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Tag: SDLC platform

  • Unqork Extends Automated No-Code SDLC Platform

    Unqork Extends Automated No-Code SDLC Platform

    Unqork today announced it has extended a no-code platform for managing the software development life cycle (SDLC) to include the ability to automatically document changes to application programming interfaces (APIs) and data models in addition to adding a point-in-time rollback capability.

    Ken Gavranovic, head of strategy and engineering for Unqork, said Unqork 2021.5 also adds a range of dashboards for monitoring application dependencies, service logs, revisions, logs and metrics.

    Finally, Unqork is adding tools to analyze, test and debug configurations along with enabling workflows to subscribe to events and adding a search capability for release candidates.

    Unqork is designed to present IT teams with a set of visual tools through which they can manage SDLC processes without having to build and maintain a platform made up of disparate offerings that they need to then integrate, said Gavranovic. The goal is to reduce the overall size of the team required to maintain an application development environment to enable organizations to allocate more time and resources to building applications, he added.

    The auto documentation for APIs is being added at a time when IT organizations are starting to employ a larger number of APIs as they transition toward building and deploying microservices-based applications. In addition to making it easier to reuse APIs, Unqork also now makes sure documentation for those APIs is always current, said Gavranovic.

    At the same time, Unqork is now providing a means to automatically document changes to data models based on a data store that is integrated in the platform, noted Gavranovic. That capability enables organizations to implicitly add governance capabilities to workflows with a minimal amount of friction.

    As organizations look to accelerate the rate at which applications are being developed to enable multiple digital business transformation initiatives, Gavranovic said more of them are starting to realize their existing processes are too complex and cumbersome to achieve that goal. Unqork is based on a data store that is shared by all the modules that make up the platform, which, in addition to enabling reusability, makes Unqork easier to deploy and manage, added Gavranovic.

    In addition, Gavranovic also noted that, over time, complex processes only increase the overall burnout rate of the development team. It’s hard enough to hire and retain developers today without requiring them to navigate a complex application development environment, he added. Eventually, the best talent will migrate to organizations that make it as easy for them to write code as possible, said Gavranovic.

    It’s not clear to what degree IT organizations will be revisiting the way they build software in the months ahead but as more of them realize how dependent the business now is on the timely delivery of software it’s only a matter of time before pressure to automate as much of the software development process as possible starts to mount. The cost of replacing an application development environment is, of course, not insubstantial. However, continuing to do the same thing with the expectation of producing a different result is, by definition, insanity.

  • source{d} Delivers Enterprise Edition of SDLC Platform

    source{d} Delivers Enterprise Edition of SDLC Platform

    source{d} has made available an enterprise edition of its software development lifecycle (SDLC) platform that includes visualization and analytics tools along with additional management capabilities. A free community edition of the core source{d} platform, which is stripped of most of the enterprise-class tools, also is now available in beta.

    Company CEO Eiso Kant said the enterprise edition of source{d} provides the additional tools enterprise IT organizations require to employ the platform as the equivalent of a business intelligence (BI) application for managing DevOps processes.

    The tools can launch queries against a big data repository based on the Apache Spark in-memory analytics engine running on a Kubernetes cluster, which can be populated with actual data or metadata pulled from multiple DevOps tools and platforms. That capability enables IT leaders to then query data that has been joined together in a way that surfaces actionable intelligence, said Kant.

    source{d} Enterprise achieves that goal by including Apache Superset, an open source business intelligence web application. The platform also can be extended to support SQL queries launched from other BI tools and project management applications. The enterprise edition also provides access to advanced queries and user-defined functions to address tasks such as code duplication analysis or identity matching.

    Finally, source{d} Enterprise provides authentication integration with LDAP and OpenID to limit who can edit or view queries, data sources, charts and dashboards.

    Longer-term, source{d} plans to leverage predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms more aggressively as the amount of SDLC data that gets collected by enterprise IT organizations increases.

    Kant said many enterprise IT organizations have tried and failed to build the equivalent of source{d} platform mainly because bringing together and then maintaining all the required technologies often becomes too complex an undertaking. Those efforts also have been confined largely to managing processes such as bug fixes versus including all the BI tools needed to manage software development in a way business and IT leaders can align technology initiatives to specific business goals, he said, noting the source{d} approach brings together enabling technologies such as Spark and Kubernetes to enable IT organizations to deploy an SLDC platform on-premises or in a public cloud.

    As software development increasingly grows more complex, the days when it could be managed efficiently through a project management application alone have come to an end. At the same time, more organizations realize their success ultimately comes down to how consistently they can deliver a high-quality application experience. For all the hype surrounding digital business process transformation, the core tenet is that most organizations are indeed becoming software companies. As such, they need to borrow many of the SDLC processes that successful software companies employ routinely. The only real difference is they don’t need to develop those processes from the ground up when more turnkey SDLC platforms are emerging.

    — Mike Vizard