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Tag: CD

DevOps in Legacy Systems: A Mission Impossible?

The word “legacy” evokes mixed reactions from the IT and business crowds alike. For those who depend on legacy systems such as the zSeries and iSeries platforms, it is a way to deliver stable and reliable applications into production. Business stakeholders who may not know the intricacies of the technology often take a view of, “Why fix it when it ain’t broken?”

On the other hand, for those who haven’t experienced the joys and pains of legacy systems , legacy world will continue to defy their logic and assumptions because their view of the world is shaped by the open system world which has completely different characteristics: being more malleable to change and easy to maintain etc. Hence there is this great divide between the legacy and new worlds. Add Agile and DevOps to the equation with the lofty goals of increased release frequency and reduced lead times, we end up with a divide that is too far to bridge.

The likes of Gartner have come up with constructs such as two-speed delivery to help deal with this legacy challenge. In my view, there is a problem with the idea of dual-speed because it is based on a wrong analogy to start with — that of allowing vehicles to move at different speeds depending on whether you are on the motorway or a city road. That analogy works well for traffic management scenarios but not for complex IT architectures we see in the enterprise. The dependencies across the systems in the enterprise landscape are just too intricate and too tightly coupled to be defined using such a binary logic. In my experience, I find that many Agile and DevOps transformations hit the roadblock and never achieve the desired levels of productivity and effectiveness because of an oversimplified view of these complex dependencies across legacy and open systems.

The three biggest challenges that prevent a legacy DevOps transformation are mindset problems, architectural constraints and tooling limitations.

The Mindset Problem

“There are no legacy systems, just legacy thinking.” That’s a great quote I heard recently from an engineer in a large organization trying to adopt DevOps at enterprise scale. The initial resistance from teams to move into DevOps ways is due to reluctance to change, emerging from an inertia of doing things a certain way for years if not decades. The mindset problem is as much a problem for those outside the legacy world as those inside. The “outsiders”—typically leadership, management team and consultants—tend to oversimplify the problem and, too often, rely on examples from the open systems world. This just alienates the incumbent legacy teams and makes them even more skeptical of DevOps driven change. The outsiders need to have a genuine appreciation of the challenges with legacy architecture and need to work in collaboration with the legacy teams if they really want to transform their organization.

Architectural Constraints

Legacy systems have certain characteristics such as being static, tightly coupled and monolithic blocks of procedural code. These systems were not built for the modern Agile workflows that focus on incremental and iterative deliveries. A significant majority of these systems are written to operate in batch mode.Testing the systems requires cycling through multiple business days, which simply limits the level of agility you want to introduce in the organization. I am currently working with a legacy engineering team in the financial services space where you have to cycle through a minimum of 20 business days to simulate even 70 percent of the test scenarios. However, there are a number of solution options to overcome the architectural challenges; they range from killing applications to migrating to modern platforms or re-engineering legacy code. Not surprisingly, the right approach depends very much on your context.

Tooling

Tooling in the legacy world to support a DevOps ways of delivery has always been a challenge. But it is fast changing now, thanks to a number of startups and even old-school IT product companies investing in this space. If you consider zSeries as an example, there are better IDEs (integrated development environments) such as RDz that can replace traditional code editors typically based on “green screens.” These IDEs provide great features such as better navigation, debugging, split views and searches on the legacy code. One of the CIOs I worked with made it clear to his team that he wanted to get rid of “green” screens from the IT floor. There are tools such as SmartBear Collaborator that support a great peer review experience and help bring one of the original XP practice of pair programming to the legacy world. There are tools such as endeavor from CA that promise automated build and deployments in the z-series world. Similarly, there are tools that support test automation of mainframe applications and tools for code coverage and code quality checks on legacy programming languages like COBOL. XATester looks like a promising tool for unit test automation from a Danish startup called Xact.

While this write-up is not intended to be a compendium of all DevOps and engineering tools, the central message is that there are a number of DevOps tools emerging on the legacy landscape which can help your legacy delivery teams get on to the DevOps and Agile journey.

What is more important is for organizations to realize that many of these legacy systems will remain part of their IT landscape for the next foreseeable future and it is time to invest in these core systems. They may not look as appealing as the digital platforms, but they are fundamental for businesses and you cannot ignore them on your DevOps journey. DevOps in the legacy world is not going to be smooth, but it is certainly not a mission impossible!

— Aditya Vadaganadam

March 17, 2017
The Tester: Saving Your Soul in a DevOps World

Software testers have seen their careers go through some ups and downs in recent years. In the days of Waterfall, the tester’s job was clearly defined. Like other functions of software development and delivery, testers lived in a neat and tidy universe, testing features and design, finding bugs, sending back feedback to developers for correction and eventually, passing off code to the production people to work their magic. Testers had discrete roles with strong value propositions in the software organization.

Then, Agile came along and new teams were created, lumping together developers, QA and Ops people for the sake of better collaboration and efficiencies. This began to create some confusion regarding who was responsible for what, when.

DevOps brought order to the process, adding automation to every step, speeding cycles and reducing bottlenecks in a highly standardized, streamlined approach. In the continuous delivery pipeline, each step of the process creates its own contract for software quality—and that’s good.

Development teams still value high quality, which customers demand. Yet in some DevOps circles, there’s been talk that testers aren’t needed much anymore. They bring bottlenecks to the process, forcing developers to work outside of the DevOps toolsets for code management and testing to respond to a defect ticket posted by the tester in an issue tracking tool.

Eliminating that layer of process helps developers be as efficient as possible using continuous integration (CI) tools, proponents say. As well, some developers are more than comfortable handling testing, using test-driven development (TDD) methodologies.

On the other hand, there’s faulty thinking here. Testers, whether deploying manual or automated testing methods, provide a valuable second set of technical eyes. Testers have a solid take on the user experience perspective, not just the fact that the code executes correctly.

This human behavior and design insight is critical to the ultimate success of a software application. Finally, not all developers want to spend time testing nor have the skills to do so outside of unit testing.

Moving forward into this new age of DevOps, testers play a vital role. The distribution of the tester into each phase of development (rather than at the end) is necessary to maintain both high standards of delivery and to keep communications fluid between different parties.

Here’s how testers can contribute to DevOps teams:

Testers need to be included in the continuous integration process

Developers might be automating their unit test coverage, but they don’t replace all the test activities a tester can bring to the table. There are still other types of functional and non-functional test activities that must occur to validate the health of the product. Instead of transferring more testing responsibilities to the already overworked developer, testers can integrate their processes and systems with those of developers.

Although there are version control tools (GitHub) and feature tracking systems (JIRA) to help developers, testers are often disconnected from these central tools. To connect with developer tools, testers can start creating and versioning their test cases within those development platforms. By doing so, testers can radiate feedback to the development team on issues to fix quickly through source code check-ins and in a way that won’t disrupt the normal flow of work.

If testers can learn to use the DevOps tools developers love, much of the conflict goes away.

Testers should increase their adoption of test automation, no matter their skill level

Testers can learn newer test automation driven frameworks, especially those that help with transitioning manual test cases into automated scripts that can be reused, such as Cucumber or Gauge.

For example, Gauge allows testers to write test specifications in Markdown, which provides a simple transition to automate your favorite programming language. These newer tools help testers transition to test automation despite not having experience writing tests this way—a common issue for testers working in DevOps.

A growing number of test case management providers are starting to integrate their test design and execution around these automation frameworks to make the manual to automation transition smoother.

Although developers might have automated unit test coverage, they struggle with developing functional and user acceptance automated tests. Testers can provide value by suggesting to the development team which are the best areas for test automation based on common issues and their unique knowledge of the application.

They also can recommend areas for exploratory or manual test execution, depending on application complexity. This is especially helpful when teams starting down the path of DevOps do not have a regression test suite built that can be triggered through CI.

Testers should focus on quality over finding defects

Developers often complain that when testers find defects, it slows down their development processes. On a fast-moving Agile or DevOps team, filing bugs in a defect or issue tracking system is a total waste of time and creates unnecessary clutter. Developers want instant feedback on code that’s broken and the related feature, rather than seeing another defect ticket they must open and close upon fixing.

Therefore, testers should be giving feedback directly to the features that are being developed within a branch of code. They can do this through adopting tools that facilitate “ChatOps,” such as HipChat and Slack, which can integrate with version control systems. Testers can also provide direct feedback through a commenting system on the feature itself.

With the advent of Agile and DevOps, which emphasize speed and frequent releases, testing is more important than ever in software development. By making some slight modifications to how they work and the tools they use, experienced testers can add considerable value to these teams by providing another layer of quality checks and a holistic view of an application’s performance and usability.

About the Author / Ryan Yackel

Ryan Yackel is Director of Product Marketing at QASymphony. He is responsible for all marketing activities around product releases, including development of strategic messaging. Ryan also helps to train the Sales teams on key value propositions for new products and features, and he provides customer feedback to the product team for roadmap initiatives. He can be found online at Twitter and LinkedIn.

March 16, 2017
Help Us Understand CI/CD, DevOps & Job Scheduling

While plenty of vendors tell us what they think is happening in the market, the only way to really learn is from you, our readers. So we are asking you to take a few minutes to take this important survey on the adoption of CI/CD, DevOps and job scheduling.

We will be giving a $50 Amazon gift card to one out of every 50 respondents. More importantly we will be publishing the results here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud to share with everyone. The survey is sponsored by BMC and co-produced with devopsy.kinsta.cloud.

You can take the survey right here:
Create your own user feedback survey
Thanks for taking the time and helping us help us all.

— Alan Shimel

March 15, 2017
CD 101 Podcast: How to Build the Modern Software Factory with Agile Development and Continuous Delivery
And now, for Episode 3 … you decide if it beats “Star Wars – Revenge of the Sith.”

I think we accidentally just set the bar pretty low, but …

… here we go. Let’s begin with a prerequisite pithy quote from an objective industry observer:

“If agile software development was the opening act to a great performance, continuous delivery is the headliner,” according to Kurt Bittner of Forrester Research.

Kurt explains this concept further by saying, “The pace at which consumers expect change is causing a crisis in application development and delivery … agile was a good start, but it wasn’t sufficient to drive better business results; continuous delivery forges the broken link in the value chain, connecting business strategy with business results.”

So there, you have it. At least according to Forrester, continuous delivery (CD) is one of the most important evolutions of agile methodology within the modern software factory. But, there’s more.

Andrew Binstock from Dr. Dobbs fairly well echoes this sentiment, saying: “It’s becoming clear that agile alone is no longer sufficient to keep up with the demands of the present day … software complexity and the need for constant updates are making it difficult for leading edge organizations to keep up without moving beyond agile and embracing continuous delivery.”

Episode 3 of our podcast series discusses the importance of Agile Transformation along WITH Continuous Delivery to automated some of the development, test, and release efforts to remove some of the bottlenecks downstream in the software development life cycle in the build, test and release phases.

Lean Agile + CD can create these 1+1=3 types of results.

Episode 3 of the Continuous Delivery 101 Podcast can be found by:
- Listening to it on your computer on YouTube
- Downloading it from iTunes store
- Downloading the podcast from your Podcast App by searching for “Continuous Delivery 101 podcast”
Thanks for listening!

— Scott Edwards
March 13, 2017
DevOps Chat: CI/CD with Travelers and Urban Code

In this DevOps Chat we speak with Laurel Dixon-Bull of Urban Code and Frank Canihuante of Travelers about CI/CD. Frank explains to us how he improved the CI pipeline at Travelers and some of the challenges he faced with the scale of a large enterprise like Travelers. Good case study.

As usual, immediately below is the streaming audio of our conversation. Below that is the written record of our chat. Enjoy!

Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. Alan Shimel, Editor in Chief, devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Here for another DevOps chat. Today we have two guests on DevOps Chat. First of all we have Laurel Dickson-Bull of IBM’s UrbanCode. Laurel, welcome to DevOps Chat.

Dickson-Bull: Hey, thanks Alan. I’ll just give you a quick introduction. I’m an offering manager for UrbanCode Deploy. And I started at IBM about 14 years ago, working on internationalization and localization. I spent a few years in release management and saw the agony of software delivery. And then now working very close with UrbanCode Deploy delivery team.

Shimel: Excellent. And our second guest is Frank Canihuante. If I mispronounce it I apologize Frank. We’ll give you a chance to correct. And Frank, you’re with Travelers. Welcome to DevOps chat.

Canihuante: Hi, Alan. That was close enough as far as pronunciation. Yes. So I’m a tech lead here at Travelers. I’ve been with the company for three years and was actually hired to lead the technical aspects of setting up a new pipeline actually. Been a developer for over two decades under various roles, different types of projects. And for the past 10 years or so, I’ve been very involved with things that relate to what we now call DevOps. And always thought of that as being just doing good software engineering.

Shimel: Absolutely.

Canihuante: So this is right up my alley.

Shimel: So we spoke a little off camera or off mic before we started today. And Frank, you mentioned that you’ve been doing sort of very DevOps like things for the last 10 years, way before they started calling it DevOps. And you know you’ve been riding this wave for a while. But Frank, I wanted to take a quick moment and talk about sort of the legacy that you had at Travelers. You mentioned you joined three years ago and you were brought in to really kind of update the pipeline, the CI process if you will. Right, continuous integration. Can you give us an idea of what it was like when you first came on board?

Canihuante: Sure. You know the interesting thing about this project that is now basically setting up a pipeline. That it wasn’t really stated as such. It was about replacing the old systems. And that right away told me that we weren’t quite sure of what the actual solution was. Now, these days we think of CI, CD, even three years ago, those two words weren’t all that popular as they are now. Of course now we understand that that is the way to go these days. You set up a continuous integration and a continuous delivery set of tools. So there was a lot of confusion. There was a lot of angst because everyone knew that if you were about to change, these tools are near and dear to your day to day activities as a developer, as a QA, as a DevOps professional. There’s some disruption that’s gonna happen. So lots, lots of expectations and a little bit of apprehension as well.

Shimel: Yep. Got it. And so Frank, you came in and you know tasked with updating this. For someone who’s listening out there and says geez, that’s just where I was. Where Frank was three years ago, that’s where I am today. Can you give ’em a little advice? Where do you start?

Canihuante: Sure. So I have put pipelines together before but at a smaller scale. So my biggest concern _____ at the same time what made it very exciting for me to take on the job was how am I gonna do this in a large enterprise. Travelers has 30,000 employees, 3,000 of which are in IT. So I knew this is directly or indirectly impacting hundreds of thousands of people. So there was a lot of responsibility to go with it. So one thing that I would recommend is you have to do your homework. You have to have a lot of experience in development to be familiar with the way developers think. Because at the end of the day they are your customers. And they’re very demanding. They have things that work now, however quirky they may be, it works. You’re about to change that. You have to be sure whatever you’re gonna replace the old tools with, it’s something that you as a developer feel comfortable with. This is where the Devs part of the DevOps part comes in. And the other part also is once you have the system put together, you have to run it like a product. And this is something that sometimes we in the rush of getting something out there, people don’t perhaps think of the operational aspects of a system. But it is something that we need to have.

Canihuante: I was just saying that you know putting it together requires a set of skills that basically call on all your development experience. But you cannot forget about how are you gonna run these tools, how are you gonna operationalize them. So trying to keep your customers happy is yet another challenge.

Shimel: Yeah. Absolutely. And so Frank, ultimately you and the Travelers team wound up partnering up with IBMs UrbanCode deploy on this project, correct?

Canihuante: Yes. So we looked at several tools. We had all the main vendors of CI and CD tools.

Shimel: I mean you don’t have to name names but —

Canihuante: Okay. Sure. So we had a process in which we brought in several vendors of CI and CD tools. And we really put UrbanCode Deploy through its paces as far as the deployment tool. We had in our RFP, which we did have a formal RFP process, many, many questions that related to how it actually worked and how it was actually operated. So we had a pretty good idea before we even brought the tool in for actual POC. But having the POC is what really made a big difference in realizing what it can do. It was very different from the old tool that we replaced. And actually once we had our users in, it brought the level of angst and anxiety that they had about the new system down to the normal levels. You know one thing is to see a demo, another thing is to actually put your hands on it and actually get an application be deployed through this new tool.

Shimel: Got it. So Laurel, let me turn to you a little bit. When did you become involved with Frank and the Travelers team?

Dickson-Bull: Well, I’ve been aware of Frank and Travelers team probably for the last couple of years. I think I visited you down you in Connecticut Frank, probably a year or two ago. I have to say though most of what I know about Frank and his team are things that I’ve heard. Really strong team. They’ve actually adopted UrbanCode very quickly and have you know made really fast progress. You know to some people, two or three years may seem like a long time. But to standardize on a deployment tool and in a large organization with ten thousand developers, that’s actually really, really good progress.

Shimel: I agree. So Frank, give us an idea you know first of all do you consider this project to be successful at this point?

Canihuante: Absolutely. There are many ways to measure how a project is successful. Projects of this type. In our case, we had over 2,000 applications in the old system. And one way to measure success is to say how many do we still have in the old system after a years’ time. So out of the 2,000 plus, we got about a hundred or so that are still in the old system. And they’re on track to be actually migrated to UCD in the next few weeks or months. But in addition to that, there are these other things that actually make it successful. Just having built something in collaboration with hundreds of other people and get their heads together as to putting together a pipeline that’s gonna make their life easier down the road. That’s another way to measure success. It’s kind of hard to measure it, but you see it in the way people talk. For example, we’re no longer talking about the way we need this tool or that tool. We’re talking about two different ways to solve a particular problem. Before, we didn’t even know how to solve it. Now we have multiple ways. And even the conversations are different. It’s not about particular problems that a group may have. But it’s always thinking how can we solve this problem for everyone. How can we come up with that pattern that solves how to build and deploy applications? Not just for my group or my division, but for the entire company.

Shimel: Got it. And Laurel, does that jive with you know I’m sure you’re speaking with other organizations using UrbanCode Deploy. Is that sort of measure of success the same you know across the board? The same type of thing?

Dickson-Bull: Yeah. Well, I would say that what Frank described as you know the challenge of standardizing on a tool for the enterprise and then going through that and it really opens up the conversations. Because once you have the visibility into the deployment automation and you start having success operationalizing your software delivery. People get excited about that. And they want to you know solve problems of automation. Dev and Ops are talking to each other. And the conversations become more collaborative. So I have definitely seen that with other large companies. And you know Travelers does represent a very large segment of our customers in the financial services. You know banks and insurance make up a good chunk of our customer base.

Shimel: And you know Frank, in talking again off mic a bit you know setting up your CI pipeline. UrbanCode Deploy’s obviously a tool that you use. But you guys are also using the integration with that and Jenkins. Correct?

Canihuante: Right. Yes, that’s correct. And Jenkins is interesting too because it was already in-house so _____ reasons why people wanted it. But it comes in two flavors. We have Jenkins ______ with various versions ______ also standardizing on a enterprise version of it. And we provide solutions that now encompass not just UrbanCode Deploy but also Jenkins. And we’re also providing a standard way of solving particular types of deployments. For example, how to deploy to WAS or JBoss. How to do .Net deployments. How to do database deployments. And it gets everyone really excited about having a standard way but sometimes even with flexibility to even tweak that a bit. Because we have some groups that only do say .Net, others do only JAVA or some do a mix of both. And now we have a menu of solutions that will span more than one tool. In addition that, there are other things that we have done that we are picking up these oddball applications. Like for example, telephone applications, voice applications. Even things that _____ not thought that we were actually going to install for but we have the ability to do that such as mainframe components, desktop components. We’re all bringing it together as a family of solutions on these tools in addition to integrations with other systems outside of the tools themselves. Such as the ticketing system for example or the monitoring system.

Shimel: Got it. And Laurel, you know I’ve known about UrbanCode having integration with Jenkins for some time. Actually at Interconnect I think it was last year or the year before, Eric Minick of UrbanCode actually did a joint session with Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the founder of Jenkins and CTO of CloudBees. And so I’m wondering have you run into a lot of UrbanCode customers who are also using Jenkins?

Dickson-Bull: Oh, yeah. For sure. I would say about half of our customers are using Jenkins. And UrbanCode is you know a great extensibility platform for Jenkins, right. So we’ve got over 300 plugins that will integrate with multiple technologies. And then like Frank was saying, multiple platforms from COS and even .Net, right. We have a lot of Microsoft integrations. So, yeah. I mean Jenkins is a great partner actually in the customer environment.

Shimel: Interesting. Guys, as I mentioned to you earlier, our time here goes so quick and we’re already coming up on 15 minutes. We’re gonna have to try to wrap up. But as I mentioned, I always like to ask our guests you know can you recommend a book to our audience that you know kind of a must read or should read. And Laurel, I’m gonna let you go first. Is there a particular book you’d recommend to our audience that they might find useful?

Dickson-Bull: So in the vein of DevOps, collaboration and teamwork that’s really important. Especially in agile development. There was a tool that I came across (that helps you) figure out your strengths. And then when you work with your _____.

Shimel: You know what Laurel —

Dickson-Bull: What?

Shimel: I think we missed you when you said the name of the book. Can you repeat it?

Dickson-Bull: Okay. It’s not a book.

Shimel: Oh, okay.

Dickson-Bull: It’s actually a survey or it’s a tool that you can use with your agile teams to figure out your various strengths. And it’s called Strengths Finder and it’s published by Gallup.

Shimel: Got it. Oh, very cool. We’ll see if we can get a link to that in the notes.

Dickson-Bull: Okay.

Shimel: Frank, how about you? Anything you could recommend to our audience?

Canihuante: Yeah. There’s so many books out there. But there’s one that I really like. It’s more of an author than a particular book. His name is Steve McConnell and he’s written the famous “Code Complete.” And I believe there’s a “Code Complete 2.” But there’s one other I really like. Actually two more. It’s called Rapid Development and the other book is called “Software Project Survival Guide.” These are from late 1990s. But if you read them it’s kind of like “The Phoenix Project” but 20 years ago. The same problems. The psychology of the software development world and how all that works. Really exciting stuff.

Shimel: Excellent. Well, Frank, before we close off and Laurel, I wanted to mention Frank, you are appearing at IBM Interconnect this year?

Canihuante: Yes. I am. I’ll be talking about our Travelers story at Interconnect.

Dickson-Bull: And we’ll be having you on a panel too, right Frank?

Canihuante: Oh, that’s correct. That’s gonna be on Wednesday. I forget the date.

Dickson-Bull: Yep. We have a few of our larger customers who have had success with DevOps joining us on a panel called, “DevOps-You’ve Got This.”

Shimel: Great. Sounds Great. We look forward to seeing it. I’m actually doing a panel there too called DevOps-It Takes a Village. So we could share notes Frank, while we’re out there. And Laurel, will you be attending Interconnect as well?

Canihuante: That’s awesome.

Dickson-Bull: I will be. I’ll be leaving that panel, DevOps-You’ve Got This. And then right before the conference, we have a full day workshop with customers from UrbanCode. So I’m organizing that now and we’ll be leading that on Sunday.

Shimel: Fantastic. All right. Well, Laurel Dickson-Bull of IBM UrbanCode. Frank Canihuante of Travelers, thank you for being our guests on this episode of DevOps Chat. Look forward to seeing you both out at IBM Interconnect the week of March 19th. And your panel Laurel that you’re organizing as well as Frank, you’re talking a little bit about your Travelers experience. And good luck as you continue to you know make the pipeline and DevOps happen at Travelers Frank. Thanks for telling us about it.

Dickson-Bull: Thanks Alan.

Canihuante: Thanks Alan.

Shimel: Thanks guys. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Thanks for being our guests today and we’ll see you on a DevOps Chat soon.

— Alan Shimel

March 8, 2017
Release Automation: Delivering the Big Quality Payoff

Have you ever gone down the path of testing the latest release of an application only to find out that you had the wrong version?

Maybe you accidentally grabbed the wrong build or you didn’t have the correct configuration file for the environment you were testing against—or your database wasn’t updated correctly, or the script you were using was still pointing to a prior version of the software.

Whatever the case, we can agree that keeping track of all the various artifacts, database schema changes, configuration parameters and other components needed to accurately test and deploy an application is both time-consuming and prone to errors.

Today, many companies are looking to DevOps, continuous delivery and agile development methodologies to shorten their application delivery cycles and reduce the number of errors and the costs associated with application deployment processes. Nearly all enterprise companies are software companies, and their mere existence depends on delivering differentiating products and services via software to their customers.

It’s imperative to be able to react to customer demands and competitive pressures quickly, if not immediately, to stay ahead of the competition. Gone are the days of yearly release cycles.

Today we see companies deploying new capabilities into production environments on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis. At some companies, hundreds, if not thousands, of deployments are occurring across dev, test and production environments daily. The old methodologies we once used simply can’t support this type of volume and cadence.

Employing Release Automation

So, how are these companies transitioning to this new way of thinking? In a word—automation; specifically, by automating early and often.

Everything about your release process is a candidate for automation. This includes environment provisioning and configuration automation, build automation, test automation and release and deployment automation.

A customer of ours recently implemented CA Release Automation, and within eight weeks had automated 90 percent of its deployments. Deployments that once took more than five hours and a team of people now take a matter of minutes.

“This not only saves us a huge amount of time, but it also mitigates the risk of human error being introduced by manual processes,” said Tim Dallmann, platform engineer at Jewelers Mutual.

Another customer, a major airline, implemented CA Release Automation and immediately reduced their production outages from an average of 237 over a three-month period, down to 15, seven, six and five over the following four months.

And Molina Medicaid Solutions reduced their cost of human error by 90 percent, all the while responding quicker to emergency deployment requests and improving deployment quality.

Automation is critical, but I believe these results prove that implementing a framework to manage and deploy release processes in addition to automation works even better.

Increased Flexibility and Visibility

Continuous delivery helps break down barriers often seen between development and operations teams. It provides, even forces, a more collaborative approach and automation is a key enabler of this.

“One of the best things about automation is that it gives us the flexibility to skill-up end users—deployments in our test environments are no longer solely the responsibility of the operations or IT teams,” explained Dallmann.

With an application release automation (ARA) solution, artifact, build, configuration and release processes are no longer tracked with spreadsheets or embedded in complicated scripts.

Increased visibility into these processes ultimately enables all stakeholders to take a more active role in the release process, and access to real-time information can significantly reduce the amount of time and resources needed to resolve and recover from problems when they do occur.

Automation leads to:

Integrating with the Ecosystem

An enterprise ARA solution can help you create a single control point to streamline all your application delivery processes for better predictability and reduced risk. A critical component of this is the ability to integrate and orchestrate tools and technologies required along the continuous delivery pipeline, including source control, automated testing tools, provisioning and configuration management solutions and change management and performance management solutions.

Integration with an application lifecycle management solution can provide even further alignment, governance and traceability between development projects and what is ultimately being tested and promoted to production.

“By integrating the two solutions, we will have a complete audit trail of deployments to help us understand how, where and by whom stories have changed,” said Phil Nickolai, director of application services at Jewelers Mutual.

“What we really needed was a solution to streamline our whole way of working,” he said. “We had numerous people working on projects, competing for resources and causing complexity. Now we’re back in control and getting smarter every day.”

The Time Is Now

Let’s get rid of the problem that exists between the keyboard and information kept in spreadsheets, scripts or emails. Not only will you stop wasting time testing the wrong version of an application, but you can also ensure you have the right test data, the appropriate test cases and the correct configuration parameters for your environment.

Stress-inducing release weekends and nights become a thing of the past. Developers can spend more time on developing innovative capabilities that generate revenue and keep customers coming back for more.

— Tim Mueting

March 7, 2017
Why Financial Companies Love Continuous Delivery
The other day I was on the American Express website paying bills and browsing around the benefits and services afforded me when I ran across a “who we are” section. It read:

“We’re a global services company that provides customers with access to products, insights and experiences that enrich lives and build business success.”

Surprisingly, the term “financial” was missing from the description. This led me to wonder if other financial institutions are evolving how they think about themselves. Here are some other examples:
- Bank of America: “Here to help connect you to what matters most.”
- ING: “Empowering people to stay a step ahead in life and in business.”
- MasterCard: “As a technology company, we connect individuals, businesses and organizations around the world, creating greater opportunities for all.”
Financial Companies Love Their Customers

My unscientific assessment of various financial services companies suggests that they are centered on delighting their customers. They are transforming who they are by altering their customer engagement models and essentially becoming better software companies. MasterCard has even reclassified itself as a “technology” company. These companies are transcending the role of transaction engine to offer seamless, intuitive digital experiences for their customers.

And the proof is in the performance. According to Forrester’s Customer Experience (CX) Index, financial services firms, including retail banks, credit card companies, investment firms and auto and home insurers, are some of the top brands worldwide when it comes to CX.

You might think that large financial institutions would be digital laggards because of legacy infrastructure, regulatory compliance pressures and overall risk-avoidance. But you’d be wrong.

In another study, 81 percent of financial services firms said they are embracing digital to redefine their businesses, and 87 percent are on the DevOps bandwagon. Sixty-one percent even said they are disrupting their industry with advanced digital initiatives.

To stay competitive and improve their customer experience aptitude, financial services firms are undergoing significant digital transformation.

Getting the Pulse of Fintech Continuous Delivery Adoption

But how progressive are these firms in terms of their application delivery practices? Working with CA, Gatepoint Research recently surveyed more than 100 IT executives from financial services companies to take the pulse of where they are in continuous delivery adoption. Results can be found in this report and infographic.

First off, to see if these companies might be considered unicorns or stragglers, they were asked the total volume of monthly deployments in all environments. Forty percent fell at the low end with fewer than 50 deployments per month. Now, lower deployment numbers could mean that these are less agile organizations or that they have fewer applications in general. Somewhat correlative to lower deployment numbers, the survey found that 48 percent currently are not using an application release automation (ARA) solution. Without automation, it’s tough to scale release processes—particularly to keep up with agile development.

Moving up the spectrum, 41 percent are moderately prolific at 50-500 deployments per month, and then 15 percent are what I would consider rock stars with more than 500 (7 percent of those over 1,000). Those doing hundreds of deployments a month often have agile development teams and more modular applications. They likely have continuous delivery practices in place that push more frequent, iterative deployments left, helping higher-quality applications to move through the pipeline to production.

The primary application delivery goals for financial services firms for the next 12 months are to get better control of release processes, tools and environments; to reduce risk and failures; and to release applications more frequently. All of these needs typically stem from companies undergoing digital transformation—it feels more chaotic and disconnected, manual processes are breaking under the weight and there’s intense pressure to move faster.

Compliance was not a top goal, and the majority (83 percent) claim that their current release process is adequate to meet regulatory requirements. However, they did acknowledge that they could improve in terms of knowledge safekeeping and auditability of the release process.

The data certainly shows that financial services companies are adopting continuous delivery practices in some form and exploring solutions, including many open-source tools, to help them get the job done. They currently are focusing continuous delivery practices on tracking and reporting releases, planning and scheduling releases and automating test deployments. These practices ultimately help financial services companies to release high-quality applications anywhere at any time.

How Continuous Delivery Helps Fintech Win

Continuous delivery sits at the heart of many digital initiatives because of what it enables these companies to achieve for their customers:
- Delivering features and updates that customers need when they need them
- Delivering applications that meet performance and quality expectations of customers
- Delivering secure, compliant applications (for external and internal customers)
Continuous delivery enables continuous devotion to the customer experience.

Continuous Release: Fast Customer Response

With continuous delivery, you establish an application release workflow that automatically connects a developer’s update to parallel testing to staging and ultimately to production release. Because of the underlying end-to-end automation technology, these steps can happen quickly, seamlessly and with little to no manual intervention. Some might call it “push button release” or “zero-touch release.”

It’s a controlled, tracked, governed, collaborative process. Application stakeholders stay aligned as application changes traverse the pipeline. Your customers can have access to fixes, updates and new innovations in days instead of weeks or months.

Continuous Testing: Building in Quality

In contrast to the significant time penalties and shortfalls that can happen with manual testing, in the continuous delivery pipeline, testing is shifting left and happening in parallel. Hand-offs and feedback loops are automated and efficient.

Testing can happen earlier and without delay with the help of test environment simulation. Testing is on target through automatic test case creation, even from requirements. Testing is real-world with on-demand test data generation. And testing is rigorous with developers able to performance test apps at their end. The continuous testing that occurs as part of the process helps to build in quality and ensure top performance before reaching the customer.

Continuous Compliance: Audit-Ready Processes

Ensuring applications are compliant and secure is critical for your customers. It’s making sure customer information is safe and that application changes are tracked sufficiently for SOX or other reporting. It’s also about helping out those internal “customers” like auditors to prove compliancy and easily build reports.

An automated continuous delivery pipeline can track releases, apply role-based governance, orchestrate proper data masking, deploy security policy updates and provide an audit trail for application releases—who did what, when and why. All this data can be collected and reported easily, which saves time and effort for auditors. You essentially stay compliant and secure all the time.

Customer Satisfaction Through Automation

Financial services companies are laser focused on using technology to delight and retain customers. And continuous delivery is the application delivery practice that’s underpinning these efforts. The companies that are exceptional at this, with thousands of deployments per month, are using automation tools such as Application Release Automation (ARA). These tools are the backbone of continuous delivery, providing the automated orchestration, governance, tracking and reporting for your pipeline—development through production.

That’s why I’m not surprised that leading financial services companies make up a large portion of CA’s release automation customers, including Euroclear, GM Financial, ING, Jewelers Mutual and Western Union. Our customers put high value on delivering excellent customer experiences and are implementing modern software delivery methodologies, practices and associated tools to support their efforts. GM Financial recently said it is “the software company that does auto finance.”

If you are serious about customer satisfaction and staying ahead of nimble competitive threats in the market, you must get serious about end-to-end automation. It’s time to truly embrace the practice of continuous delivery to be able to consistently release applications that are progressive, always compliant and completely customer-satisfying.

— Patricia Johnson
March 2, 2017
CD 101 Podcast Episode 2: The Agile Enterprise
And we’re back with another episode of the “Continuous Delivery 101 Podcast.”

In Episode 1, we covered the three waves of IT disruption—and how these disruptions, combined with the move toward digital transformation, are drastically changing every industry.

This, of course, underlined how accelerating speed-to-market is clearly more important than ever before.

In this second episode, we talk about Agile methodologies with expert Dan Rice, who addresses how these practices can enable business strategies to be implemented at greater speed.

Listen closely and you’ll learn more about what Agile actually means across various teams, roles, product owners and scrum masters, along with related points on DevOps and CD tooling.

All of these topics are great food for thought as you think about how you can move to build software faster and with increased quality. Yet, if enterprises only focus on these issues, they aren’t tackling or talking about the real problem in their organization that Agile can solve.

It’s time to take the conversation beyond the team level and talk about how work flows to every involved team, enterprise-wide—specifically, about how initiatives can expand across multiple teams, how to manage shared resources and how to pull in other dependent teams.

For Agile to work, it has to expand universally and be ingrained further at program level, to understand precisely how work is coordinated and flows across every domain.

You can listen to Episode 2 of the “Continuous Delivery 101 Podcast” via:
- YouTube
- iTunes store
- Or by searching for it in the iTunes Podcast App under “Continuous Delivery 101 Podcast”
Thanks for tuning in to the “Continuous Delivery 101 Podcast.” We hope you’ll continue the conversation by posting your comments below or in the comments section on YouTube or iTunes.

Meanwhile, keep tuning in: We’ll be back soon with another episode!

— Scott Edwards
February 21, 2017
Warning Signs Your Organization Needs CI/CD
Sometimes, taking a look at a problem from a different angle makes it look different. As a recent meme showed, a six and a nine are the same marks, just viewed from different angles. I don’t know who originally created this image; if you do, drop me a line and I’ll give them all the credit.

There are a lot of reasons for your organization to consider continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). A quick Google search can show lists of reasons, mostly technical or business-related, that attempt to give enterprise IT impetus to move toward the various forms of DevOps. But a solid set of reasons, discussed occasionally, is worth considering because it has a separate appeal.

IT staff are people. They have the needs of people. They have (or lack) the skills of people. And they respond as people. Answer the following questions, and consider what your answers might mean for your organization:
1. Twitching. Can your caffeine consumption and amount of sleep be tracked by the release cycle?
2. The Pain. Do you have stress headaches based on work?
3. Must. Not. Look. Are you still—or even more—stressed when you are away from work, even avoiding email when not on call?
4. Those Guys. Do many in your organization see IT as an anchor that drags behind the ship, slowing it?
5. Slippage! We Have Slippage! Does the phrase, “Yeah … the deadline slipped” not even cause you to raise an eyebrow anymore?
6. Total Manhours: 1,440, assuming no full moons. Do development timelines mostly get expressed in terms of months or even years, and even then everyone expects the number is too small?
7. And Then, We Put it on a Floppy… Are there areas of the development/deployment cycle that you avoid looking too closely at, or everyone rolls their eyes when the topic comes up?
8. Ask Bob. No One Else Has a Clue. Are there critical software systems with just one or two people who can keep them running in your org?
9. We’ll Test in Production! Is “due to deadline slippage, we have less time for testing” normal and expected, not even causing you to think of the implications anymore?
10. Now That We Can Use it, that Chicken Dance Requirement for Order Entry Is … Not good. Are business-owner changes to requirements happening at the last minute, after the business sees how the functionality/flows of the system work, and can actually start using it?
11. This Would All Be Better if Your People Learned to Use Left-Handed Smoke Shifters. When someone in the business starts talking glowingly about strange new development technology X, you start mentally calculating when you’ll find time outside of work to research it.
12. Release Recovery. Is there always a period after rollout that critical development staff are kept on the project to fix problems that occur in production?
13. Operations Claims That … Are the names of other IT departments used as swear words by App Dev?
Sure, I’m being a bit tongue-in-cheek, but am I wrong? A ton of people and organizations actually feel many of these items. It would be unsurprising to hear your organization is one of them.

And these are good reasons to consider CI/CD. Sure, we could dress them up with business or technical reasons based upon them, but the reality is that human overload, stress, burnout, and avoidance are reason in and of themselves – if for no other reason than they are symptoms of organizational inefficiency.

If you are suffering from any of these symptoms, read the articles here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and others easily found on the web. Consider one of the excellent CI/CD books on the market, talk to trusted dev tool vendors about their CI/CD tools. See if the stories told by those who have implemented CI/CD is where you would like to end up.

It might just cut down on those headaches. But it won’t free you from developing in JavaScript. There is no silver bullet, after all.

— Don Macvittie
February 13, 2017
DevOps Job Titles Emerging in Enterprise IT Organizations

IT job functions and, by extension, individual titles inside the classic enterprise have been relatively constant. Various hierarchies of developers labored separately alongside IT operations teams that focused mainly on infrastructure. However, the emphasis on continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) within the context of a modern DevOps environment is starting to blur the lines separating who does what inside these organizations. In fact, Phil Guido, general manager of IBM Global Technology Solutions in North America, says new titles such as DevOps engineer and Scrum Master, which better reflect new roles many IT professionals taking on, now are emerging.

At the crux of this shift is the rise of programmable infrastructure coupled with a need for IT organizations to be more agile. Instead of rolling out a few applications and associated updates a year, IT organizations today are being urged by business leaders to roll out more applications and updates at a pace associated more often with web-scale companies than the classic enterprise. Much of that demand emanates from shareholders and Wall Street to accelerate investment in digital business initiatives that generate higher-margin revenue.

To achieve those goals, enterprise IT organizations are trying to emulate as many of the DevOps processes employed by web-scale companies. For example, web-scale companies make extensive use of CI/CD technologies and processes to roll out as many new applications as fast as they possibly can. Overseeing those processes are developers who now are accountable for not just writing but also maintaining the application. The theory is that if developers are held accountable for the quality of the application, they will focus more on making sure that application attains a level of quality. The trick is to empower those developers to own everything from the code itself to the programmatic infrastructure it runs on. Because of that requirement, many of those developers adopted a “cloud first” mentality because deploying applications on a public cloud such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) eliminated the need for those developers to engage with IT infrastructure professionals altogether.

However, most traditional enterprise IT organizations have a much smaller number of application developers. Every minute those developers are not writing code reduces the number of applications an enterprise can roll out. Because of that issue, many enterprises have been trying to find a way for existing IT operations teams and developers to work together hand in glove.

That requirement, Guido says, is creating a lot of demand for advice from IBM about how to manage DevOps. IBM advises organizations to go slow to ensure they have a few quick successes under their belts before propagating DevOps across the entire organization, he notes. If an organization tries to do too much or move too fast, there’s a good chance that employee resistance to change will only increase. Above all, Guido says, organizations should avoid being too prescriptive in how they define DevOps.

Of course, not everyone agrees that changing job titles is always the best way to go about fostering change. But human nature being what it is within large organizations, some job titles will have to be reclassified to bring about permanent change.

— Mike Vizard

February 8, 2017