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Tag: devops process

  • CD 101 Podcast: How to Build the Modern Software Factory with Agile Development and Continuous Delivery

    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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 4 Top Tips for Developing a New Feature

    4 Top Tips for Developing a New Feature

    As a backend developer at CA BlazeMeter, I recently had the chance to work on a big feature for our web app. The feature required a massive change on our backend code, a big change on our frontend and multiple migrations. You know what I’m talking about—it was one of those projects that developers fear.

    But, I gained a lot of valuable experience from the project. Not only did we deliver a kick-ass feature, I also learned the importance of teamwork and patience when developing something new. Armed with those two values, and the right tools and technologies, you can deliver a new feature quickly and efficiently.

    Here are a few more things that I learned that should prove helpful whether you’re developing a major feature or one that only requires a minor code change.

    Tip 1: Plan to understand the development requirements

    The process of development starts way before you start coding, with planning. After the product manager decides what needs to be developed, R&D needs to understand the cost: how many days (or weeks) of development the feature will take, how many people will be needed and which APIs are required.

    To do that, the product manager needs to conduct at least three “grooming” sessions with backend, frontend and QA leaders. The grooming sessions start with the product manager presenting the product flow and requirements.

    Since no one wants to read a lot of text (except perhaps the awesome readers of this article), the product manager should prepare mockups. They don’t have to be designed or colorful, but they do need to show the team what the feature looks like in his or her vision. During our grooming sessions, we used Balsamiq, which lets you create screen sketches for how the product is supposed to look, feel and work.

    Editing screen sketches using Balsamiq

    After the initial presentation, the sessions should include a lot of open discussion—asking questions, checking for answers and examining compliance, etc. —until everyone is satisfied and understands what the feature requires from them and from others.

    This is the time and place for frontend, backend and QA to give their opinion about the schedule and to alert and flag any potential problems in development or extreme use cases. It’s the role of the product team to answer questions and change the flow and requirements until there are no R&D rejections.

    Afterward, the frontend and backend leaders need to create a feature development plan, sitting down to determine what data they need to transform the product vision into a real thing. Or in other words, which APIs are required for each flow or button, how long each step is supposed to take, including buffers, and the order of development. APIs are the agreed “contract” between the development teams. After determining the contract terms, each team can proceed individually.

    I recommend you write your APIs in Swagger, which turns YAML files into detailed HTML pages with all the APIs.

    Swagger Editor

    This plan needs to be transparent to everyone working on the project. In fact, it’s even better if each project participant can add and describe scenarios. Tools such as TestLink and Atlassian do just that. Then, when the code is ready, developers can go over the list and see everything is covered.

    We will need to stick to this schedule later on, especially when new demands unrelated to the feature come in, such as fixing bugs. Sticking to this plan is the best way to distinguish the wheat from the chaff of the development process.

    Start writing automation ASAP

    After planning, we want everyone to start working, and not only the backend. To do that, the backend can prepare mocks, either through outsourcing services such as JSON servers, which show inputs and outputs, or by writing dummy code.

    I mentioned earlier that we used Swagger to write APIs. We also used it to generate a server in NodeJS/Python, like this:

    Generating a JSON Server through Swagger

    From this moment on, frontend can begin writing and building screens and QA can start writing API automated testing, by using tools suh as JMeter. At this point, frontend and QA have the response codes and response bodies; they know which features to put where; and which APIs they need and how to use them.

    QA also know which data they’re missing, such as field names and field data. Sure, the backend code isn’t ready yet and all of the automated exams will return “red” instead of “green,” but the main issue is making sure everyone is as prepared as possible.

    This includes load and performance testing. You can use open-source tools such as JMeter, which is enhanced by CA BlazeMeter. By uploading our test script into, configuring the number of virtual users and ramp-up time, determining geo-locations to test from and analyzing KPIs to determine trends and the health of our system, we can ensure our product is delivered to our customers without crashing.

    This is also true about sending code to QA: Developers should test their code themselves and ensure that when they commit their code, it works 99.9 percent of the time.

    By starting automation as soon as possible, you can minimize future bottlenecks in the development process.

    Ensure the team communicates and works together

    Like I said before, teamwork is the most basic requirement when creating a new feature. This is because new questions arise during development and because requirements change. Therefore, everyone in the team needs to be in sync all the time, from the product manager and the designer to the developers and QA.

    Open communication lines are crucial because everyone is working on the same product at the same time, but each developer or QA should be working on a different part of the product and on different functionalities. Communication ensures each person’s work is compatible with the rest of the team’s work. This saves time, prevents frustration and redundancy and ensures maximum professionalism.

    To make sure everyone knew what was happening, we used Slack and opened a dedicated channel for the creation of this feature. We also had daily (short!) standups where we discussed what we have and what is missing.

    Opening a Slack channel

    Communication also includes team and assignment management. JIRA, our primary issue tracking tool, offers Kanban-style, Scrum and fully customizable boards, which show the progress of each development task, including the developer assigned to it, and his or her exact status or phase.

    This helps you understand what other people are working on, and just as importantly, where people are stuck. If you can, get everyone to work in an open space and put a large screen in the middle of it. This lets you stay in sync at all times.

    We used JIRA to open and manage bugs as well. This was helpful when multiple QAs found the same bug. It’s important to carefully choose which tickets are opened and put them under one epic, so everyone stays focused.

     

    JIRA Dashboard

    Another important aspect of communication is ensuring everyone uses the same terminology, as sometimes people might use the same term to describe different things or different terms to describe the same things. To prevent mixups that could waste your time, make sure everyone is on the same page. For example, do you say “system admin” or “<name (ex. BlazeMeter)> admin”?

    Work on the same development environments

    It’s important that everyone works on identical development environments and even on the same version of the tools and libraries. Otherwise, it could cause an (in)compatibility mess, including a lot of unnecessary back and forth and even might cause bugs to pop up. This environment needs to be as similar as possible to production, but only on a smaller scale.

    Conclusion

    Now look at the feature that came out of all that work here. I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to work on it with an awesome team.

    I hope these best practices help you the next time you develop a new feature. Don’t forget to keep going agile after development and delivery by running tests in a continuous environment such as Jenkins for every commit.

    CA BlazeMeter works with Jenkins, ensuring you can load test in the cloud and analyze your data while shifting left. You can also use different APM tools, such as New Relic, AppDynamics and CA APM to alert you about errors before QA, which saves time.

    — Dor Atias

  • 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

  • Predictable Progress: Tracking DevOps Maturity Metrics

    Predictable Progress: Tracking DevOps Maturity Metrics

    As DevOps methodologies continue to evolve, we’re naturally seeing an increased emphasis on the cultivation of related maturity metrics.

    For instance, in the 2016 State of DevOps Report, researchers with DORA took an initial stab at creating relevant ROI measurements.

    Similarly, a new report issued by researchers Coleman Parkes, sponsored by CA Technologies, offers additional evidence that as agile and DevOps processes continue to expand, today’s practitioners are increasingly employing metrics to optimize their efforts.

    The report, titled, “Accelerating Velocity and Customer Value with Agile and DevOps,” finds some form of adoption among nearly every enterprise, with 87 percent having adopted agile to some degree and 73 percent leveraging DevOps.

    Related to the overall maturity of these practices, those organizations that are moving to embrace the techniques most broadly are predictably seeing greater returns. Yet, despite the widespread adoption, only a third have deployed either practice widely, according to the research.

    Percentage of Advanced Adopters Reporting Improvements in Customer Experience

     

    Based on a survey of 1,770 senior business and IT executives, the study also closely investigates the specific KPIs that organizations are using to gauge how agile and DevOps initiatives are translating into customer interactions.

    Most notably, “advanced” agile and DevOps adopters have observed more than an 87 percent improvement in overall customer experience, compared to “basic” adopters.

    In terms of how those efforts are affecting business drivers, Coleman Parkes finds:

    • Advanced agile practitioners are experiencing a 40 percent improvement in time-to-decision, compared to 33 percent for basic users.
    • Advanced DevOps adopters have noted a 42 percent improvement in speed-to-market, compared to only 24 percent for basic practitioners.

    Key Performance-Invoking Indicators

    To that end, the research highlights specific KPIs that organizations are using to measure the impact the agile and DevOps practices are having on customers. In fact, the study finds that between two thirds and three quarters of all the organizations surveyed have established such measurements.

    At least half of these focus on business or customer-related metrics, reflecting how “critical software has become to businesses’ ability to achieve their core mission,” Coleman Parkes researchers note.

    Among the mostly widely invoked metrics, include:

    • Business growth (specifically revenue): over 73 percent
    • Operational or process efficiency: over 73 percent
    • Employee productivity: over 73 percent
    • Customer experience: over 71 percent
    • IT-related costs: over 71 percent
    • Speed-to-market: over 71 percent
    • Customer satisfaction (via NPS): over 70 percent
    • Time-to-decision: over 70 percent
    • Quality of development: over 70 percent
    • Employee retention: over 64 percent

    If increasing applications delivery speed and overall organizational velocity are, in fact, the primary goals of engaging agile and DevOps, the research bears out that the techniques are having the desired effect. After all, the survey finds that time-to-decision and speed-to-market are being accelerated among approximately a third of the organizations studied.

    Related to other notable KPIs, Coleman Parkes highlights that a full three-quarters of adopters have moved the needle on overall customer experience, along with employee recruitment and retention, a significant benefit that was also highlighted in the State of DevOps Report.

    Along with positively impacting customers, the reality is clearly that agile and DevOps are also making a big difference in allowing companies to improve the atmosphere for their workers—a huge benefit when you consider the shortage of talent in IT today, and how much it typically costs to attract new employees, just as DORA’s researchers noted.

    Other key findings by Coleman Parkes include “before and after” metrics that many organizations are observing related to their continued adoption and advancement of the involved methodologies themselves.

    I encourage you to download the entire report, and leverage it to measure how far you’ve come with Agile and DevOps transformation—and where you may need to re-examine your efforts.

    — Aruna Ravichandran

  • Assembling the Key Components of Continuous Delivery

    Assembling the Key Components of Continuous Delivery

    As agile methodology was popularized at the start of last decade, engineering teams gained the opportunity to begin producing software in shorter cycles, while releasing it reliably at more frequent intervals.

    This concept garnered greater attention in 2009, when Tim Fitz published his thoughts on continuous deployment. By the time Jez Humble authored his seminal book, “Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation,” in 2010, the approach started to get significant mindshare. In the book, Humble advanced the three building blocks of continuous delivery: configuration management, continuous integration and continuous testing.

    Thereafter, Agile Operations—the practice of using end-to-end monitoring, fueled by analytics, to increase operational agility—appeared. This complemented continuous delivery, with the goal of increasing the quality and velocity of software delivery while minimizing overhead.

    Since then, and particularly over the last six years as DevOps adoption has exploded, there’s been significant discussion (and confusion) over the opportunity to embrace “continuous everything” across the software development life cycle (SDLC) to deliver functionality continuously and optimize end-user experience.

    Today, having spoken to hundreds of organizations employing agile and DevOps, it’s possible to expand on these concepts to better define the key components of continuous delivery.

    In this blog, I’ll detail the precepts of “CD” that CA’s customers recognize as critical in reducing the time, risk and expense of software delivery by frequently releasing smaller batches of code with extensive visibility and traceability.

    These building blocks of continuous delivery are:

    • Continuous development & integration,
    • Continuous testing. and
    • Continuous release.

    Continuous Development and Integration

    When it comes to delivering quality apps faster, every second counts.

    That’s why it’s important to automate the planning, development, unit testing and integration of code with different inter-dependent components, all while packaging it for quality assurance. We categorize these activities under continuous development and integration, as shown in Fig 1.

    This all starts with sprint planning and modeling of requirements in agile management software. Unit tests can be created automatically, based on requirements and use case stories. These unit tests then can be executed automatically based on pre-defined criterion, using automatically generated synthetic data.

    Fig 1: Continuous Development and Integration

    Next, virtual service interfaces can be generated automatically by simulating unavailable systems across the SDLC, allowing developers, testers, integration and performance monitoring teams to work in parallel—driving faster delivery, along with higher quality and reliability.

    The integrated code can be built and tested automatically against validation criterion, and upon passing, made available for continuous testing. This later phase, after code development and before QA, is also commonly referred to as continuous integration.

    Continuous Testing

    Continuous testing across app delivery not only enables enterprises to shift testing left, engaging it earlier in the SDLC, but it also helps them shift right, leveraging the same processes throughout staging and production.

    After the unit tests are passed and integrated builds are made available for QA, functional and performance tests can be completed—before the build is made available for staging and production. Various activities during continuous testing are shown in Fig 2.

    Before the functional and performance tests are performed, the build promotion criterion and configuration also need to be validated. Testers require provisioning of QA environments to deploy the build, along with virtual services and test data. Using test data management to create a subset of production data and mask sensitive information is another continuous testing requirement.

    Fig 2: Continuous Testing

    It’s also important to engage application performance monitoring in the QA environment before running automated tests, providing feedback about any problems back to developers.

    After the automated tests are executed and promotion criterion are met, the build is ready for deployment in staging or production environments.

    Continuous Release

    Continuous release matches release velocity to development velocity through controlled and scalable deployments.

    The goal of continuous release (sometimes referred to as continuous deployment) is to continually and automatically deploy the build into production; similar activities also can be performed in a staging environment.

    As shown in Fig 3, build configuration needs to be validated, with the production environment configuration updated before being sent to production. As with application code, configuration is also maintained in the version control system and can be automated for deployment.

    Fig 3: Continuous Release

    After the build is deployed into production, application monitoring should be initiated to track performance and customer experience. Feedback from the production environment can be passed back to developers to guide enhancements or sprint backlogs.

    This blog aims to outline core CD activities, and in subsequent articles I’ll provide additional details on entry and exit criterion, as well as metrics useful in tracking continuous development & integration, continuous testing and continuous release.

    In the meantime, check out, “DevOps for Digital Leaders: Reignite Business with a Modern DevOps-Enabled Software Factory,” a new book authored by my colleagues Aruna Ravichandran, Kieran Taylor and Pete Waterhouse.

    Based on learnings gained from numerous customers who have already embraced CD and DevOps, it highlights key practices for starting this journey, related ROI metrics and other useful tips.

    — Anand Akela

  • Every Business Has Become a Technology Business

    Every Business Has Become a Technology Business

    Contributor: ITSM ACADEMY-Drew Lapatin

     

    Every business has become a technology business.

    Let that one sink in for a moment.  With the internet of things ever increasing it has become ever more imperative for us to make wise decisions about how to move forward on which IT services we should be delivering into the future (pipeline), how long we should continue to deliver our current (catalog), and when should we retire them (retire).  We literally could be an app away from becoming irrelevant.

    It is no longer enough to satisfy our customers, we must now delight and excite them.  They have to be able to enjoy the experience of how they receive these services along with the knowledge and comfort that the service provider of choice can continue without interruption to deliver this level of performance and functionality and even deliver new capabilities swiftly and often.

    By engaging in DevOps principles & practices (Scrum and Agile) at the strategic level we can begin to prioritize new and changing customer requirements more effectively. Normally projects will start with a given set of requirements.  In an Agile project (yes, we are going to use an Agile project format to continue the theme of blending ITIL and DevOps) the product backlog will contain these requirements as user stories, but as we all know those stories/requirements/attributes can change very rapidly. One tool that could help us rank these attributes and ensuring the delight of customers is the Kano model.

    A Kano model shows us there are three different factors in customer satisfaction.

    They are as follows:

    • Basic factors are aspects of the service that have to be in place for the customer to receive the service. They may not offer any obvious value, but if they fail, or are not delivered, customers will become very dissatisfied. These factors are sometimes called ‘must-have utility’ or the very least the service provider can deliver for a particular service.  Basic factors are not responsible for high levels of satisfaction, unless they alone fulfil the customer’s requirements completely.
    • Performance factors are factors that enable a customer to get more of something that they need, or a higher level of service quality. These are the factors that customers are interested in and the price they are willing to pay is directly impacted.  These factors result in customer satisfaction when delivered and customer dissatisfaction when unfulfilled.
    • Excitement factors are attributes of a service that are generous, and which customers do not expect. When they are offered (within reason) they cause higher levels of satisfaction. The service provider is seen to be ‘going the extra mile’. While excitement factors result in the quickest and highest levels of customer satisfaction, they are expensive to maintain, since the service provider is offering more than necessary at the same price. These factors may be exciting, but they are not essential to the service, and are therefore also referred to as ‘nice-to-have utility’. Internal service providers should be careful of introducing excitement factors in the interest of ‘customer satisfaction’ without doing a proper business case to justify the additional costs.

     

    Drew Bio

    — Alice Acedia

  • Keep Applications Running by Testing Early, Continuously

    Keep Applications Running by Testing Early, Continuously

    Almost every product we buy or use today goes through some form of extensive testing before it’s released on the market; typically, these tests are designed to replicate the worst-case scenarios that a product may encounter under real-world conditions.

    Automobiles, for example, go through extensive hot and cold weather testing in remote locations, and are driven over obstacle-laden tracks designed to push the limits of their durability. Even seemingly mundane objects such as children’s toys are exposed to abusive simulations to ensure that they don’t harbor any potentially hidden and harmful effects.

    On the current landscape, applications are the face of your business, often serving as the battleground where consumer loyalty is won or lost. Given this reality, it seems crazy to think that any applications are released having only been exposed to a minimum of tests. Yet, in the name of getting to market quickly, that’s far too often the case.

    As disciplines including agile and continuous delivery continue to increase the speed at which development teams can release software, it’s easy to put the crunch on testing in the rush to get an update released. But that’s a costly mistake in the long run, as research has shown that it is 50 percent less expensive to find an error in testing than to address the same error once it has reached production, and more than 90 percent cheaper  when addressed in the development/coding phase.

    Given the dramatic cost savings of addressing errors in development, clearly the goal of any organization focused on continuous delivery should be to shift testing left so a greater number of defects are found early in the development process. This is what we refer to as continuous testing, and it’s a huge part of the reason why I am so excited about CA’s acquisition of BlazeMeter.

    Performance load testing should be a core element of any continuous testing strategy because it is a critical factor in determining system reliability. Similar to the worst-case scenario testing that consumer products undergo, performance testing can quickly uncover applications defects that might otherwise go unnoticed. After all, the manner in which a system operates with a few hundred concurrent users may be very different than how it runs with thousands of users.

    BlazeMeter enables today’s development, operations and DevOps teams to conduct this critical performance testing earlier in the development process, saving countless hours and resources. The company is also competing—and winning—in a highly competitive marketplace where it has been pitted against much larger, more entrenched competitors.

    Part of the reason BlazeMeter is winning is its focus on offering a SaaS-based solution that is highly cost-effective and easy to engage. Using this model, customers can try  out the testing software with a few clicks, and then quickly move forward to broadly adopt the system. Another catalyst to its success: BlazeMeter was built using open source tools, such as Apache JMeter, used widely in the development community for performance and load testing. As a result, BlazeMeter can easily run and analyze JMeter and other open source-based load tests—such as Selenium, Gatling and Locust—within a commercial-grade performance testing system.

    This combination of a SaaS delivery model and incorporation of open-source tools, augmenting strong performance testing functionality, make BlazeMeter very complementary to CA’s existing continuous delivery solutions, including its CA Service Virtualization, CA Test Data Manager, CA Agile Requirements Designer and CA Release Automation products.

    At CA, we’re committed to providing the most comprehensive, integrated and open continuous delivery ecosystem, allowing our customers to release swiftly, test agilely and constantly increase reliably. The addition of BlazeMeter will further enable customers test continuously, thereby increasing agility and the overall quality of their software, to ensure that applications don’t break down on the side of the virtual road.

    — Aruna Ravichandran

  • REP SPOTLIGHT: Daysha DevOps Solutions

    REP SPOTLIGHT: Daysha DevOps Solutions

    DevOps Institute: Tell us a little about your organization.

    Daysha DevOps Solutions: Daysha DevOps Solutions is a leading IT services and solutions company focused on helping companies to deliver their IT projects, transform their capabilities and ultimately to provide value to their customers and stakeholders. Our goal is to help organizations benefit from disruptive technologies, such as cloud computing, Lean/Agile software development and DevOps. We work across a range of industries including financial services, government, aerospace and high-tech.

    Daysha DevOps Solutions has partnered with the best-in-class product vendors to help organizations improve their ability to deliver software quicker, more frequently, with higher quality and less risk. Our DevOps solutions address all stages from project planning right through to deployment.

    DOI: What other topics do you teach or consult on?

    Daysha DevOps Solutions: Daysha bring proven expertise and consults across the wide domain of DevOps. Partnering with vendors such as Atlassian, App Dynamics, Chef and Zephyr, we offer expertise, training and tooling to support all aspects of the DevOps journey.

    Our IT Project Services team consists of experienced IT consultants including project managers, technical experts and business analysts. These can be deployed to help augment your existing IT teams or to provide specific project help, such as requirements gathering, gap analysis and process improvement.

    DOI: What type of interest in DevOps are you seeing in your region?

    Daysha DevOps Solutions: The interest in DevOps is growing, though to be honest, a lot of organizations are wary of it. That said, the same organizations are heavily rooted in traditional waterfall environments. There is a recognition that DevOps is the way forward but also a realization that cultures need to change first.

    DOI: How do you think that DevOps contributes to the business’ value stream?

    Daysha DevOps Solutions: Primarily by delivering value earlier and increasing the visibility of the IT contribution to the business stream.

    DOI: What topic area in DevOps excites you the most?

    Daysha DevOps Solutions: How business can get more value from IT. In other words, turning an IT department into a revenue-generating tool rather than a cost.

    DOI: Why should enterprises and individuals consider formal DevOps Training?

    Daysha DevOps Solutions: It is the first step, and a certified first step, on the road to improving the value of IT functionality.