and the speakers never cease to amaze!

Solving Problems Together

As a vendor-neutral conference, DevOps Enterprise Summit curates stories that are from the enterprise point-of-view. Most of the presentations follow a very specific “experience report” structure—speakers describe their organization and their industry, the business problem they faced, where they started their transformation, what they did and the business outcomes. It’s a simple format but very powerful because it helps other people facing the same problems learn how other people solved the problem, and it often reveals practices that can be used in other contexts.

I’m so excited to share some of the initial speakers we have slated for DOES London:
- Chris Jackson, Director of Cloud Product Engineering at Pearson
- Robin Hughes, Head of Development Services at LV=
- Justin Dean, SVP, Platform and Technical Operations at Ticketmaster
- Jeremy Waite, Chief Digital Strategist at Salesforce
- Gareth Rushgrove, Senior Software Engineer at Puppet Labs, Inc; ex-UK GDS
- Antony Collard, Deputy Director at HMRC
- Finbarr Joy, Group CTO at Lebara
- Amy Philipps, Head of Test at Songkick
- Jason Cox, Director, Systems Engineering at The Walt Disney Company
- Rosalind Radcliffe, Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect for DevOps for Enterprise System at IBM
What also amazes me about DevOps Enterprise is the concentration of talent in the technology leaders who attend—they’re all people who are passionate about technology and helping teams win, and willing to do disruptive things to get there.

Ross Clanton from Target (a large U.S. retailer) told me he valued being surrounded by people who were not only trying to solve the same problems that he was facing, but were the best in the game—and there’s a huge intrinsic value of being surrounded by those kind of people. I can definitely relate; I learn something in every one of my interactions at the conference, and I have no doubt that the practices this group is pioneering will be commonplace within a generation.

Like in any aspect of life, peers are important. As Buzz Aldrin said, “Show me your friends, and I will show you your future.”

DOES is a unique opportunity to meet some very talented and inspirational new friends who can help shape your career path. We hope you’ll join us in London.

DevOps Enterprise Summit London

June 30 & July 1, 2016

Hilton London Metropole

225 Edgware Road, London, UK

@DOESsummitEU

Early Bird £600 +VAT (ends May 2)

DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco

November 7–9, 2016

Hilton San Francisco Union Square

333 O’Farrell Street, San Francisco, CA

@DOESsummit

Early Bird $1,450 (ends May 16)
Check out videos from previous DevOps Enterprise Summits on YouTube.
April 21, 2016
How a CEO Allocates Time

— ROELBOB

April 21, 2016
Cohesion Critical in a Successful DevOps Team

In the push to adopt DevOps among enterprise IT organizations, cohesion has been one of the biggest challenges in collaborating effectively. Historically, departments within a business existed in disparate locations, or silos. Marketing, IT and operations all had their own teams and their own communication channels, which made it difficult for members of separate teams to work successfully with one another despite the fact that they were working toward a common goal.

However, with the continuing adoption of DevOps, IT admins are finding that projects are easier and more well-executed when all the parts of the development cycle—creation, coding, testing and deployment—are working in tandem. Therefore, it’s becoming ever more critical that agile product teams are on the same page when it comes to their DevOps projects.

Cohesion Matters

Why is it so important to have a development team that coheres as one entity and communicates effectively among all its members? Let’s take a look:

Quicker feedback cycles

When team members are working as one unit instead of disparate entities, testing and development cycles don’t have to be long, drawn-out affairs. One of the biggest benefits of DevOps itself is the ability to shorten time to market and deploy code more quickly, with fewer errors—so enabling teams to communicate can only enhance that benefit.

According to DevOps.com contributor John Balena, facilitated collaboration allows teams to achieve continuous testing goals and streamline processes. This can lead to a continuous delivery cycle, which is the goal of DevOps in the first place.

“DevOps can best be realized when IT operates in a social, collaborative environment that ensures all groups are working with a visual model in their context with the necessary information from downstream and upstream teams, as well as in collaborating with relevant experts at the moment when clarifications are needed or issues arise,” Balena wrote.

Shared responsibility

With a collaborative DevOps culture, no one person or group of people is responsible for the entire project. It is a team effort that doesn’t rest on anyone’s shoulders unnecessarily. This makes the project more of a shared endeavor, which everyone is invested in and cares about. With silos, when something goes wrong, members of different teams may try to lay blame on one another, which lowers morale and may defeat the entire purpose of DevOps. But when teams are communicating effectively, they can share blame—but they also share success.

This mindset enhances the teamwork aspect of software development and can help get rid of the culture of fear, according to DevOps.com contributor Claire Agutter. When teams work together within a blameless culture, they can more quickly see and learn from their mistakes.

Common goal

Throughout all of the steps of the software development life cycle, another important advantage of teams working together is that they share a common vision of how the company should progress. Business needs and customer satisfaction are both critical factors in the DevOps cycle, and team members should all be on the same page when it comes to these goals.

In all, it’s critical for IT managers to support a culture of collaboration and communication if their DevOps endeavors are going to succeed. You need the right tools for the job, but you also need to have the right attitude.

“Culture is like quality,” DZone contributor Jim Bird wrote. “You don’t build culture, or quality by talking about it. You build it by doing things, by acting, by making things happen and making things change, and reinforcing these actions patiently and continually over time.”

A collaborative DevOps culture can improve project success.

About the Author/Sanjay Zalavadia

As the VP of Client Service for Zephyr, Sanjay brings more than 15 years of leadership experience in IT and Technical Support Services. Throughout his career, Sanjay has successfully established and grown premier IT and Support Services teams across multiple geographies for both large and small companies. Most recently, he was Associate Vice President at Patni Computers (NYSE: PTI) responsible for the Telecoms IT Managed Services Practice where he established IT Operations teams supporting Virgin Mobile, ESPN Mobile, Disney Mobile and Carphone Warehouse. Prior to this Sanjay was responsible for Global Technical Support at Bay Networks, a leading routing and switching vendor, which was acquired by Nortel. Sanjay has also held management positions in Support Service organizations at start-up Silicon Valley Networks, a vendor of Test Management software, and SynOptics.

Connect with Sanjay:

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjayzalavadia

Twitter: https://twitter.com/yourzephyr

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April 20, 2016