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Tag: toolchain

  • The Right DevOps Tools for Value Stream Velocity

    The Right DevOps Tools for Value Stream Velocity

    Think of DevOps tools as stepping stones to releasing new functionality into the hands of your customers faster and more frequently. Working together, tools automate processes and help companies become modern software factories. But isolated tools, like a lone rock in the middle of a river, are much less useful.

    Disparate tools may help an individual or a team do their job, but they impede the progress of the larger organization. To achieve desired efficiency across the application life cycle, companies may waste time and amass technical debt by integrating tools with scripts.

    The other answer is that organizations get restrictive. They may establish a “center of excellence” for DevOps that prescribes a toolchain that works together, but are those tools going to be the best fit for all individuals and teams, supporting an agile mindset?

    The ideal scenario is for a DevOps toolchain to become an integrated, dynamic continuous delivery powerhouse where “best fit” tools work in concert to enable better performing teams and better customer experiences.

    Start with the Right Tools for the Job

    DevOps teams are focusing on automating and streamlining all aspects of the application life cycle. It makes sense to choose the tool that’s best for the job. And teams should feel free to experiment and take advantage of new tools emerging every day that solve new problems or do a better job solving existing problems.

    Typical areas of DevOps tool investment include:

    • Planning and managing development work
    • Managing, tracking and documenting all code changes
    • Building, managing and deploying containers
    • Automating iterative builds/continuous integration
    • Developing and deploying to cloud platforms
    • Automating the deployment of applications into environments at all stages
    • Provisioning, configuring and monitoring environments
    • Managing all types of testing with the right requirements and data
    • Validating security before vulnerabilities become a problem
    • Promoting better agile team collaboration
    • Monitoring and managing an application in production

    These tool categories each serve a vital role in the application life cycle. However, there remains a significant lack of coordination and shared knowledge across the DevOps toolchain to generate the value stream velocity that can keep businesses competitive and customers engaged. For example, if a testing function is isolated, it becomes a black hole of activity and often a bottleneck to delivery.

    Build the Smarter DevOps Toolchain

    When teams can visualize, orchestrate and track the continuous delivery value stream from development through production, the pipeline becomes an intelligent entity of its own. How is the pipeline performing? How is it adding value to the organization? How do you improve the pipeline?

    For example, by integrating the planning and management solutions as part of the value stream, you can keep track of the user stories—including where they are deployed, what tests have been done and the results. Bi-directional integration enables automatic updates in the planning/management tool. Layer in collaboration tool integrations, and dev teams can get instant feedback and respond more quickly, shifting quality left.

    The result: real-time information and the ability to plan and prioritize more effectively. Release and development teams now have a shared view and understanding of release status and business implications.

    The testing function is another area where tools can work better together. Instead of sequential and separate functional, integrated, performance, API or security testing, you can build a testing workflow that runs in parallel, automatically promotes tasks, monitors progress and sends feedback of testing status. This can include orchestrating the generation of the right test cases, test data and virtual services for the app under test. With all the testing knowledge gathered in one place, it’s easy to see testing gaps and determine the risk of a release.

    Launch DevOps Mission Control

    A control center that manages the continuous delivery value stream can help teams not only manage the health and schedule of an active release more effectively, but it can also provide the visibility and analytics to help teams iteratively improve.

    There are a number of tools on the market that look beyond the silos of the application life cycle to connect and extract value from an end-to-end toolchain. As you assess tools that can enable a dynamic value stream, ensure they have capability in these five areas:

    1. Plug and play integrations: Does the tool support common DevOps plug-ins? How easy is it to integrate tools, whether they are open source, commercial or home grown?
    2. Full pipeline visibility: Does it enable orchestration and tracking of all releases at all stages—planning, development, test and production—including feedback loops and planning for the next release?
    3. Continuous quality: Does it support a shift-left testing model to ensure testing happens continuously and rigorously? Does it help you prioritize your testing and automate risk assessment for your releases?
    4. Business value alignment: Does it provide intelligence about the app content in the pipeline? Can you see what code is deployed where in the pipeline and its status? Can you map how the content of a release aligns to business priorities?
    5. Actionable analytics: Does it extract meaningful data points from pipeline operation to provide analytics that support real-time decisions, as well as inform improvements over time? Can you get insights into release and pipeline performance, testing coverage and speed, release readiness, team productivity, and so on?

    With intelligent integration of your DevOps toolchain you can increase your value stream velocity and deliver the best quality apps—every single time.

    — Patricia Johnson

  • DevOps: State of the Art in 2017, and Why CDOs Should Care

    DevOps: State of the Art in 2017, and Why CDOs Should Care

    Nine years after the term “DevOps” was coined, the following two questions seem still open:

    From the perspective of the industrialization of work labor also in the software industry, the answer to the first question appears very clear to me: DevOps is the third (digital) revolution of software and IT services, where CI/CD was equivalent of the second industrial revolution as elaborated in more detail in this article. Chances are high that further transformation can be expected to merge it with the fourth industrial revolution, as stated here: “DevOps will underpin the 4th industrial revolution.” That is also why chief digital officers (CDOs) should be in contact with DevOps teams in their organizations.

    Now, I see two important things have happened end of 2016: First, the establishment of DevOps Express, as 14 leading enterprise vendors have recognized the importance of interoperability of their tools for leveraging DevOps stack. The demand for this—the second important thing—has been (in my opinion) totally confirmed by CA’s infographic going viral, which maps a broad selection of tools around the software development life cycle. Adding the lifecycle view has been definitely an improvement beyond an overview of tools as proposed in the Periodic Table from XebiaLabs. Still, we are not done. Let me explain why.

    The next challenge I see is there is yet no agreement within the community what is—or could be—a reference DevOps toolchain (meta) model or process (meta) model. Is it:

    • “Plan, Develop, Test, Release, Operate,” as suggested by CA, or maybe
    • “Plan, Create, Verify, Package, Release, Configure, Monitor,” (Wikipedia) or
    • “Requirements, Development, Build, Testing, Deployment, Execution” (Len Bass et al.)?
    Source: Wikipedia, DevOps toolchain

    In the seminal book, “Continuous Delivery,” this life cycle was suggested as “Commit stage, automated acceptance testing, automated capacity testing, manual testing, release.” While we talk so much about culture in DevOps, we should recognize the need to align on a high-level view on the DevOps life cycle that is well-understood and accepted by most stakeholders.

    To have a track of all this and attract other collaborators, I have created an open format (SVG) infographic and published it as a GitHub project. Dear colleagues at the DevOps Express consortium, this is your call! Let’s join forces and accomplish this together.

    Next Steps

    After we will have (I hope so) a community-accepted DevOps meta-model toolchain setup and all important tools in place on the ecosystem, many more interesting questions will appear:

    • Which of these DevOps tools leverage open APIs to reduce risk of vendor lock-in?
    • Which tools belong to which generation of systems, leveraging optimization of human labor?

    Why DevOps is also CDO’s Business

    The fourth industrial revolution builds on digital process data, right? So if we aggregate all that data spread across and produced by the DevOps tools, we could get useful and holistic analytics and insights about IT in much faster time than we can imagine today.

     

    About the Author / Peter Muryshkin

    1Peter studied M.Sc. in Applied Computer Science and works in management consulting roles focusing on complex analysis and customer satisfaction, like IT Business Analyst and Change Manager. His current scientific research focus is digital transformation applied to the field of software engineering in large distributed organizations. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

     

     

     

  • 3 Key Uses of a DevOps Toolchain

    3 Key Uses of a DevOps Toolchain

    DevOps toolchain infographicThe ultimate goal of DevOps is to streamline development. DevOps doesn’t necessarily require tools and is not defined by its tools, but for most organizations, they play an integral role in automating tasks and ensuring processes run as efficiently as possible. When used together, a combination of DevOps tools form a DevOps toolchain, which enables teams to flow smoothly through the DevOps life cycle.

    While the integration of DevOps is by no means ubiquitous, we’re witnessing its growing presence in the mainstream IT world. A plethora of tools and systems has emerged to facilitate continuous build, test, release and deploy, but constructing an effective DevOps toolchain to run efficiently can be a tricky undertaking. It often requires a good deal of experimentation and continuous refinement to ensure that critical processes and hand-offs are effectively automated.

    While the specific tools and systems you utilize will depend on your organization’s unique needs, it’s helpful to keep three key uses of a DevOps toolchain in mind to guide your planning and organization. Let’s take a closer look at the primary ways that an organization can benefit from a DevOps toolchain.

    1. Resolve Product Defects. The first use for a DevOps toolchain is to help resolve individual product defects more efficiently. Automation enables you to generate dependable, targeted alerts to your team about major IT incidents. This can not only improve the speed with which you resolve issues, but also help to proactively sidestep potential problems from escalating and damaging your customer experience.

    2. Refine Incident Management. The second way to use your toolchain is to further refine your management of major incidents and to facilitate the rapid and automatic progression from pinpointing critical events to escalating targeted communications to the right team members and following through until the issues have been resolved. It’s especially important that communications are delivered only to the appropriate team members—mass notifications, particularly to teams of hundreds or thousands of personnel, are ineffective and don’t do anything to combat alert fatigue.

    3. Innovate Faster. Finally, remember that your toolchain is meant to help you innovate faster by driving continuous build, test, release and deploy. Combining monitoring, diagnostics and continuous testing can help your organization ensure rapid delivery and follow best practices for agile development. Decentralized version control, for instance, is used by 85 percent of software organizations because it can help streamline the development process tremendously.

    Which tools are best for you, and which combination of tools will work best for your DevOps toolchain, is a subjective exercise. Regardless of the tools you use, though, it’s clear that there are benefits for organizations that put together an effective DevOps toolchain that can help streamline and optimize the life cycle from beginning to end.

    — Tony Bradley