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Tag: software quality

  • Is DevOps Transformation a Holy Grail?

    Is DevOps Transformation a Holy Grail?

    Both development and operations teams are popping up in enterprises all over the world, and even though DevOps programs are still in the early stages, our ultra digital world calls for even more software applications. This is why many analyst and consultants alike believe that, in the near future, DevOps will be even more powerful than legacy IT. DevOps will be something businesses of all sizes will not be able to live without and the sooner you initiate the DevOps transformation, the better.

    Why DevOps Transformation?

    One of the most exciting aspects of DevOps is enacting technology practices and architecture that help organizations create an agile and continuous product flow, from development to testing, operations and all the way to deployment while increasing stability, reliability and security at the same time.

    More importantly, adopting DevOps can enact changes in the culture of your business, such as allowing teams to work more quickly with more independence. Back in the days before DevOps, deploying even a minor update, upgrade or bug fix would involve literally hundreds of developers doing weeks worth of work.

    Today’s top-performing businesses and DevOps adopters are deploying much faster, and the products they release generally have greater reliability. Still not convinced that DevOps is the holy grail? Consider the following.

    Focus on Speed, Not Cost

    Do you want to achieve the same capabilities of Amazon and Netflix? Of course! Who doesn’t? It’s easy to make an excuse that they have a lot of money to spend, but, when we look deeper, companies that achieve DevOps success are more focused on optimizing speed, not cost. Organizing and optimizing for cost creates functional silos for networking and database people, server admins and many others.

    When you optimize for speed, you are willing to cultivate talent from within, increase engineers’ salary and send them to conferences. You would not necessarily do these things if you were simply optimizing for cost. There are a whole bunch of techniques we can use to optimize for speed, such as using small, cross-functional teams that can deploy value to the customer independently without having to rely on hundreds or, in some cases, thousands of people.

    Best of all, you don’t have to be a big conglomerate to make this transition. Even small and medium-sized businesses can choose to optimize for speed, break down silos and get their product to market faster. After all, this is what DevOps is all about.

    Software Speed vs. Quality

    Businesses that rely on developing and deploying software to support or supply their customers often are faced with choosing speed or quality. If you go to market before your competitor(s), you could be cutting corners in terms of testing and quality assurance, which can ruin your launch. However, if you wait until your code is perfect, you could end up lagging behind in the race for the next big breakthrough. Fortunately, the DevOps approach can resolve this dilemma while improving the bottom line.

    Way back in 2015, the “State of DevOps Report” collected the DevOps health and habits of more than 20,000 tech professionals and found that top performers using DevOps show more agility and reliability in their releases and they were twice more likely than non-DevOps users to exceed productivity goals. In the roughly 800 companies that had a stock ticker symbol, the top performers had an almost 50 percent higher market capitalization growth over three years. This indicates that DevOps is great for IT performance as well as organizational performance.

    What everything boils down to is that all modern businesses are increasingly more reliant on technology when it comes to acquiring new customers and bringing value to those customers. It is becoming increasingly apparent that agility and speed are key attributes for companies who want to win in today’s marketplace.

    DevOps Transformation Guide

    With all of the benefits listed above, you are probably eager to get started with DevOps. Here is a simple step-by-step guide to assist you in your DevOps transformation.

    1. Conduct an Enterprise Readiness Audit – The highest probability of a successful DevOps transformation is when it is championed from the very top. The participation of business leaders is just as vital as operations, security and development teams. To get everyone on the same page and to ensure that your DevOps transformation gets off to a good start, seek assistance from an experienced, external consultant or coach. The purpose of this first step is to get executives to buy in, create mutual goals and get an understanding of what an Agile-DevOps program looks like.
    2. Create a DevOps Center of Excellence (CoE) – One of the most important things you must do here is designate an Executive DevOps lead with enterprise authority. There is no use in creating this Center of Excellence at the incorrect organizational level. It must be spearheaded by someone who has the support and trust from all branches of the organization including delivery and vendors.
    3. Create a Program Governance – Such a program will include creating a communications plan, an enablement program as well as establishing program KPIs. In terms of making a cultural impact on your organization, this is perhaps the most important step. The roles and responsibilities of practitioners will change with Agile and DevOps and it is vital that they understand collaborations between structures where historically animosity could have existed so they can break down these organizational silos. The KPIs will also need to be transitioned from individual metrics to holistic customer business results.
    4. Create a Project Intake Process – Project intake really sets the tone for how successful each new sprint that comes into the program will be. What matters here is not the tools and process, but rather the proper sizing of the tools and process. There is a need to fit for purpose when selecting accelerators, toolchain and development methods. Once it is created, the communication of the intake process needs to be disseminated across the organization. Keep gathering feedback and and continuously evolve and mature based on this feedback.
    5. Identify and Initiate Pilots – To achieve the highest probability of success, apply this step to a specific portfolio of applications or a domain solution. The purpose here is to create a value-stream map of a specific application with company wide participation on all levels. This needs to be done with the necessary amount of detail to identify manual and automated processes, end-to-end process tooling and the people and skills that are involved.
      The next aspect of the intake project is the collaboration between the subject matter experts from the Center of Excellence with the project team. The goal is to advise on “to-be” processes with proper tooling, reusable assets and automation. As the application goes through the development and test cycle, be sure to identify and capture the KPIs for the program in order to compare with existing KPIs.
    6. Scale Your DevOps Program – This final step involves taking feedback from the pilot metrics and scaling them by taking different application portfolios and running multiple release trains. It is not enough to merely do automated deployments and daily builds. The last, but by no means least, piece of the DevOps puzzle is constant feedback and optimization.

    Key Takeaways

    • To keep up with top-performing businesses and stay alive in today’s ultra-competitive, fast-paced environment, implementing DevOps is an absolute must. DevOps is not solely reserved for giant enterprises such as Amazon and Netflix and can be implemented in any-size organizations.
    • In the not too distant future, DevOps will become something businesses of all sizes will not be able to live without. To reap all the benefits DevOps has to offer, the sooner you make the transition to DevOps, the better.
    • With DevOps, there is no longer a reason to choose between speed and quality when deploying your software. When implemented properly, DevOps will allow you to deploy software with both agility and reliability increasing your customer base and the bottom line.
    • The step-by-step approach mentioned above can and should be implemented in any flavor and variety that best suits each individual organization’s needs and constraints.  Pay particularly close attention to large gaps or excessive deviations as they are red flags which will need to be corrected.

    About the Author / Stanislav Ivaschenko

    Stanislav Ivaschenko is a certified AWS solutions architect at Squadex with more than 10 years of professional experience in building, delivering, supporting and optimizing a broad range of software applications. From bare metal to the cloud, from monolith architecture to microservices his expertise and experience help to meet business needs for startups, mid-sized companies and large enterprises. He has experienced a large number of DevOps and infrastructure related tools, services and management practices.

  • Virtuoso: Focused on Quality as the First Step in DevOps Innovation

    Virtuoso: Focused on Quality as the First Step in DevOps Innovation

    I’ve found that those who have been most successful with DevOps do not actually care for the phrase. What they care about is the ability to automate, respond to, and improve their software delivery chain, as well as the tactics of moving faster and improving application quality. Another common attribute of those committed to DevOps is a focus on releases automation. The problem has been a tendency to move too quickly in the middle of the process, but in production, things start to break. 

    This is why Virtuoso decided to look at the outcome first.

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  • End-User Analytics: A Reality Check to SLAs

    End-User Analytics: A Reality Check to SLAs

    Everyone understands that a great user experience is vital for customers, but few organizations give the same level of consideration to their own employees. This lack of insight into the internal end-user experience leads to frustration, inefficiency and waste. Detailed analysis can lift the curtain, exposing the gap between your service level agreements (SLAs) and the reality of your current systems and software.

    Some of your employees may have more applications than they really need, while others may lack the tools to do their job effectively. It’s also likely that some of your employees are making do with outdated software that’s no longer fit for purpose. Before you can set about changing that, you must gain an understanding of the overall picture.

    What does your user experience look like?
    Many organizations will have trouble answering this question. They may not know how many applications they have, which ones are being used, and how well they’re performing.

    The rise of shadow IT—and the fact that 40 percent of spending no longer controlled by the IT department, according to Gartner’s “How to Manage the IT Budget Wisely Through Cost and Value Optimization,”—are further muddying the waters.

    To determine your company’s user experience, ask yourself the following questions:

    • How many users do you have, and how are their roles defined?
    • What devices are accessing your systems on your daily basis?
    • Where are all the access points located?
    • What content is being accessed?
    • What applications are being used?

    By trimming the unused apps and consolidating common apps through a virtualized XenApp or similar environment, you can redirect resources to focus where they can deliver the greatest benefit.

    SLAs are failing
    It may be tempting to take the SLA model and apply it internally, but SLAs are too simplistic and one-dimensional to deliver the insight that’s required here. Cloud service providers might focus on availability and uptime, but what do those metrics tell you about performance? Issues such as slow-loading pages usually aren’t included in the metrics, but they really should be if you want to assess the user experience.

    There’s also a trust issue here. Can you validate that your service provider is meeting expectations? What about security? Relying on provider self-reporting and a set of metrics that don’t reflect accurately the performance or the user satisfaction with the platform or application are inadequate if you really want to understand what’s going on and act to improve things.

    End-user analytics
    You need insight to real-time and historical data on all your hardware, users and applications across multiple environments inlcuding traditional, mobile and virtual. Good end-user analytics will flag security risks and suspicious behavior, record when an application hangs or crashes, and identify whether specific issues are widespread or localized. Records should be comprehensive enough that you can audit areas of concern and run root cause analysis to find ways to improve. Turn your end users and their devices into roaming sensors, which paint a factual view on usability and performance.

    Finding out how your employees really work is invaluable insight that can streamline many emotional conversations. Finding out what applications and devices they’re using—and how they’re using them—can unlock many potential benefits for different areas of your business. You can ensure costs are kept down and you maintain regulatory compliance while maximizing agility. A fresh insight into risk and productivity will help you to make informed business decisions.

    The end user knows best
    The only real measure of software quality that’s worth its salt is end-user satisfaction. Forget about what applications have been designed to do; forget about developer and service provider promises that don’t include an end-user analytical strategy. Cut to the chase and look at what’s actually happening; analyze every user session and employ business intelligence to extract actionable insights that will have a tangible impact.

    Give users the flexibility they want and the tools they need to do the best job possible. Happy and productive staff are the foundation of a good business. Seek out service providers that provide transparent end-user analytics; this will develop a foundation of trust and collectively you can provide guidance based on factual performance. Hone in on boot times, application performance or network speed: You dictate the metrics that are important to your business and metrics that make a difference to your customers.

    By acting without analyzing and putting your faith in SLAs, you’re basing the company’s future and its future path on pure guesswork. With end-user analytics, you can find out exactly what’s actually needed and ensure that you’re on the right track.

    About the Author
    crop_Nicholas Lee of FujitsuNicholas Lee is head of Global Digital Programs for Fujitsu, the Japanese information and communication technology company.

  • The Business Value in Software Quality

    The Business Value in Software Quality

    Software is taking over the world. You would be hard pressed today to find a company without dedicated software development efforts. But even in traditional business models, this is not confined to line-of-business applications. Organizations now have public, contractor and field team applications—as well as end users. And they must consider the results-focused future of software development and the need for faster, higher quality application releases. This is the business value of software quality.

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