At its DevOps World | Jenkins World 2019 conference, CloudBees today unfurled an early preview of the CloudBees Software Delivery Management (SDM) service, which applies analytics to metrics gathered by the company’s continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms to enable organizations to optimize DevOps processes based on their business goals.
CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey said CloudBees is trying to take DevOps to another level by providing a unified view of all development activity and the impact any delay those projects might encounter will have on the organization.
The CloudBees SDM service provides access to a Contributions dashboard to provide insights into work prioritization and dependencies that are hindering other projects, as well as an Efficiency dashboard to provide retrospective insights that can be used to improve development going forward.
In addition, the CloudBees SDM service surfaces suggestions and alerts based on a policy and rules-based engine that identifies issues that warrant deeper investigation, such as code that doesn’t comply with a regulatory compliance mandate.
There’s also an integrated feature flag management that enables DevOps teams to manage delivery and rollout of application features based on business and operational metrics.
Finally, the CloudBees SDM service provides access to a Product Hub module, which provides visibility into all the data, resources, development and delivery activity around a specific product, and a Value Stream Management module, through which additional business insights relating to feature contributions and the overall status of a specific project are surfaced.
Labourey said the CloudBees SDM service initially will be available as a cloud service, but the company expects to make an on-premises edition available as well.
The goal is to provide IT leaders with a framework for managing multiple development teams that roughly equates to the capabilities a customer relationship management (CRM) application provides managers of sales teams, which should make it easier for organizations to identify best DevOps practices that should be shared across the organization, said Labourey. DevOps practices have been adopted unevenly across many organizations. The CloudBees SDM platform goes further than legacy approaches to software development lifecycle (SDLC) platforms in that it also makes it easier to identify what impact DevOps processes also are having on the business, he said.
Longer-term, Labourey also noted the CloudBees SDM platform will act as the mechanism through which machine and deep learning algorithms will be applied, once a critical mass of data is acquired.
CloudBees envisions its SDM service being used as a tool to coach developers on how to build better code faster. However, there always will be organizations that will make use of any SDLC platform as a vehicle primarily employed to drive higher levels of developer productivity, noted Labourey.
Whatever the motivation for adoption, advances in analytics are transforming the way every process is managed. Software development is no exception; it’s one of the first job functions where advanced analytics most likely will be applied aggressively.
— Mike Vizard
