DevOps Without Scale, Part 2
In Part 1 of this series, I covered why it’s important to be aware of your product’s health and how you can do so. I covered the user experience and technical types of metrics and how to get started with collecting them. In this part of the series I will walk you through how to […]
14 Tools That Raise Web and App Performance
In the DevOps Era, teams increasingly are turning to a variety of tools to integrate, accelerate and automate. Speed and efficiency are critical. This is especially amplified in continuous delivery (CD), which enables IT teams to achieve fast and reliable releases. If successful, CD allows for a faster time to market, increased operational effectiveness and […]
Continuous Testing Live Network DevOps
My earlier blog, “From Laboratories to DevOps: Factories for Continuous Testing,” discussed the importance of and suggested practices for a fully automated, orchestrated software DevOps laboratory infrastructure, akin to a modern factory staffed by robots churning out products at a dizzy pace. The blog applies to development of software for networks, and the practices increasingly […]
Rookie Mistake: Not Managing Mobile Customer Feedback
Managing mobile customer feedback effectively could be the single-most important success factor for your company and customers. Call it addiction or habit, but every passing day we encounter new data confirming the growth of mobile app usage and total hours spent interacting with them. In the “2015 U.S. Mobile App Report,” the CoreMetrics team has shared […]
Mobile Testing’s Role in Staying Alive
Have you ever forgotten to take your pills? You’re not the only one. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, half of the people prescribed medication eventually stop following their doctors orders. It’s a dangerous game of Russian roulette. Most of us simply forget. For the elderly, who take more medications with different […]
Does DevOps Improve or Undermine Quality?
In my earlier blog, “From QA to Continuous Testing,” I explained that “several industry developments converged to make continuous testing the winning method for software engineering quality assurance (QA).” The “combination of improved test methods, agile processes, continuous integration speed afforded by automation and orchestration tools and low-cost test dynamically configurable infrastructures afforded by virtualization […]
DevOps Without Scale, Part 1
When most people think of DevOps, what comes to mind first are continuous integration (CI) and continuous development (CD) pipelines. While they are arguably the most important parts of DevOps, they are not all of it. So, then, what is DevOps? It is a philosophy of how to build and operate software products and systems […]
Culture Change: Metrics, Tools Make a Difference
Change is in the wind. This time of the year, as winter weather gives way to springtime renewal, this concept isn’t a cliché but rather a concrete, visceral experience. You go outside, smell the earth defrosting and know for certain that change is happening all around you. You can feel it. Such is the case […]
Our Sprint to Agile Success
Adoption of the agile methodology is essential to the success of a DevOps culture. This is not revolutionary, but is an important foundation. We view agile as the tool for developers to achieve DevOps. Our team, which is developer-centric, is focusing on the agile piece of the equation moving forward. But what happens when you […]
Puppet Labs Launches Annual State of DevOps Survey
Puppet Labs has announced its 5th annual State of DevOps Survey. In the past five years, we’ve surveyed more than 20,000 technical professionals around the world, spanning all industries and companies of all sizes. We’ve captured a tremendous amount of data about how IT performance, culture, technical practices and organizational performance intersect. What sets our […]
The Forgotten Fourth Question
A very well-written paragraph about DevOps appears in Mike Loukides’ book, “What is DevOps”: … Modern applications, running in the cloud, still need to be resilient and fault tolerant, still need monitoring, still need to adapt to huge swings in load, etc. But those features, formerly provided by the IT/operations infrastructures, now need to be […]
DevOps Days returns to London
On April 19, after a break of nearly two and a half years, the DevOps Days conference is returning to London. Expect great things: All DevOps Days events are extremely interactive, making use of the Open Space format, and this year’s event includes a world-class set of presenters ready to share their experiences and guidance. […]
The DevOps Equation: Agility + Empathy = Quality
I had the chance to catch up with Jeff Sussna (@JeffSussna), founder and principal of Ingineering.IT, ahead of his keynote address on continuous design, scheduled for DevOps Days Atlanta, April 26-27. He discussed the importance of designing for service, responding to the unexpected, and the importance of building empathy across teams. Derek Weeks (@weekstweets): Today I’m […]
‘Don’t Make Me Code’: Affordances for Developers
Thanks for listening to “Don’t Make Me Code,” a Heavybit podcast that discusses developer experience design and the unique challenges of building developer-facing products. Don’t Make Me Code is hosted by Steve Boak, co-founder and CPO at Opsee, and David Dollar, co-founder and CEO at Convox. In this episode David and Steve are joined by Dustin Larimer from Keen IO. They […]
Git: One Giant Leap Toward DevOps
If you work in an organization that has not yet embraced DevOps, then you might be wondering where to begin. Fortunately, there are many good answers. But I want to introduce one simple starting point that you probably haven’t heard: introducing Git to operations. By itself, Git might not seem like a meaningful way to […]
Case Study: Sauce Labs Covers Animoto’s Testing Needs
Animoto’s web and mobile platforms enable businesses and consumers to drag and drop stock and user-defined visual and audio elements to create videos via a tiered monthly subscription service. Animoto updates service features with increasing frequency—some of them several times a day. “We have a broad range of applications and features including an online video […]
Remote Deposit Capture: Mobile Testing for Your Convenience
“How much of human life is lost in waiting!” penned Ralph Waldo Emerson. Any chore that can be digitized is surely welcome. How about cashing a check? Cashing a check takes time. You have to go to the bank, wait on line for the next available teller or ATM. If you go to an ATM […]
Building a Foundation for Big Room Planning
When people think of agile, the first thing that comes to mind is a software development team. But agile is much more than that now, as every DevOps practitioner knows. Nearly a decade and a half of practice has shown us that high-performing agile software development teams are critical, but not sufficient on their own. […]
Microservices: Easier Than You Think
“Microservices are easier than you think and more valuable than you’ve heard.” Those are the words of Ben Gracewood, chief delivery officer at cloud POS and omnichannel retail provider Vend. His company has used microservices to trim a monolithic PHP application, improving performance and changing the way the company approaches updates. Approaching Microservices Vend is […]
To Be Continuous Podcast: Staging Servers Must Die
Welcome to To Be Continuous, a show about continuous delivery and software development hosted by Paul Biggar, founder of CircleCI, and Edith Harbaugh, CEO of LaunchDarkly. In this episode, Edith and Paul discuss a blog post by Edith, in which she asserts that you should kill your staging servers so that continuous delivery can live. This podcast is brought […]
The Difference Between DevOps and Anarchy
DevOps is about being more efficient. It’s about breaking down silos and removing traditional business obstacles that get in the way of just getting things done. It’s about enabling teams and individuals to collaborate more seamlessly. None of that, however, means that DevOps is about turning your IT into some sort of “Wild West” anarchy, […]
What If We Had Git for DevOps?
I used to hate Git. Compared to my previous source control systems (SVN, SourceForge and floppies), it was cryptic, opaque and hard to learn. It was comfortable to create a set of files and folder, then snapshot them as a unit. It was simple to understand and improved my individual productivity. But that snapshot created […]
