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Tag: software delivery pipelines

  • LinearB Raises $16M for Software Delivery Intelligence

    LinearB Raises $16M for Software Delivery Intelligence

    LinearB announced today it has raised an additional $16 million in funding to advance adoption of a software delivery intelligence platform.

    Ori Keren, LinearB CEO, said rather than relying on antiquated processes that require software development teams to track progress by reentering data into a project management application, it’s now possible to automatically collect all the relevant data required from the tools and platforms being employed to build software.

    The LinearB platform correlates DevOps pipeline data gathered from code, Git, projects and releases to provide visibility and context to every member of the development team. LinearB employs machine learning algorithms to construct and correlate that data, in real-time, to provide accurate insights into project status. That’s critical, because it empowers every individual on that team to make informed decisions about which tasks to prioritize without waiting for an explicit directive, Keren said.

    LinearB will, in part, use the funding to build integrations with a wider range of DevOps platforms and tools, Keren added.

    Software delivery intelligence differs from value stream management (VSM) platforms; though they provide similar insights, those surfaced by LinearB are aimed at developers rather than C-level executives trying to optimize deployment of limited resources across multiple teams, said Keren. In many ways, the data collected by LinearB could be employed to better inform a VSM platform, Keren added.

    LinearB, in contrast, makes it easier to identify which teams and projects need additional help in near-real-time using metrics surfaced in a dashboard that track, for example, cycle times. The goal is to provide insights that make it easier to predict and eliminate project delays, remediate high-risk code before it is included in a production environment, eliminate bottlenecks and make certain the focus of the DevOps team remains on tasks of the highest priority.

    More than 1,500 software development teams are already using LinearB as an alternative to traditional project management applications. Most of those customers are building commercial applications, so the goal now is to extend the reach of LinearB into the enterprise, said Keren.

    LinearB, of course, doesn’t eliminate the need for project managers. However, it does eliminate the need for project managers to nag developers to update a project management application. Given the rate at which application development projects are now updated, much of the data in a project management application is outdated shortly after it is entered.

    There’s a lot of pressure on application development teams these days. Many projects have been accelerated as part of an effort to more rapidly embrace digital business transformation in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The challenge for many developers is they, too, are working from home to help combat the spread of the virus. That often results in interactions with managers over video conferencing calls that lack context. Having access to a software development intelligence platform should enable everyone with a vested interest in application deployment speed to make more informed decisions faster.

  • Doing DevOps in an Interconnected World

    Doing DevOps in an Interconnected World

    Doing DevOps would be simple if you had total control over the tools, code and infrastructure that your company used. But the fact is, you don’t. Instead, we live in a world where most CI/CD chains connect in some way to third-party resources or processes.

    In other words, doing DevOps effectively means integrating with entities that are external to your organization. Here’s a look at what this entails in practice and why it’s so important.

    The Interconnected World of DevOps

    Conversations about DevOps often assume that all DevOps processes happen internally. In reality, many software delivery pipelines depend on third-party resources and services. Consider the following examples of ways companies could make their software delivery chains dependent in part upon third-party agendas:

    • They integrate open source code into their codebases and therefore depend on an open source community to write some of their code.
    • They maintain relationships with partners and need to be sure their release schedules and toolchains are compatible with their partners’ needs.
    • They need to make sure the applications they deliver work on different operating systems, browsers and hardware devices that are controlled by third parties.
    • They are subject to regulatory rules handed down by third parties and must ensure their delivery chains meet those regulatory requirements.
    • Their applications depend on APIs that are designed and updated by third parties.

    In these ways and more, the CI/CD pipelines organizations build to do DevOps need to be able to integrate with, and adapt to, decisions made by third parties. If they don’t, the organizations risk problems such as broken code, the loss of partners and regulatory compliance issues.

    Succeeding at Interconnected DevOps

    This is why it’s critical to design CI/CD pipelines and other DevOps processes in ways that make them mesh with third-party resources and services. In practice, this means:

    • Adopting tools that are flexible and have broad coverage. You don’t want to tell a partner you can no longer work with their code because your CI server doesn’t support their new programming language.
    • Use branching in the CI/CD process. Multiple branches give you more flexibility to support different target environments. They also help you react to sudden changes made by third parties without having to overhaul your entire CI/CD process.
    • Make sure your collaboration and communication channels integrate with those of third parties on whom you depend. If you use open source code in your application, for example, add the open source project’s security announcements to your Slack channel so you’ll be notified right away when a vulnerability arises.
    • Choose your integrations wisely. Just because you can integrate a third-party API into your application, for example, doesn’t mean you should. Too many dependencies put the efficiency of your CI/CD pipeline at risk.

    No matter the details of your CI/CD chain, the most important thing is simply to recognize that we live in a very interconnected world and most organizations don’t have total control over their software delivery processes. That’s just a fact of modern DevOps. But with the right planning and strategies, you can ensure that third-party dependencies add value to your software delivery pipeline rather than creating unnecessary risk and overhead.

    — Chris Tozzi