Impacts of DevOps on Testing
I always come across a standard question from testers in any DevOps related presentation. “Will DevOps remove the need for Testers?” A simple answer is “No”. DevOps is not going to replace Testing as a discipline. Firms implementing DevOps have a vision for better product quality workable by brilliant Testing. DevOps is an enabler for the following. […]
Five things to understand about Enterprise DevOps Solutions
There is a lot of buzz in the industry around selling and consuming DevOps. Unfortunately there isn’t the same level of understanding or even a common definition about DevOps between consumers and service providers. In my experience the past couple of years of evangelizing DevOps, the following 5 aspects come to my mind as critical […]
Steer SAFely – Driving collaboration across multi-disciplinary teams
This is the second blog in the DevOps – Scaled Agile series. In the first blog, Scaling Lean and Agile for the enterprise: All hands on keyboard!!!, we discussed the characteristics of a successful enterprise agile transformation and described why engagement and commitment across all disciplines in the organization is not just optional, but required, […]
Librato Seeks to Unlock DevOps Application Monitoring
As wider adoption of DevOps methodologies continues to foster demand for new tooling to help streamline evolving workflows, at least one vendor is attempting to address the growing need for related monitoring capabilities. Librato, a San Francisco-based provider of Amazon AWS applications performance monitoring (APM) services, claims that it is finding favor among the rapidly […]
Scaling Lean and Agile for the enterprise: All hands on keyboard!!!
Lean and Agile methodologies are nothing new, but in the last few years we have seen the emergence of several frameworks combining elements of both. The IBM DevOps framework is one clear example. Combining principles of Lean and Agile into a single framework enables scaling of the core benefits to the entire organization, not just […]
Tailoring DevOps to your IT: A case study for SAP
I am frequently asked if DevOps principles can be applied to legacy environments such as SAP. They clearly can, with some tailoring. But you should be aware of certain constraints. An agile transformation from conventional IT (where the SAP software delivery process is split between business analysts, development, the QA department and IT operations) towards […]
How ADLM Gobbles Up DevOps
The Next Evolution of Software Delivery Automation In the 1980’s and 90’s, the business software landscape was dominated by a diverse list of cutting-edge companies such as Best Software, i2, Brock Control Systems, Mapics, Ross Systems, Infinium, FBO Systems, Manugistics and MSA (of course I could go on and on). Now long gone, these and […]
Will DevOps Kill IT Outsourcing?: Part 1
Part 1: DevOps and outsourcing like oil and water After nearly two decades of steady IT outsourcing for the sake of savings and efficiency gains, the shine seems to have worn off from this once glittering phenomenon. And according to many experts, DevOps and continuous delivery practices are playing a big part in many enterprises’ […]
The Whole Nine Yards with DevOps and Agile Operations
Growing up as a boy in Manchester, UK, football (ok, soccer to US readers) was everything to me. I vividly remember being herded into the stadium stands on cold rainy Saturday afternoons to watch my team (#MCFC) win, draw or lose. Back then, football was for the die-hards – no frills or fancy tech, just […]
The Next Wave of Software Delivery – Integrating Agile and DevOps for the Digital Enterprise
In the past five years business cycles have greatly accelerated, forcing companies to respond faster to customer needs and competitive demands. This trend has been driven by business adoption of consumer-oriented technologies like social media, smart phones, b2c internet services. We all expect to have a constant stream of new services and capabilities delivered to us […]
Appster Must Produce Mobile Apps Using Nimble DevOps Practices (It Has No Choice)!
In order to meet the many challenges of producing loads of different app/server projects large and small in extremely rapid succession, Appster collaborates on, automates, and dashboards everything it can. “Unlike traditional product companies (i.e. one product with lots of developers) or corporate IT shops (i.e. silos of products and services that rarely change), Appster […]
Best Practices to Prevent Scrum Failure
In my years of experience as a scrum master, I’ve encountered numerous situations where scrum has resulted in less-than-ideal outcomes, a Scrum failure if you will—not because the agile framework is flawed, but because the company didn’t understand, or disregarded, how scrum is supposed to work. For example, I was once a scrum master for […]
SaaS: Building Tools for the DevOps-Minded
DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration and Continuous Testing are no longer just methodologies and development strategies — they’re all a part of a growing economy within the tech industry. Great Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies such as Chef, Docker and New Relic have done an amazing job of spotting the trends early and building their tools and […]
5 Ways Continuous Integration Reduces Risk in Development
***This post is based on themes and ideas from the great e-book, “Continuous Testing,” by our friends at Parasoft. There’s a lot of talk about DevOps and Continuous Integration in the tech space right now, but sometimes the implementation of those methods can be tricky. An effective Continuous Integration strategy requires DevOps teams to manage […]
Continuous Testing: What exactly is it?
***This post is based on themes and ideas from the great e-book, “Continuous Testing,” by our friends at Parasoft. The aptly named DevOps practice of Continuous Testing synchronizes Testing/QA with Dev and Ops processes optimized to achieve business and development goals. A few years ago when Agile was all the rage, lightning-fast Dev sprints left the […]
Surprise! Broad Agreement on the Definition of DevOps
For the past few years, the conventional wisdom has been that DevOps has no agreed upon definition. Instead, everyone has their own interpretation. However, the conventional wisdom is wrong. While everyone supplies slightly different words, the same working understanding of DevOps is nearly universal. Our understanding of DevOps goes back to a handful of common touch-points. There is the “CAMS” […]
Documenting DevOps: Agile, Automation and Continuous Documentation
Chris Riley former GigaOm analyst, O’Reilly author, devopsy.kinsta.cloud featured writer and founder of Fixate I/O has written an outstanding report on the key role documentation must play in the modern software development lifecyle. Agile or DevOps, automated or not, we live in a continuous IT era. So why shouldn’t documentation be continuous as well? Riley’s […]
DevOps Teams: Containers Will Help You Become Future Ready
Container frameworks are emerging as a superior choice to create, manage, and run distributed applications in a scalable and secure fashion. Docker’s growth is testimony to the fact. There are 100 million downloads of the Docker Engine, 75,000 Dockerized applications, 770 contributors, and 50,000 third-party projects on GitHub using Docker in less than two years. […]
The Business Value of Continuous Testing
***This post is based on themes and ideas from the great e-book, “Continuous Testing,” by our friends at Parasoft. Enterprise software development models have presented many innovative solutions for IT to align development efforts with business goals. Adopting new software development lifecycle methodologies is as much a business decision as an IT decision. From an […]
Overcoming Siebel Complexity to Achieve Agile and Continuous Deployments
Siebel releases are complex. Executing one well is difficult. Extracting databases, migrating SRF repositories, deploying non-repository items and managing all the planned and unplanned outages is no small feat. Oh yeah, and there’s still that little thing called production. These deployments can easily take days and are updated infrequently, because the business can’t afford any […]
DevOps at REA Group
“DevOps is 100 years old, and probably invented by a British engineer in the 1920s,” according to Nigel Dalton, CIO at REA Group, the company behind realestate.com.au and other leading real estate sites in Australia, Hong Kong and Europe. He was referring to the work of Frank Woollard at Morris Motors in the UK. In […]
Service virtualization – The hows and the whys.
Close your eyes and take a deep breath. You are on an island, smelling the iodine coming from the sea, the sun is gently caressing your cheeks and you are sipping on a cocktail in the middle of the afternoon. Your phone is off, in a place you forgot and you do not have direct […]
The right answer was “process”
The question is “why is there no one-size-fits-all automation and orchestration solution”? Automation, a component critical for continuous deployment particularly as it extends beyond app operations and into the broader environment to encompass network and security operations, too, continues to be a custom build kind of thing. There’s no single automation tool, framework or pattern […]