One Team, 5,000 Jobs: Life in the DevOps Jungle
Damien has 5,000 jobs. While you might gasp at that workload, Damien is not stressing out. All 5,000 jobs are automated within his team’s Jenkins pipelines. How does he do it? Damien follows four key principles to keep his cool in the job jungle: self-service, security, simplicity and extensibility. But you might be surprised that one of his most […]
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. […]
Culture Comes First in Bringing DevOps to the Mainframe
One of the most difficult challenges in engineering, oddly enough, isn’t technical: the challenge is culture transition management. In my 20-plus years of managing engineering teams worldwide, I’ve led teams through countless organizational adjustments and process improvements toward high-performance and quality, beginning with QA segregation to CMMI to ITIL, AGILE and SAFe. Today, mainframe organizations […]
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 […]
Welcome to the Continuous Delivery 101 Podcast
No matter what industry you’re in or how old your business is, your software often determines your success in today’s application economy. Applications are the face of your business—both the way it performs and the speed with which you can incorporate new ideas and innovations, driven by the efficiency of your software development life cycle—determines […]
Predictable Progress: Tracking DevOps Maturity Metrics
As DevOps methodologies continue to evolve, we’re naturally seeing an increased emphasis on the cultivation of related maturity metrics. For instance, in the 2016 State of DevOps Report, researchers with DORA took an initial stab at creating relevant ROI measurements. Similarly, a new report issued by researchers Coleman Parkes, sponsored by CA Technologies, offers additional […]
How Open Source Can Help Your CD Chain
What can you do to make continuous delivery work better? Consider moving to open source software solutions. Here’s why. Many DevOps teams already may be using open-source platforms for reasons not related to continuous delivery. They might like the cost-efficiency or interoperability that usually come with open source. Or maybe they just like the open-source […]
DevOps by the Book in 2017: Where we Really Stand
Now that the year-end prediction season is over, it’s time to focus squarely on the actual here and now—where the DevOps movement actually stands at the start of 2017. As we’ll need to wait another six months or so for the annual State of DevOps Report to emerge from the good folks over at DORA […]
DevOps Leaders Share 2017 Reflections, Predictions
As the New Year kicks off, it is a time for reflection and a chance to look ahead and plan for what is to come. While many are making personal resolutions pertaining to their physique, job performance or travel plans, there is a lot of chatter in the software delivery space around what DevOps will […]
15 DevOps Expert Opinions on Continuous Integration and Delivery
We at Shippable recently approached some DevOps experts and asked them what they really think about continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). The responses were just amazing, proving that CI/CD’s future is just bright and long in the software development process. Perhaps this insight might be of help to organizations, regardless of whether they […]
Are You Paying a ‘Wait-Time Tax’ on Your Global DevOps?
Business increasingly is global, so DevOps has become global as well. In fact, for many enterprises, DevOps entails collaboration between development, test/QA and ops teams across multiple continents. This is in part due to the economics of IT labor and in part because applications for global enterprises have to be deployed globally. Unfortunately, enterprises executing […]
Closing the Gap on Continuous Delivery Metrics that Matter
Management guru Peter Drucker once said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” I would take a step back and say, If you can’t measure it, you can’t get it off the ground. Many companies that I work with are amid digital transformation initiatives, such as the adoption of DevOps and continuous delivery. […]
A Holiday Tradition: 2017 Continuous Delivery Predictions
It’s that time of year. As the calendar year comes to a close, many of us are following time-honored traditions: making preparations for the holidays, planning some much-deserved time off and enjoying time with friends and family. In the business world, the year-end also brings its own traditions, and first among those is making predictions […]
How Continuous Can Integration Be?
My blog, “7 Pillars of DevOps,” identified seven essential best practices areas that make up successful DevOps. One of the seven pillars is continuous integration (CI). The blog explained that the pillars are not silos, but rather foundations that need to be kept in balance. A well-balanced CI implementation performs integrations that are fast enough […]
How Often Should You Release with Continuous Delivery?
If you do continuous delivery, you could release software updates as frequently as you want. But should you? Here’s what to consider when deciding how often to release. Although the terms continuous delivery and continuous deployment are often used interchangeably, they don’t mean the same thing. Under continuous delivery, you prepare all software updates as […]
Assembling the Key Components of Continuous Delivery
As agile methodology was popularized at the start of last decade, engineering teams gained the opportunity to begin producing software in shorter cycles, while releasing it reliably at more frequent intervals. This concept garnered greater attention in 2009, when Tim Fitz published his thoughts on continuous deployment. By the time Jez Humble authored his seminal book, […]
Should Continuous Deployment Be Renamed?
I’m a technologist turned into a word person. For those of you who know me, I started as a developer, learned ops and security as it was needed, and eventually my love of talking about technology lead me to writing, tech marketing and evangelism. I still develop, though; I can’t stop that—it’s kind of a […]
When Technology Doesn’t Matter
Over 10 years ago, Nick Carr wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review with the title, “IT Doesn’t Matter.” As you might expect, an article with a title like that generated a significant amount of controversy. CEOs from leading technology companies and other writers at the time panned Carr’s premise in a way that, […]
Welcome to the CD Neighborhood
Today we opened a new neighborhood or section here on DevOps.com. It is called the CD neighborhood and it will feature content on CD and related content. The neighborhood is sponsored by CA Technologies, who will also contribute content to the new neighborhood. CA authored content will be clearly marked. CA employees have contributed by […]
Adding Usability Testing to the CD Pipeline
Do you include usability tests in your continuous delivery pipeline? If not, you could be making a big mistake. Usability testing, which entails having actual users test an application for user-friendliness, intuitiveness and accessibility, gets easily lost within the DevOps conversation. If you want to do continuous delivery, waiting on manual usability tests may seem […]
Mainframe Apps and the Long View of DevOps Strategy
IT is constantly under intense short-term pressures. Line of business (LOB) executives demand a competitive advantage in digital customer engagement now. Marketing leaders demand better customer analytics now. Legal demands better audit reporting now. In fact, much of the investment that companies are making in Agile, DevOps and continuous delivery is due to the urgent, […]
Continuous Integration vs. Delivery vs. Deployment: What’s the Difference?
“Continuous” is one of the most popular words in the DevOps lexicon. What does it really mean, and what is the difference between continuous delivery, continuous deployment and continuous integration? Keep reading for some perspective. Like many technological concepts, continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment are terms that DevOps teams tend to use without […]
7 Best Practices for Continuous Delivery Success
Continuous delivery refers to the development of software in short and ongoing build-test-release cycles along the deployment pipeline. Repeated testing of processes and scripts before deployment to production means most errors are discovered early on and have minimal impact. Plus, finding and fixing such errors is much easier with fewer changes per release—software is released […]