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Tag: software development

  • CircleCI Brings Insights to CI/CD Platform

    CircleCI Brings Insights to CI/CD Platform

    CircleCI has added an Insights dashboard to its namesake CI/CD platform that makes it easier to surface metrics such as duration, mean time to recovery and throughput change over time as part of an effort to optimize DevOps workflows.

    The Insights dashboard makes it easier to discover, for example, which jobs are failing, which workflows are failing tests and which workflows are taking the longest to process. DevOps teams can also gain visibility into credit spent, throughput, success rate and mean time to recovery.

    CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber said that while it’s relatively easy for a single developer to ascertain issues with a build, the Insights dashboard shines a light on how an issue is creating a cascade of issues throughout a development project. The Insights dashboard also makes it easier for managers to track the interdependencies that exist between software projects, notes Zuber.

    After nine years CircleCI now has more than 1 million users employing its CI/CD platform. A recent report published by the company shows 80% of workflows running on its platform finish in less than 10 minutes. The company also reports that the adoption of its integration modules, dubbed orbs, has increased 200% since becoming available in 2018. There are now more than 1,900 orbs listed in the registry, with more than 58,000 organizations using orbs within their CI/CD pipelines. Strategic partners include Hashicorp, Plandek, Salesforce and others.

    Competition among CI/CD platform vendors is intensifying. It’s unclear, however, if CI/CD platforms will continue to expand in ways that subsume additional functions or if much of the focus is going to be on further integrating CI/CD platforms with other platforms and tools as part of a software development strategy that revolves around best-of-breed tools and platforms. Regardless of approach, more organizations will be embracing best DevOps practices to cope with software development projects that require more discipline to successfully build, deploy and maintain. The issue now will be determining which CI/CD option to standardize on.

    Overall, Zuber noted software development in the last few years has become more complex with the rise of microservices and containers. Complexity is increasing because the way one problem is solved tends to create others, he said. The challenge now is to find ways to provide more visibility into complex software development environments, as over time more artifacts and platforms span both monolithic and microservices-based application development projects, noted Zuber. In fact, that challenge is driving many organizations that have already embraced one CI/CD platform to reconsider their options as software development becomes more challenging.

    It may be a while before most organizations are able to exercise as much control over software development as they might like. However, the one thing that is certain is no one can manage what they can’t see.

  • 5 Myths About Software Development

    5 Myths About Software Development

    2020 has broken many rules about software development. Some perceived trends, however, remain myths

    Some trends come and go, some trends stick. I remember when Docker launched and it was barely mature enough to run unit tests, and now containers are a common way for modern orgs to deploy applications. We’ve seen the rise of microservices but also the return to the monolith. We’ve seen “observability” take off in popularity, while serverless remains a buzzword with limited (but fast-growing!) adoption. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are still click-worthy headlines, but how much actual ML is being used within our applications?

    The True State of Software Development

    Let’s look at five common myths about the current state of software development and evaluate why they’re not completely true:

    Digital Transformation Initiatives Will Be Hindered by the Pandemic

    We live in an online world where every business is already a software business (or rapidly becoming one). The impact of the pandemic further highlighted ISG’s research which stated that “2020 will still see the rapid scaling of digital initiatives across industries.” While some industries have been hit so hard that digital projects had no choice but to stop (e.g. the airline industry), in many circumstances this will be the catalyst to fully embrace digital transformation.

    The Waterfall Method Still Works

    Organizations that haven’t adopted more agile and iterative approaches to building software are operating at a significant disadvantage. I know there are many big companies that still believe in doing all of the strategic planning upfront (I know this because I talk to these companies), but the truth is that it leaves very little room for flexibility and improvement in real-time. In today’s world, the customers and the users are kings—it is no longer possible to build great products without their input. If you take anything away from this article, it’s that the waterfall methodology needs to be abandoned once and for all.

    Everyone Loves Kubernetes

    K8s is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The fact of the matter is that a large chunk of the enterprise still hasn’t fully embraced the cloud, let alone started containerizing their applications. So while we have to give credit where it’s due and acknowledge that K8s is the clear leader for orchestrating containers, we also have to acknowledge that the hype doesn’t quite match the adoption. It’s still a relatively young technology.

    According to a report from Datadog last year, 45% of their customers that run containers use Kubernetes. That number is growing and is certainly impressive, but when you realize that only a chunk of their customers run containers in the first place and they are a modern monitoring solution where we’d expect to see a higher percentage than a random sampling, it’s clear that K8s is far from mainstream.

    Everyone Is Doing Tracing

    The rise of the digital age has put monitoring and observability in the forefront. As we rely more and more on online services for internal and external interactions, we better make sure they are working properly. But at the same time, regardless of industry headlines and conference talks focusing on tracing, the truth is that the industry at large has yet to adopt it.

    For most organizations, there’s so much room for improvement in getting logging and metrics right, that there’s no need to opt for tracing (yet). After all, Google built most of its global platform relying on metrics. Unlike SREs, developers often find tracing alien and very cumbersome to deploy and wield. Instead, more and more companies are opting to empower their engineers to see what’s going on in remote environments through software understandability.

    AI Will Solve Our IT Problems

    We’ve been hearing about the promises of AI in IT for a long time now. One of the terms still actively promoted that I am very skeptical of is “AIOps.” What does that even mean, really? According to a recent report from OverOps, only a very small percentage of companies are even considering AIOps in their plans for the future.

    That said, I do believe in making better, data-driven decisions. So the more data we can collect, contextualize and understand, the better. We see how this helps companies identify anomalies, alert on issues and even project out into the future. But none of this, really, is artificial intelligence.

    Conclusion

    There’s often a gap between hype and actual adoption. That’s the role of good marketing. And ultimately, hype helps drive adoption. But as technical practitioners, we need to stay rooted in reality in software development and beyond. So while I am convinced agile has proven to be the best way to build and deploy software, and that most organizations would benefit from letting go of old-fashioned waterfall processes; on the other end, I haven’t been fully convinced of the benefits of tracing and AIOps for most companies.

  • Pair Programming

    Pair Programming

  • How No-Code Software Development Speeds Digital Transformation

    How No-Code Software Development Speeds Digital Transformation

    More organizations are democratizing software development through no-code solutions that empower anyone to write applications

    In today’s fast-paced and digital business world, organizations must revise their goals and processes to achieve digital transformation and remain a viable business.

    However, most transformation efforts fail. Recent McKinsey research shows that 70% of complex, large-scale change programs don’t reach their stated goals. For most organizations, the complexity of the technology environment and the inability to swiftly implement necessary changes are major roadblocks.

    No-code solutions allow organizations to stay agile and accelerate their strategy execution by empowering power users (or business users) and developers to rapidly develop applications. Such solutions also improve the ability of IT to respond to business demands, shorten time-to-market and accelerate digital transformation.

    What Is a No-Code Solution?

    A no-code solution mitigates the need for manual programming in application development. Instead of writing lines of code, users can develop applications through simple point-and-click on specific components that can be arranged into logical sequences to create functional and feature-rich applications.

    The inherent value no-code software development is it accelerates and democratizes the application development process. With such a solution, your power users can build applications to solve critical business problems and automate tasks to increase productivity.

    5 Benefits of No-Code Software Development Solutions

    • Reduce the load on IT: As mentioned before, no-code solutions allow business users to build applications without any coding knowledge. By enabling such a change, the solution reduces the burden on the understaffed IT department. Applications to solve business challenges and increase productivity can be built quickly without relying on IT. This in turn allows the IT department to dedicate more time to business-critical apps and projects.
    • Accelerate development time: No-code solutions enable business users to take application development into their own hands; they don’t have to wait for their requests to be answered by the IT department. Tasks that used to take months (even years) to complete can now be done in a few hours or days, depending on its complexity. That is the level of acceleration a no-code solution can provide to the application development life cycle.
    • Ensure more targeted outcomes: The point-and-click configuration of no-code solutions empowers the business users and developers to quickly build solutions to meet their exact requirements and specifications. Such applications then can be updated on the fly. These aspects are important to keep the business competitive and agile. While a no-code solution allows the development of applications for immediate impact, it can also prove to be cost-efficient in the long run.
    • Fight shadow IT: When the IT department is unable to act on the requests of business users, those users start seeking solutions on their own. With the rapid rise of SaaS, they can quickly find an application to meet their needs. However, adopting such applications can lead to security vulnerabilities. A no-code solution enables businesses to eliminate the problem of shadow IT by allowing the business (power) users to develop their solutions to meet specific business needs while enabling IT to centrally control the data and user accesses.
    • Enable experimentation without risks: Experimentation is an essential part of digital transformation. No-code solutions allow organizations to test their ideas on a small scale to eliminate the setbacks. It empowers business users to experiment with their ideas, iterate projects efficiently and create solutions that can transform organizations and keep them adaptable to changes in the industry.

    To meet the challenges of digital transformation and remain competitive in the marketplace, organizations need to create an environment that enables agility and flexibility of the internal workflows and customer-facing operations. When powered by a comprehensive no-code solution, organizations can create an infrastructure that allows them to transform and innovate faster, which generates new growth opportunities and provides a competitive advantage.

  • ShiftLeft Brings Security Workflows to DevOps Processes

    ShiftLeft Brings Security Workflows to DevOps Processes

    ShiftLeft has updated its NextGen Static Analysis (NG SAST) tool to include workflows that are purpose-built for developers.

    Company CEO Manish Gupta said the security workflows are designed to make it easier for DevOps teams to incorporate them within their application development and deployment processes. In fact, a survey of more than 165 developers, application security and DevOps professionals conducted by ShiftLeft finds 89% of respondents said the current disconnect between developers and cybersecurity teams is the biggest inhibitor of productivity.

    The issue with rival static analysis tools is they were not designed from the ground up to incorporated into a DevOps process, said Gupta. As a result, he noted, security workflows are managed around application development processes rather than being incorporated within them.

    The survey finds that most IT teams are performing security scans too late in the software development life cycle (90%) and when they do discover an issue they often lack any remediation guidance (88%).

    Most existing cybersecurity processes can’t keep pace with the rate at which applications are being deployed. The survey finds nearly 70% of software development organizations are releasing multiple times per month or more, with 18% releasing at least daily.

    Gupta said NG SAST overcomes that issue by automating code analysis during every pull/merge request. That approach enables developers to address security issues much the same way they do any other bug. Rather than having to wait on a report from an application security team, developers can remediate a security issue from within their development environment log before it ever shows up in a report, he said.

    Productivity and application quality improves because vulnerabilities get fixed faster while the code at issues is still uppermost in the mind of the developer, Gupta said.

    DevOps teams can also create build rules that accept or deny merges based on how many security vulnerabilities there are, he added. That capability prevents security flaws from become too deeply embedded within the build process before they can be more easily remediated.

    Gupta said security scans are also run locally where applications are deployed, which means source code never has to leave the organization. That approach also eliminates the need for network and firewall architecture updates to access an external scanning service. It also reduces bottlenecks inside organizations that might need to do as many as 20 scans per hour, he noted.

    Overall, Gupta said it’s not uncommon to see developer productivity increase by a factor of 40 because ShiftLeft NG SAST enables scans to be run instantly. The days when developers took a coffee break while waiting for a security scan to run are now over, he said.

    Of course, the level of productivity gain for development teams that might be gained by embedding static analysis within the application development process will vary widely. However, given the fact that developers outnumber cybersecurity professionals by several orders of magnitude, it’s also readily apparent dedicated application security teams can’t keep up. Unless organizations give developers the security tools they need, any ambitions an organization may have about implementing best DevSecOps processes will remain largely a pipe dream.

  • Lifespans in Technology: Lazlo the Software Developer

    Lifespans in Technology: Lazlo the Software Developer

  • 5 Ways Traceability Is Changing to Bolster the Remote Workforce

    5 Ways Traceability Is Changing to Bolster the Remote Workforce

    Traceability has always been a useful tool in the development process, but it has become especially important since the COVID-19 outbreak and the increased remote workforce. 

    Where developers and engineers were once working side-by-side, with the ability to discuss their process and keep their team informed, they are now navigating a remote collaboration landscape. According to a 2017 study done by Stack Overflow, there is a correlation for developers between remote work and job satisfaction, and the highest job satisfaction ratings are seen from developers who work remote full time. As technology has grown to make this process easier, remote working is expected to become a norm. 

    Advanced traceability has the potential to hold teams together by allowing increased visibility into each move throughout an entire project. Without traceability, it would be nearly impossible to keep remote teams aligned and on schedule.

    Product development tools have continuously been forced to evolve to keep up with the multi-dimensional nature of requirement, test and risk management. For these processes to be successful, all related variables must work together continuously, at scale, and across teams. 

    We’ve only just started to see how traceability tools can use updated capabilities to streamline the product development process, but we know enough to discuss two things: what’s happening now and what the future may hold.

    Traditionally, traceability could be compared to a map. While not limited to a single view, maps exist to help you navigate your way to a destination. Similarly, traceability leads product developers through every step of their processes, eventually helping them reach their goal. If your map was constantly changing you’d never be able to figure out where you were going, but what if people ahead of you could update it as they went along? This would keep you in the loop of the upcoming twists and turns, and no one would feel blindsided. Traceability makes it easy to share similar production changes with your entire team, all at once.

    In the traceability process, links are built automatically which lets major decision points, reviews and approvals be captured in final documents and reports. This allows for faster and more informed decision making and these live references can exist across versions. 

    With the switch to remote work across the globe, and no immediate end in sight, developers don’t have the option of working side-by-side with their colleagues. Because of this, it is pertinent that they are able to streamline their work in every way possible, and increased traceability is expected to be a pillar of that transition. 

    At the end of the day, connecting the dots is all about making sense of everyone’s decisions. Why did they follow that process, and what factors led them to make the choices they made? 

    In the early days of traceability there wasn’t always room to include every piece of information that you might find relevant down the line. Legacy tools such as the act of manual reporting through Word documents left much to be desired. Today, that’s becoming less of an issue, as developers are allowed more meaningful accountability and insight into interconnections as they happen.

    As we look ahead, we can expect to see these capabilities grow in five different ways.

    Less Manual Effort

    Updating your traceability reports with as little manual effort as possible will be essential to a streamlined, remote workforce. As traceability becomes more advanced, the work to create and maintain it should not become more difficult. 

    More Nuance Captured, Related and Parsed for Meaning

    Improvements in software will make data gathering more precise, and increase the number of items a team can consider relevant, traceable information. This will take additional workloads off of the developers as more items are automatically traced and easily accessible.

    More Attributes Can Define and Predict a Project’s Success 

    If you have a more data-rich, detailed record of activities, it is possible to understand the past with more context and less reliance on costly manual documentation or memory. 

    Dispersed Systems Holding Relevant Information Will Start to Feel Closer and More Interconnected

    Through more dense integration and aligned processes, systems feel more controlled and connected, giving users a more seamless experience.

    Expansion of Communication and Review Capabilities for Stakeholders Who May Be Impacted by Changes

    The availability of a full audit trail of participation will make a big difference in the ease of the review process. The ability to easily see who is impacted by changes will allow teams to proactively manage the effects of said changes.

    In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the number of companies who are maintaining their remote work policies, we can expect to see more innovations related to product development workflows. These innovations will enable easier remote collaboration between colleagues and across teams, overall streamlining the product development process.

  • Participate in the Checkmarx 2020 Survey

    Participate in the Checkmarx 2020 Survey

    Checkmarx, the global leader in software security solutions for modern enterprise software development, and devopsy.kinsta.cloud are conducting a survey about the implementation of DevOps and related automation and security tools.

    The purpose of the survey is to help organizations evaluate their DevOps maturity, find out what are the most used DevOps tools and the most common challenges organizations are facing with their current DevSecOps model.

    The survey consists of 16 short multiple-choice questions. The results will depend on several factors including:

    • The organization’s progress on their DevOps adoption journey.
    • The role of the respondents in their organization and their responsibilities for DevOps transformation.
    • Automation and security tooling capabilities respondents are using for DevOps and cloud-native applications.
    • The respondents’ ability to overcome challenges and obstacles standing in the way to successfully implementing DevOps.

    We urge everyone in the DevOps space to participate in this survey. The more data we can gather, the more we’ll find out about the adoption of DevOps and AppSec tools. We’re counting on you to make this report even more valuable. Invite your friends and colleagues to contribute to the survey, too — the more the merrier.

    Click on this link to complete the survey.

    We will make an announcement when the report is ready. Stay tuned!

  • Developer Personas, or the Exquisite State of Being of June

    Developer Personas, or the Exquisite State of Being of June

  • History of Software Development – Part 1

    History of Software Development – Part 1