Test Driven Development, Continuous Test and Code Quality
We’ve gotten a lot of good out of agile development methodologies. I’m never a “One True Way” kind of person, but agile has a ton of benefits that development needed (and Ops increasingly needs). Extending that to the Dev side of DevOps is painless, since much of agile is wrapped in DevOps clothes these days. […]
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 […]
Testing: Your Secret Weapon for DevOps Success
I spend virtually all day, every day, speaking with IT leaders who recognize that their bottom line ultimately rests on their ability to accelerate the delivery of innovative software. That’s why they’ve invested so much in digital transformation initiatives—including hiring the best and brightest developers, scaling Agile, driving DevOps adoption, automating the continuous delivery pipeline, […]
CD 101 Podcast: How to Build the Modern Software Factory with Agile Development and Continuous Delivery
And now, for Episode 3 … you decide if it beats “Star Wars – Revenge of the Sith.” I think we accidentally just set the bar pretty low, but … … here we go. Let’s begin with a prerequisite pithy quote from an objective industry observer: “If agile software development was the opening act to a […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Relevant Continuous Testing: The Primary Key to DevOps
My recent blog, “7 Pillars of DevOps,” identified seven essential best practices areas that make up successful DevOps and explained that the pillars are not silos, but rather foundations that need to be kept in balance. One of the pillars is continuous testing (CT). For well-balanced DevOps, CT performs tests that are fast enough to […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
A Ferrari and DevOps: More Similar Than You Might Think
In a world where customers aren’t short of options, all businesses are characterized by the need to achieve customer delight. From a technological standpoint, a large part of that hinges on fast-tracking the release of high-quality software. A release every quarter is being replaced by a release every week and sometimes even sooner. Expectations have […]
You’re Not Doing DevOps if You Can’t Pull the Cord
There are many concepts in Lean manufacturing that have applicability with software development “factories.” One example is the Andon Cord. The Andon Cord concept involves using signals and alerts to indicate that a station on the assembly line has a problem. Alarms are activated manually by workers pulling a physical cord or automatically by the […]
Keep Applications Running by Testing Early, Continuously
Almost every product we buy or use today goes through some form of extensive testing before it’s released on the market; typically, these tests are designed to replicate the worst-case scenarios that a product may encounter under real-world conditions. Automobiles, for example, go through extensive hot and cold weather testing in remote locations, and are […]
Design for DevOps – Best Practices
Without good design practices, a DevOps implementation has no hope of delivering on its promise of accelerating innovation with high quality and scale. Anyone who has been a designer knows that good design for DevOps is easier said than done. My blog, “7 Pillars of DevOps,” identified seven essential best practices areas that make up […]
Cobalt Merges Bug Bounties, Continuous Testing for Better Security
The rapid pace of application development today can be hard to keep up with, especially when it comes to security. Combining the benefits of continuous testing with the incentives of a crowdsourced bug bounty program seems like a potentially effective way to address that volatility effectively. Companies need to keep up with demand while staying […]
xMatters Sees Value in Continuous Testing
xMatters builds an intelligent communications platform that alerts and connects company stakeholders for IT incident response and in manufacturing line workflow support and DevOps systems scenarios. Customers who count on xMatters also count on the effectiveness of the vendor’s continuous testing mechanisms: A failure of continuous testing early on at xMatters could lead to a […]