What Happens to Test in a DevOps World?
I am always surprised by the urban legends around DevOps. One of my favorites is, If you implement a DevOps methodology, you can stop doing test. People famously quote that Netflix only tests in production as evidence of this. This is perhaps more like of game of Telephone, where much of the story gets lost […]
Where’s the Heat? Talking DevOps, Use Cases and More
Transitioning your organization from a traditional IT infrastructure into the world of DevOps is certainly a journey. Sometimes a long one, with many obstacles, but undoubtedly a voyage with a worthwhile prize at the end. Many organizations just embarking on their DevOps journey find themselves wondering, what use cases should they attack first? And who […]
How DevOps is Killing QA
If you work in software quality assurance (QA), it’s time to find a new job. The overall software development process has always consisted of the following core activities: Creating a requirements analysis; Producing a specification of the software artifact; Constructing the software; Investigating the quality of the product or service; Finding and fixing defects; then […]
DevOps: Shift Left to Reduce Failure
DevOps is all about increasing the feedback loop from idea to customer and back again. Tremendous gains have been achieved in automation and tools to drastically reduce the amount of manual labor involved in progressing down the release pipeline. But mission-critical applications in a highly competitive market cannot afford to go down. Complex applications, environments […]
Learning in the Continuous Customer Economy
We live in a continuous customer economy. Buyers in the 21st century are continuously discovering, adopting and discarding products and services online, telling us—very loudly and unequivocally—that value isn’t perceived in the actual product itself, but rather in our ability to change a product continuously. So, it’s now about the options to change the product, […]
Tales of DevOps Discovery Part 2: Definitions Matter
Definitions Matter: Step Two in a DevOps Transformation The first post in this series on DevOps Discovery discussed the importance of asking fundamental questions of stakeholders to facilitate alignment on priorities and establish a mission statement when beginning a DevOps transformation. Part 2, below, reviews definitions of common DevOps-related terms and provides examples of how […]
PTC: Using DevOps to Transform Applications
Large companies and monolithic applications are not usually associated with DevOps. But I recently discovered that some of the best DevOps operations have come from the largest organizations and most complex applications, and PTC is the latest example. If you are not familiar with PTC, the company has a wide range of offerings for enterprises […]
Five Harsh Truths About DevOps
DevOps can provide tremendous productivity improvements, but it’s not a panacea. As much as we’d want it to be the solution for all of our software development problems, here are five truths you should consider. 1. DevOps may lead to juggling job roles and coming out of your comfort zone With DevOps, the development team […]
‘DevOps is a Lifestyle, Not a Title’
“DevOps is a lifestyle, not a title.” This is a quote from Ron Melanson, of Amazon, and I hope he won’t mind me sharing it here. It struck a chord with me, and this blog explains why. I have spoken about DevOps on a few occasions. Some audiences are not from a development background, so […]
Booz Allen Helps the GSA Put Your DevOps to Shame
Production Docker, automated workflows, open source projects and microservices are just some of the ways that Booz Allen is helping the General Services Administration (GSA) modernize its IT operations. And frankly, after talking to Nirmal Mehta, the lead architect on its recent project, I became a little embarrassed for you DevOps-born startups. In my circle […]
Faster, Smarter DevOps
Whether you call it DevOps or not, if you are concerned about releasing more code faster and at a higher quality, the resulting software delivery chain and process will look and smell like DevOps. But for existing development teams, no matter what the velocity objective is, getting from here to there is not something that […]
The Beauty of Inheritance Architectures
Spoiler alert: This article is not about inheriting your great-grandparent’s estate. It is rather about how embedding the principles of inheritance into the architecture of your chosen DevOps toolset can yield exponential results. And yes, I realize that you, the customer, have little to do with what a vendor builds its tooling architecture upon. However, […]
5 Prerequisites for a Successful DevOps Initiative
There are certain tools and attitudes that are essential to any successful DevOps transformation. The manner in which a DevOps transformation is performed will have huge implications on the level of agility the company is able to achieve. However, before that point is even reached, some vital foundations must be laid. It is from that […]
Continuous Delivery: The Atlassian Way
Sonatype’s Mark Miller (@TSWAlliance) caught up with Ian Buchanan (@devpartisan) for our 2016 DevOps Leadership Series. Ian discussed his experiences at Atlassian, including continuous delivery, ChatOps, and use of tools such as Bamboo, Nexus, Puppet and Datadog. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgRaYKHGqeQ Buchanan: I’m Ian Buchanan. I’m a Developer Partisan at Atlassian, which is developer advocacy for our developer tools. Miller: Ian, most people know […]
Trust, You Must: 8 Tips for Adopting CI/CD
We have done continuous deployment (CD) for four years, and enable many of our customers to do continuous deployment with quality assurance (QA). We’ve helped tons of companies adopt and optimize their CD setups. We’ve found that continuous deployment is all about trust — augmented with processes and infrastructure. To that point, here are some […]
5 Key Aspects of High Fidelity DevOps
As much as we talk about how we should have shared goals spanning Dev and Ops, it’s not nearly as easy as it sounds. To fuel a DevOps culture, we have to build robust tooling, also. That means investing up front in five key areas: abstraction, composability, automation, orchestration, and idempotency. Together, these concepts allow […]
Defining What DevOps is Not
It’s not often that my emails turn into full-blown conversations on DevOps. But when it happens, it’s a great time to take advantage of the insights. John Purrier of Automic and I recently discussed DevOps sustainability. Both of us think that sustaining a modern delivery chain and adopting it are two very different things. However, […]
DevOps Days London: The Human Factor
Day 2 of DevOpsDays London 2016 kicked off with a presentation from the legendary Gene Kim. The theme that dominated today’s proceedings was the “human factor,” (fitting, as we finished Day 1 with #humanops) nicely started by Gene’s quote from Nathan Shimek: “We need DevOps to make our work humane.” The second day delved beyond […]
Reasons Why Developers Should Test More
When I got started as a professional software developer, I thought awesomeness in development was measured by the lines of code (LOC) per day and how quickly code got to QA for testing. Coding a few thousand lines overnight gave one instant bragging rights, regardless of how well the code worked (or didn’t) in the […]
DevOpsDays London 2016: Making Happy
We haven’t had a DevOpsDays event in London since 2013. The audience size was about the same at this year’s event, held April 19-20, as I remember from last time, but about 85 percent of the audience were attending a DevOpsDays event for the first time. It was great to see so many new faces, […]
How Mobile Testing Converts to Greater Earnings
From a business’ sales strategy to the type of coffee it decides to stock in the company lounge, every decision boils down to this: How will it impact this year’s earnings? That’s what makes testing critical for any business with a mobile app: Having a poor-performing app is just like throwing money away. There are […]
‘Admins’: The Movie
In the IT industry, where we are exposed to various levels of incompetence, it is quite tempting to become a little cynical. A few years ago we hit rock bottom. Our patience—not to mention our sanity—lay in the balance. Like many of you, we sought refuge in laughter. We found comfort and comic relief through […]
Cohesion Critical in a Successful DevOps Team
In the push to adopt DevOps among enterprise IT organizations, cohesion has been one of the biggest challenges in collaborating effectively. Historically, departments within a business existed in disparate locations, or silos. Marketing, IT and operations all had their own teams and their own communication channels, which made it difficult for members of separate teams […]