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Tag: devops adoption

  • Release Automation: Delivering the Big Quality Payoff

    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

  • Why Financial Companies Love Continuous Delivery

    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

  • Be Here Now – Agile and DevOps in the Current State of Synergy

    Be Here Now – Agile and DevOps in the Current State of Synergy

    If there’s one thing that our culture does not lack, it’s a litany of pithy catch-quotes meant to remind us to focus on the task at hand; yet, this often runs counter to our tendency to fixate on matters of the past and future.

    While we are so often encouraged to “live in the moment” and “seize the day”, this is hardly an easy task, especially as related to any sort of emerging phenomenon that compels us to improve on historical missteps, and predict how things should change for the better.

    Register today for the 3rd Annual DevOps Virtual Summit.

    With the methodologies of agile and DevOps the tendency is, of course, to do the same, harping on the inefficiencies of previous software delivery models and painting an elaborate portrait of how related workflows are being transformed overnight.

    The simple truth is that it’s easy to get excited about concepts that hold such tremendous potential in recasting an increasingly critical vital set of processes, and lose track of where things actually stand.

    To note, while a recent research project published by Coleman Parkes found that over 80 percent of organizations have adopted some manner of agile and DevOps practices, and see them as critical in transforming their internal software factories, only a third have adopted the methods on a broad scale.

    Point being, we’re still pretty early.

    That said, we in the business of helping organizations adopt related culture and tooling have gone to great lengths to encourage everyone that this change should be pursued with dogged intensity. We have sliced and diced the data to illustrate how those organizations at the forefront of so-called digital transformation, enabled by agile and DevOps, are realizing the results in the form of increased velocity.

    The same research finds that “advanced” adopters of the two concepts are, in fact, seeing significant improvement in time-to-market, customer satisfaction and new business growth.

    But research is just that, and often not completely aligned with real-world scenarios. Someone who takes the time to answer a survey about such matters, one could reasonably expect, is the type of person far more likely to be involved in agile and DevOps activities.

    My personal conversations with everyday practitioners [aka other parents on the sidelines at my kids’ sports and social events, many of whom work in IT] tell me that we’re much more oriented to the “pockets of innovation” phase at present, than any sense of pervasive adoption.

    So this begs the two-part question – where do we really stand, and what do I really need to care about?

    The only reliable source of record in my mind is the perspective of people already doing the work, beyond what I can discern amid basketball games and middle school theater. Real-world practitioners are the voices of reason that allow us to “be here now” and address the specifics of practical agile and DevOps implementation.

    Over the past several years, I’ve found one of the best sources of such input to be the customer panels available at industry conferences and on webcasts. When it’s time for me to sit down and crank out some related content, I often go back to these recordings to remind myself where the rubber actually hits the road.

    On Tuesday Mar. 7, we’ll host just such an event, the 3rd Annual DevOps Virtual Summit, where agile and DevOps leaders from organizations including CNN, GM Financial and United Airlines will share their thoughts on how this ongoing transformation is playing out, and where the remaining challenges lie.

    Along with those experts, we’ll also hear from Dr. Nicole Forsgren, one of the leading researchers in the space who is in seemingly constant contact with people leading the charge and working in the trenches putting agile and DevOps into practice.

    As a marketer, and previously as a journalist, everything that I know comes from direct interaction with those colleagues willing to share their hands-on experience garnered via doing this work every day.

    Register for the event and join us to find out where agile and DevOps actually stand today.

    — Matt Hines

  • CD 101 Podcast Episode 2: The Agile Enterprise

    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

  • What Happens Post-Deployment: The Rotating Roster

    What Happens Post-Deployment: The Rotating Roster

    DevOps has become that celebrity who’s always the talk of the town but is largely misunderstood. It’s even quoted in the wrong context.

    A few days back, while speaking at a conference, I was interacting with audience and one of the attendees said DevOps is like the backbone of Agile. I think that’s an excellent way of describing DevOps. In an industry where we are still struggling to implement Agile—and even more so to keep people from drifting—is DevOps ahead of its time? Maybe not.

    DevOps is the set of practices necessary to sustain the fast pace of delivery. The best part of DevOps is there are no levels or certifications one needs to achieve. It’s the stack of practices that you pick and implement and reap benefits. The 7Cs—continuous planning, continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous testing, continuous deployment, continuous monitoring and continuous operations—help maintain sanity, though.

    One teams had to sustain fast-paced releases with a big customer base. We saw our users increase from .1 million to 2.4 million in three years. Agile, continuous integration and continuous delivery are not just fads for us, but needs for survival.

    Using the Rotating Roster Method

    When we talk about continuous delivery but then focus on just delivery, it’s not enough. It’s equally important to work on what happens post-deployment, such as continuous monitoring and continuous operations.

    Rotating Roster is one practice we use in our organization and this has helped us pull together the whole ecosystem of:

    • Resolving customer issues,
    • Feedback system pumping into out technical pipeline/debt for next releases,
    • Knowledge transfer and learning ecosystem to address attrition, and
    • Broken silos.

    Here’s how we do this. First, we define the scope of the Roster. We picked the following:

    • Production Outage
    • Customer issues/P1
    • Ad hoc requests from stakeholders
    • Data extraction (only tasks out of scope of a separate Data Analytics team)

    Next, we publish a schedule of every two to four weeks, designating at least one person to be on the Roster. It’s essential that the Roster rotates to all or most in the team to build a bus factor or a knowledge transfer ecosystem in the team.

    For each request received, we asked the Roster person to log it in JIRA. This was not just for bookkeeping sake, but as an essential step in line with the Roster objective.

    After every Roster period, we sat down and reviewed these JIRA requests for possible targets to:

    • Automate the task or the effort involved, such as account creation requests automated by writing php scripts, for example.
    • Delegate the task to the right team to cut the effort. For example, for a new data extraction we set up SQL slaves and replicate tables on analytics machines, then delegate the task to them for all future instances.
    • Mitigate the reason for the request, such as the root cause of an outage.

    The mitigation/automation steps had to be picked by development team in their Sprints. Otherwise, usually they become technical debt and lay around in the backlog.

    Since the development team was taking turns on the Roster, they understood the priority and necessity of doing the task. Thus, the technical pipeline was chosen and fed actively.

    Another advantage of the Roster was it showed the team the “big picture” and helped catch early trends.

    The Rotating Roster system turned out to be a big success for our teams; thus, we replicated the model through the rest of the organization. It’s a small but essential step to adopting DevOps culture.

    In one definition, Jez Humble explained that DevOps is “a cross-disciplinary community of practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating rapidly changing resilient systems at scale.”

    I could not have put it in better words.

    About the Author / Kiran Chhabra

    Kiran Chhabra is Vice President of Engineering at Infoedge India Ltd. She has 14 years of industry experience designing and implementing highly scalable and available architectures with optimized continuous integration and delivery in technologies including LAMP, Java and mobile technologies.
    Kiran holds a U.S. Patent and has published technical papers. She is certified scrum master and certified scrum professional, and speaks at various Scrum Alliance & technical conferences in India and the United States. Connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.

  • Reality Check: Bringing Continuous Delivery Dreams to Life

    Reality Check: Bringing Continuous Delivery Dreams to Life

    Every developer shares the same dream: to write a piece of code or app that changes everything.

    Whether it makes your company do things more efficiently, attracts hordes of new customers, simply makes existing clients happier or maybe even changes the world a little bit, that code is what we strive for. Some of us don’t merely harbor that dream; many of us actually achieve that moment of brilliance. For those who have, it’s remembered as a moment of pure joy.

    So, where does this magical process begin? First, you talk to your manager and, if you’re lucky, she or he agrees that it is a fantastic idea and starts to sell it internally. Sometimes the idea is so good that you get the go-ahead on the same day and even get a small team to work on it!

    Then, soon thereafter, reality kicks in.

    You need data, inevitably from applications running somewhere in the cloud and/or some other data from on-premises data stores. You need to interface with APIs, some well-documented, some not. You need some user experience work done, and the standards your company has adopted don’t really match your vision.

    You also need to interface with many of the standard services your company has already implemented because, after all, your app doesn’t run in isolation—you work with existing billing systems, a CRM system, a fulfillment system … and all of them run on servers that can be anywhere. Soon you find yourself fighting for test data, systems to test with and applications and APIs to interface with. Before you know it, you’re banging your head against the wall.

    Fortunately, your teammates are flexible, creative people. And because your internal systems seem to work against you, you go around them. You download a trial version of some testing software; you install a copy of some internal systems on a virtualized test server (if you can find one) and start working with these.

    Since your app needs to be snazzy and snappy, you download some open-source software to help you test the performance on mobile devices. After three sprints, you’re now ready to move your app to an environment where you can start performing real tests!

    Most times this is the moment when the hardest reality kicks in. The copies of the systems you tested with were not up to date. Data has changed. APIs have changed. The real system responds three times slower than the copy that sat on the server right next to you. The data in the cloud has changed. The performance testing tool you used is not available in the official testing environment. … The list goes on.

    This doesn’t even include the difficulties of moving all the components of your new app to different environments. Trust me, this is not a fictional nightmare scenario; it is reality and I see it happen all the time.

    Now, what if you had the test-data generators necessary to create the data you need and a server that ran virtualized services, mimicking all the (up-to-date) external systems you need including the APIs to talk to them—services that would allow you to say, “What if this application responds three times slower when I request data?” or, “What happens if this system suddenly goes down?” What if, when you’re done building, you could simply migrate the app and all the components that go with it to another (test/QA) system with one click?

    Everybody wants to support people with good ideas and turn these ideas into working software without the frustration that very often distracts and demotivates people. To do so, you need to create the infrastructure that supports this. Is it difficult? Not really, the tools to automate services, create test data (and test scenarios) and migrate complete applications from A to Z are available.

    However, just like a great app, this too starts with a dream—the dream of allowing people with great ideas to work on these ideas without the overhead of an infrastructure that allows them to focus on the coding and not on the infrastructural issues; the dream to create a software factory where the creation of the app takes 90 percent of the time and the infrastructural burden only 10 percent, not the other way around.

    If you’re serious about developing software and want to create an environment where the infrastructure allows people to develop and release software faster instead of working against them, find the tools that support it and jump in, because they exist today.

    Enacting this change now and maybe the next time someone comes to you with a great idea you can be confident that they will have all the support needed to get there efficiently.

    — Marcel den Hartog

  • Culture Comes First in Bringing DevOps to the Mainframe

    Culture Comes First in Bringing DevOps to the Mainframe

    One of the most difficult challenges in engineering, oddly enough, isn’t technical: the challenge is culture transition management. In my 20-plus years of managing engineering teams worldwide, I’ve led teams through countless organizational adjustments and process improvements toward high-performance and quality, beginning with QA segregation to CMMI to ITIL, AGILE and SAFe.

    Today, mainframe organizations have emerged as the focal point for enabling DevOps capabilities and practices. Why the mainframe? Well for starters, business critical applications rely on mainframe data and business components. These applications are mission-essential and that sustained innovation requires solution sets that deliver continuous testing, continuous delivery and continuous feedback on the mainframe platform.

    But culture comes first.

    Understanding Your Key Players

    In conversations with our customers we’ve observed an interesting dynamic emerging within mainframe application development teams. Within these teams are experienced developers who were instrumental in creating the applications that helped make their companies so successful. Over time, many have become set in their ways, adopting a motto of, “If it’s not broken, why fix it?” Such developers are not interested in trying out new things, including programming languages and tools used by the modern-day programmer.

    New to the scene are the millennials who have also taken up the mantle of enterprise software engineer. They are a bit more open-minded and bring a different programming language profile, including Java, .NET and C. These developers might be learning how to code APIs with the support of management, and have likely dabbled the basics of how to code iOS apps. Millennial developers are typically much more active online and, as a result, prefer to leverage Twitter and other social channels to stay informed with the development community.

    United We Stand

    Who, then, should be involved in the journey to realizing DevOps? The answer, of course, is both. Because we’ve heard it reinforced among our users we talk with in the CA Communities every day, at user groups and at prominent mainframe community events such as CA World and SHARE.

    You know it, because you probably see it in your organization as well. There are experienced developers: people who have deep knowledge of the applications in place, business intelligence, database tables, cross-application dependencies, batch execution windows and the general experience of how things work on the z/OS platform.

    Most importantly, they also know how to avoid breaking what’s working.

    And there are the millennial developers: people who are curious to learn about new programming languages, platforms, people who, with the advent of Agile development, and open source have played with things, tested them and are using it to enhance their skill sets.

    These people prefer to use modern user interfaces and tools to increase their productivity. Sometimes they might be tentative about making mainframe changes, not willing to risk their careers by breaking poorly documented code.

    Culture – Have it Both Ways

    While the interests of millennial and experienced developers may at times seem conflicting, both have pivotal roles to play in application development and will benefit greatly from the common sense practices of DevOps and agility that are coming to the mainframe platform. To survive and thrive, teams must unify to facilitate the change process. Most importantly:

    • Code must be accessed and modernized at the speed of business. Enterprise developers, testers and architects cannot be afraid to go talk to the “black box” that is the mainframe team.
    • Project managers can’t worry that a six-week turnaround for small changes will kill their hopes of meeting their delivery windows.
    • The delivery team—QA, release management and operations—can’t afford to sit around waiting for simple deployment steps to happen: when we can automate and integrate to increase deployment frequency.

    The promise of DevOps and agility on the mainframe is to fix this, and that’s why our engineering teams are actively building out solution sets that extend DevOps practices to the mainframe, including continuous testing, continuous delivery and continuous feedback.

    Curious about what it will take to bring DevOps to the mainframe? Catch some tips and best practices from Forrester Research principal analyst Rob Stroud, or hear from the leaders driving change in their organization in our CA World 2016 Mainframe DevOps panel.

    — Aline Gerew

  • Automation Killed QA – It’s Time to Deal With It

    Automation Killed QA – It’s Time to Deal With It

    Quality assurance (QA) had a good run.

    From the time it was considered an afterthought by organizations and software vendors alike to the era of massive outsourcing contracts, followed by significant vendor investments in related tooling, and, finally, its recognition as a critical success factor among high-performing organizations, quality has evolved to become even more important than functionality to end users.

    Customer experience, today, is defined by speed and quality above all else. Namely, can I access the information and products that I want in the blink of an eye and get expected feedback based on input? As a result, customer experience has also shifted: It’s all about application experience, not the friendliness of a checkout cashier or sales/service rep.

    With this massive shift toward customer experience platforms (think omni-channel) and increasingly lofty expectations, the operative question becomes, How are we enabling velocity in our testing practices to ensure the highest quality while keeping up?

    We’ve tried everything from outsourcing to insourcing, investing in tooling, investing in people and even building testing architecture teams to oversee the automation, quality and consistency of testing results. Roughly seven years ago, my top priority for testing teams was to automate 30 percent of our tests. Today, if you are not 100 percent automated, or close to it, you are severely lagging in output.

    But what’s next? What if I’ve automated all of my tests and my manual testers have been replaced with automation engineers, but I’m still having quality issues and being perceived as a bottleneck?

    The answer is simple. Automate everything.

    Makes sense, right? Isn’t everyone telling you that? But what are we defining as “everything” from a testing perspective? Therein lies the problem; we are thinking about testing as its own factory within the larger software development life cycle.

    While we believe we are changing this perception by going agile and moving most QA functions into scrum teams, the reality is we still look at testing as a standalone function. Centralized or decentralized, this is the case, and we need to think differently.

    Automating for quality begins with defining requirements. How am I ensuring that I’m covering all cases? How do I ensure I’m translating the business requirements properly? These questions, the time it takes to answer them and the risk of human miscalculation all impact quality and velocity.

    We must start our automation for quality at the beginning, during establishment of business requirements.

    Let me introduce you to next-generation QA. Intelligent “continuous testing” platforms are replacing humans for testing, automating tests, creating data and building test cases. These platforms are able to translate model-based business requirements into complete automation—test cases, test data and test script automation.

    Orchestration across your software development life cycle creates your environments, lays down your test data, deploys your software, runs your test scripts and reports results. No more human error, no costly resources and guaranteed test coverage that ensures quality.

    Integrating your existing automation around continuous integration, portfolio management reporting, and execution reporting to this framework now gives you the ability to report and automate your ideas all the way through to outcomes.

    Early adopters are already doing this. QA as a functional organization is gone. If you aren’t already automating to this end, you are severely behind.

    Questions?  Comments?  Perspective?  Have at it in the comments below.

    — Ron DeCanio

  • A Holiday Tradition: 2017 Continuous Delivery Predictions

    A Holiday Tradition: 2017 Continuous Delivery Predictions

    It’s that time of year. As the calendar year comes to a close, many of us are following time-honored traditions: making preparations for the holidays, planning some much-deserved time off and enjoying time with friends and family.

    In the business world, the year-end also brings its own traditions, and first among those is making predictions for the coming year. I’m not one to forgo traditions, so in this article I’ll share my thoughts on the upcoming year within the context of the continuous delivery movement.

    To level set, continuous delivery is the most evolved and modern state of software development and testing—and is core to a successful DevOps strategy. Organizations that are able to achieve continuous delivery can rapidly develop, test and release applications—with higher quality and at lower costs.

    Simply put, the ability to more continuously deliver software is one of the biggest advantages to attain in the application economy, where the battleground for consumer loyalty is most often found in the ability to deliver superior applications.

    Now that we know what continuous delivery means, let’s get to my predictions for 2017:

    1. Continuous Delivery Means Continuous Everything

    Continuous delivery is still a relatively new concept, and one that many organizations strive to achieve. As a new concept, it suffers from some of the misconceptions that often plague emerging technologies or trends. Many technology providers latch on to the term and claim to provide “continuous delivery solutions” that in reality only address a small part of the continuous delivery challenge.

    Truly delivering software continuously means that all the tasks within the software development life cycle (SDLC) must be optimized to occur in parallel and continuously. This means development must be continuous, testing must be continuous, and likewise for release and operations.

    2017 will be the year that industry embraces the importance of an end-to-end continuous delivery value stream. In 2016, many organizations began their continuous delivery journey by addressing certain aspects of the SDLC; in 2017 many organizations will begin to realize a truly open and integrated continuous delivery workflow.

    1. Democratization of Continuous Delivery Tools (via the Cloud)

    Optimizing all aspects of the SDLC for continuous delivery, as mentioned above, means that related tools need to be easier to use and easier to access. Developers who have access to testing tools (left-shift) can improve the quality of code they produce. Similarly, QA engineers who have access to design requirements sooner can create more accurate test data and scenarios, earlier.

    However, for this to occur, the tools have to be both easy to access and simple to use. Developers have avoided complex testing frameworks, but with simple, easy-to-use tools available—often in SaaS forms—developers can certainly incorporate testing into their methodologies.

    In 2016, CA acquired BlazeMeter, which pioneered the notion of cloud-based performance testing employing a simple and easy-to-use (yet very powerful) product. We expect to see this trend expand into other tools within the continuous delivery value chain in 2017.

    1. The Industry Embraces Open Source (Really)

    In the past, we’ve noted that commercially motivated technology providers have tried to keep open-source technology “at arm’s length.” There may have been some lip service paid to openness, but in reality many commercial providers felt threatened by open-source solutions that were seen as competitive to their products.

    This perception has already started to change, but I believe 2017 will mark the tipping point where companies will truly embrace open-source solutions as part of their strategy; those companies that continuously resist (pun intended) will be at a significant disadvantage.

    Open source is important for many of the same reasons as the cloud: It is broadly adopted because it creates advantage in time to market, quality and cost effectiveness. Embracing open source—and by that I mean both integrating with open-source solutions and using them as part of a product strategy—only makes good business sense. It helps software development teams meet their objectives in delivering quality software faster, and at lower cost.

    Another year is rapidly coming to a close and we have a lot to look forward to in 2017.

    On the topic of continuous delivery, looking forward means spreading continuous delivery throughout the SDLC, using the cloud more and embracing open source.

    All of those things combined will help us advance the continuous delivery movement together as an industry. Here’s to another year of continuous delivery advancements!

    Don’t forget, you can also take a closer look at the ongoing evolution of continuous delivery and other DevOps-related trends by picking up a copy of my colleagues’ new book, “DevOps for Digital Leaders: Reignite Business with a Modern DevOps-Enabled Software Factory.” If you have some extra time over the holidays, you’ll find it to be an interesting deep-dive.

    — Jeff Scheaffer

  • DevOps Ascending: Guardrails, Not Guidelines – DevOps For Digital Leaders

    DevOps Ascending: Guardrails, Not Guidelines – DevOps For Digital Leaders

    The season of DevOps is upon us, if not only related to widespread adoption, then certainly in terms of industry emphasis.

    This week, at the CA World ’16 conference, my colleagues and I will be interacting with thousands of practitioners, all of whom have evolving DevOps narratives. Meanwhile, CA was a founding sponsor of the AllDayDevOps conference, held earlier this week, attracting more than 12,000 registered attendees worldwide.

    These events come on the heels of a successful DevOps Enterprise Summit held last week in San Francisco, where many of the industry’s brightest minds gathered to discuss and debate the current state of play. If activity is a reliable indicator of relevance, the growing noise around DevOps adoption has been amplified into a deafening roar.

    All of this stands as further evidence that DevOps is no longer an emerging phenomenon, but rather a ubiquitous movement transforming the manner in which nearly every organization builds and operates software.

    As a result, the DevOps movement is finally ready to move from initial framing of emerging techniques into the domain of defining best practices. Yet, at the same time, given the fluid nature of DevOps itself and its unique correlation with the individual needs of every business and environment, even this notion of best practices is one that mandates flexibility.

    Increasingly, we hear leading experts in the field espouse the need for these practices, but those that serve as “guardrails” that set useful parameters for DevOps adoption and refinement rather than concrete guidelines that dictate specific requirements.

    Such is the tone and goal of the new book that my co-authors Kieran Taylor, Peter Waterhouse and I released this week to help practitioners understand common DevOps challenges, methods and milestones.

    Titled “DevOps for Digital Leaders,” the book examines the genesis and increasing maturity of DevOps, all with the explicit intention of helping to inform further refinement among today’s organizations. After reading it, I’d argue that any practitioner, from total neophytes to hardened DevOps vets, should walk away with a greater understanding of how to bring today’s best practices to bear within their own work.

    Beyond looking at precisely how DevOps has grown in response and parallel to use of agile methodologies in the world of manufacturing thereby transforming the modern software factory, the book offers specific examples of leading adopters that are using these techniques, and related tooling, to re-engineer the very DNA of their business.

    From the core competencies of building, testing and deploying applications to continuous monitoring and management of software to help stay attuned to changing customer expectations, we sought to offer a practical guide to DevOps transformation. Other chapters touch on finer points related to key topics including creation of success metrics and measurement of ROI.

    In one of the analogies invoked throughout the book, we highlight how DevOps-empowered software factories are not unlike the engineering, design and race day teams present in the world of today’s Formula One racing series.

    Pushing themselves and constantly innovating on the fly—clawing for every second in the name of winning the overall title—the comparison fits nicely as we watch this season’s contenders fight it out down to the final race in Abu Dhabi later this month. As with winning customers in today’s applications economy, clearly every little bit counts.

    Again, no matter what—or how much—you think you know about DevOps, we’d like to think that there are tactical “learnings” sprinkled throughout the book that will broaden and deepen your understanding.

    Download your copy today, and let us help drive you down the road to victory. Alternatively, you can order a hard copy of the book via Amazon, with all proceeds being donated by the authors to fund Foundation for Excellence, which provides STEM scholarships to children in India.

    — Aruna Ravichandran