DevOpsDays and Diogenes: Thoughts from a First-Timer
I went seeking honesty at a DevOps conference and met Diogenes. Diogenes of Sinope was a controversial figure in ancient Athens who was known for walking around the famed ancient city—some say in the nude— during daytime with a lamp in his hand. He parried inquisitors who questioned his strange habit of using a lamp […]
DevOps Experts Unite on Video Podcast Series
To remain competitive in today’s software-driven economy, organizations of all sizes are investing in DevOps to become better at releasing software. Although the ROI is evident in the IT and business performance of organizations that have successfully implemented DevOps practices, the journey still can be challenging. There are troves of resources available to help companies […]
DevOps: Achieving Process Without Too Much ‘Process’
While there’s no fundamental conflict between IT service management (ITSM) and DevOps, DevOps does bring new and different techniques for getting work done and interacting with the rest of the organization. ITSM people who are used to frameworks such as ITIL and COBIT tend to regard the IT department as a “service provider” and the […]
Why your Company Should Load Test
The main reason your company should load test its websites and mobile applications is to learn how the site performs so you can improve the user experience and make smart web infrastructure decisions. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? Above all else, load testing is a learning experience that provides a wealth of insight into how your […]
What the Auto Industry Can Teach IT Development
The latest and greatest advances in technology often draw the spotlight, but the truly great changes in business aren’t driven by technology alone. They’re enabled by a change in culture that’s supported and accelerated by technology. Consider the assembly line in the auto industry. Automation, specialized tooling and robotics have provided a boost to quality […]
Test-First Development: Processes and Tools for Success
A lot of software development teams are talking about “test-first” methodologies. The practice involves moving testing up into the very earliest stages of development so automated tests can be written before code. Making this seemingly minor shift can result in much higher quality software and greater efficiencies. Integrating development and testing avoids needless late-stage bugs […]
Checks and Balances to Build Stronger Code
Every software development needs coding; without it, nothing can be developed. The quality of the software depends on the way its developers write code. It’s an essential part of the system and the behavior of the system depends on it. A small mistake in coding may make the software vulnerable and unstable. Quality engineering works […]
Should You Embrace DevOps in Your Business?
New to some, old hat to many and a source of ambiguity to more than a few, DevOps is being embraced by the IT world as an answer to increase quality of business processes—to innovate faster and to get new products to market sooner in a defined time frame. There is no doubt DevOps has […]
Pokémon Go Shows DevOps Changes Human Behavior
Everywhere you go lately, you can see people acting strangely. They’re walking streets they never walked before. They’re waving their smartphones around in odd ways. And they’re high-fiving each other for no apparent reason. And they’re doing it because of DevOps. Of course, not everyone immediately thinks about Pokémon Go as an artifact of DevOps—but […]
An Even More Modern Continuous Integration
It would be strange for me to tell you that there is an even newer new approach to release automation, as if the processes of continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), continuous deployment and canary releases were not modern enough. And it would be even stranger to say that the open-source tool Jenkins, which dominates […]
Delivering DevOps’ Business Value
DevOps is an interesting space to be operating in right now. More than just culture or a set of tools and processes, DevOps delivers speed and agility that can be truly meaningful for the business. Unfortunately, for most large enterprises, the path to the benefits isn’t always well-known and isn’t assured. Over the last five […]
Jenkins World Speaker Gruver on the State of DevOps
Santa Clara, California, will be home to the biggest gathering of Jenkins users in the world Sept. 13-15. This year’s Jenkins World conference will feature Gary Gruver, DevOps expert and author of “Leading the Transformation.” We had a chance to connect with Gary and hear his thoughts on the state of DevOps, continuous delivery and […]
The Disposable Development Environment
Wait! Just wait a dadgummed minute! It takes days to build a development environment, and now I am supposed to read an article on a disposable development environment? Yes. It seems like it took an entire sprint to upgrade PHP! Now I am supposed to let them build something so they can trash it? Yes […]
Intersections: DevOps, Release Engineering and Security
With emerging ideas, innovation and talents, the lines between DevOps, release engineering and even security are rapidly blurring. I invite you to sit down for a moment with principal consultant, J. Paul Reed, and listen to his take on what the intersection between these once individualized fields entails—and may even foreshadow. Derek Weeks: Good morning, […]
Useful Big Data Terminologies, Part 1
As data continues to increase at an evermore rapid pace, organizations struggle to deal with this data torrent, let alone use it to analyze and capture value. The ways used to understand this big data also is increasingly rapidly, which introduces myriad terms used to define these methods. The follow is an attempt to provide […]
How to Conquer Test Automation for Your Mobile Testing
Developing your mobile app is just the initial step toward preparing it for market. It first needs to work flawlessly over thousands of different devices, each running over different mobile operating systems with their own version, and inside any of hundreds of unique local networks. On top of that, every feature has to be tested […]
Mobile Testing Delivers Big for Pizza
Mobile applications have been disrupting industries worldwide. For some industries, the disruption focuses on business internals, as enterprise apps enable manufacturing processes to be restructured and streamlined. In other industries, the disruption focuses on the customer and how mobility can make life more convenient. When it comes to pizza, however, mobile development changes everything. I […]
Follow the Simple Path of Nirvana to DevOps
Perhaps the title of this post is a misleading, as nothing is truly “simple. But there is a well-defined pathway to achieving DevOps goals for any size company. Just follow a step-up pattern by adopting the principles of agile, continuous integration and continuous delivery, and you will reach your goal of DevOps. This path is […]
Give Test Automation the Respect It Deserves
One of the key mantras of DevOps is “continuous.” Effective DevOps relies on automating routine tasks. Any step in the process that requires human intervention or manual input becomes a roadblock that can slow or halt productivity. To the extent that it’s possible, anything and everything should be automated—and that includes testing. Test is like […]
It’s Time to End the Automated Tests Arms Race
I grew up during the end of the Cold War. During that time, I remember hearing that there were enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world 20 times over. That always seemed silly to me. Wasn’t once or twice plenty? Wasn’t it more important to have the fastest and most effective weapons rather than to simply […]
5 Reasons DevOps Needs NetDevOps
Networking’s role in DevOps is not accurately defined. Up to this point, networking has been integrated into DevOps through infrastructure as code (IaC), which has been around since the beginning of the DevOps movement. Although important, this does not quite encompass all of what networking needs within DevOps. A few of the current terms being […]
Doing Nothing is Hard Work!
If you really want to know how good your software delivery process is, try doing nothing. Yes, you read that correctly, do nothing: Go through your normal release process without any requirements, no new code, no testing and no installation at the end. Sounds easy, right? So let’s get started. This will be different for […]
Redefining Product Value in the Continuous Economy
The internet is now more than 20 years old. It’s older than my kids, which is a scary thought. It’s older than Kendall Jenner. It’s older than Uber, Grey’s Anatomy and the iPhone. And so now, after more than two decades of software and e-commerce, it’s high time we take stock of where consumers really […]