Avoid Crashes: 5 Best Practices for Load Testing
Demanding customer expectations and the rapid distribution of information across social media have made website and applications crashes an off-limits path for today’s companies and organizations. Crashes resulting from traffic spikes cause immediate and long-term loss of sales, as well as tarnishing the brand name. When servers or websites go down during highly anticipated events […]
How Much QA is Enough in Software Development?
People working in quality assurance as testers, managers or engineers know what it’s like having to justify their existence; it’s been part of the job for many years. QA experts have had to fight the perception that what they do is a bottleneck, overkill and it slows everyone down. Finally, however, QA is getting the […]
DevOps is a Lifeline to Connected Mainframe ROI
A new IDC white paper sponsored by IBM and CA Technologies reveals the adoption of DevOps is a hallmark of those organizations that are actively modernizing and integrating legacy systems such as a mainframe to support digital transformation. Early adopters are blazing a path for faster innovation and greater ROI. DevOps Delivers Mainframe Modernization and […]
Is Site Reliability Engineering the True ‘Ops’ in DevOps?
I recently had the privilege of attending the SRECon conference in San Francisco. It’s in its third year and 650 attendees gathered to learn and share their experiences, insights and site reliability engineering (SRE) practices. Most SRECon attendees either identified as SREs or were there to learn more about this new role and approach. While […]
Meeting the Need for Speed in Cyber Threat Response
In the very early days of the internet, hackers most likely were “lone wolves.” They might be an unhappy customer, a disgruntled employee or a tech-savvy youth who just wanted to see if he could breach a target’s defenses. Occasionally, hackers might aspire to more devious crimes including identity theft, blackmail, theft of trade secrets, […]
CD 101 Podcast: The What, How and Future of Continuous Delivery
Now that we’ve arrived at Episode 4 of our CD 101 Podcast, let’s address some basic concepts—like the what and how of it all and the future. Wait … perhaps we could—or should—have touched on these key topics earlier. Or not. At least not the future part? Anyway … While this (mostly) backwards-looking orientation may […]
An Unanticipated Obstacle to Full Automation
I’ve been concerned about the impact of automation on human employment for a while. My research activity started after November 2016, when I decided I needed to learn whether the much-touted phrase, “We’re bringing back the jobs,” was valid or not. While it is true that some jobs in the United States have been exported […]
Self-Healing Service Management and the Future of DevOps
How can DevOps teams take continuous delivery to the next step? Part of the answer lies in self healing, which could optimize performance management and monitoring and underpin the software delivery pipelines of the future. Self healing means the ability of systems or environments to detect and resolve problems automatically. It eliminates the need for […]
When DevOps Disrupts DevOps
As longtime readers of my blogs will know, one of my hobbies—when not writing about or playing with technology—is modeling. There is a similarity between quality tech work and quality modeling, but the brain power involved in modeling is much less, leaving me time to think about tech issues or listen to audiobooks (when I’m […]
DevOps in Legacy Systems: A Mission Impossible?
The word “legacy” evokes mixed reactions from the IT and business crowds alike. For those who depend on legacy systems such as the zSeries and iSeries platforms, it is a way to deliver stable and reliable applications into production. Business stakeholders who may not know the intricacies of the technology often take a view of, “Why […]
The Tester: Saving Your Soul in a DevOps World
Software testers have seen their careers go through some ups and downs in recent years. In the days of Waterfall, the tester’s job was clearly defined. Like other functions of software development and delivery, testers lived in a neat and tidy universe, testing features and design, finding bugs, sending back feedback to developers for correction […]
Release Automation: Delivering the Big Quality Payoff
Have you ever gone down the path of testing the latest release of an application only to find out that you had the wrong version? Maybe you accidentally grabbed the wrong build or you didn’t have the correct configuration file for the environment you were testing against—or your database wasn’t updated correctly, or the script […]
Why Financial Companies Love Continuous Delivery
The other day I was on the American Express website paying bills and browsing around the benefits and services afforded me when I ran across a “who we are” section. It read: “We’re a global services company that provides customers with access to products, insights and experiences that enrich lives and build business success.” Surprisingly, […]
Boosting Time-to-Market by Improving Software Development
Today’s business environments require “agility” in terms of being able to quickly understand and adapt to information, trends and new developments. For example, a company might employ a business intelligence suite that provides them with real-time information on product sales, which allows them to dynamically adjust content or strategy. Set a Baseline You can’t measure […]
The Right Automation Tool for the Job
My father was an antique dealer, and we did a lot of furniture repair in the workshop. All of us kids took turns working for the business as we grew up, and we learned some solid lessons in the process. One day, when I was still pretty young and very new at working on things, […]
Dispelling the Myths Around Continuous Testing
You may have seen the term “continuous testing” and thought it was just the DevOps flavor of the month. Some might even think it isn’t part of DevOps or isn’t for cloud or hybrid cloud applications. Well, think again. As it turns out, there are a few more fallacies around the idea of continuous testing […]
Be Here Now – Agile and DevOps in the Current State of Synergy
If there’s one thing that our culture does not lack, it’s a litany of pithy catch-quotes meant to remind us to focus on the task at hand; yet, this often runs counter to our tendency to fixate on matters of the past and future. While we are so often encouraged to “live in the moment” […]
CD 101 Podcast Episode 2: The Agile Enterprise
And we’re back with another episode of the “Continuous Delivery 101 Podcast.” In Episode 1, we covered the three waves of IT disruption—and how these disruptions, combined with the move toward digital transformation, are drastically changing every industry. This, of course, underlined how accelerating speed-to-market is clearly more important than ever before. In this second […]
Reality Check: Bringing Continuous Delivery Dreams to Life
Every developer shares the same dream: to write a piece of code or app that changes everything. Whether it makes your company do things more efficiently, attracts hordes of new customers, simply makes existing clients happier or maybe even changes the world a little bit, that code is what we strive for. Some of us […]
Automation’s Impact on a Structured Life
A few years back my sister’s husband died after an unexpected illness. My sister, who was in her early 50s, experienced a devastating loss at a relatively early age. To her good fortune, my brother-in-law left behind an adequate pension and their mortgage had been paid off, so she didn’t have to bear the burden […]
4 Top Tips for Developing a New Feature
As a backend developer at CA BlazeMeter, I recently had the chance to work on a big feature for our web app. The feature required a massive change on our backend code, a big change on our frontend and multiple migrations. You know what I’m talking about—it was one of those projects that developers fear. […]
The Impact of Automation: Considering 3 Facts
I’ve been interested in the ramification of automation on human employment for a while now. My profession, IT, is bringing more automation to the planet every day. I would be irresponsible to not understand the ramifications of my work. Recently in my research I came across three facts that gave me pause. The facts are: […]
Automation Killed QA – It’s Time to Deal With It
Quality assurance (QA) had a good run. From the time it was considered an afterthought by organizations and software vendors alike to the era of massive outsourcing contracts, followed by significant vendor investments in related tooling, and, finally, its recognition as a critical success factor among high-performing organizations, quality has evolved to become even more […]