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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Infrastructure Management in the Age of DevOps
DevOps has emerged as the de facto cure-all for all that’s wrong with enterprise IT, breaking down silos and replacing them with agile and transparent relationships between developers and operations and seamless, fast workflows that drive greater efficiencies across IT. But legacy IT systems still need tending, even in a DevOps world. They must be […]
DevOps Ascending: Guardrails, Not Guidelines – DevOps For Digital Leaders
The season of DevOps is upon us, if not only related to widespread adoption, then certainly in terms of industry emphasis. This week, at the CA World ’16 conference, my colleagues and I will be interacting with thousands of practitioners, all of whom have evolving DevOps narratives. Meanwhile, CA was a founding sponsor of the […]
Accelerating DevOps with Service Management (and Vice Versa)
One of the great misconceptions of service management is what it means. This also is the reason why so many service management initiatives fail. Consider a call center, for example, with many people answering phones and replying to emails. It’s true that a service desk is one of the functions (and in some organizations, maybe […]
Are We Leaving Developers Out of DevOps Spinoffs?
SecOps. DataOps. NetOps. Reading these terms, you get the sense that the key to IT efficiency is to make IT Ops work with everyone else. But that’s a mistake, because it leaves developers out of the picture. It’s no secret that the DevOps movement has generated a number of other *Ops initiatives, including those listed […]
4 Essential Practices to Succeed at ChatOps
We know enterprises are embracing messaging apps and incorporating so-called “ChatOps” into their workflow. ChatOps is, potentially, a powerful way to facilitate more swift decision-making and problem-solving and to receive quick, expert guidance. “With the rise of cloud services that can be easily deployed, and increased awareness and importance given to productivity and collaboration within […]
Debating the Future of DevOps
Change happens at an astronomical pace in the DevOps world, and I constantly see organizations shifting in their needs as the weeks and months go by. One week, the most essential need will be a specific configuration management tool and the next, it will be an urgent requirement to work on containerization. Many companies forget […]
Why DevOps Needs Cloudified NPM
One of the three “ways”—or principles that DevOps guru Gene Kim articulates as defining DevOps—is amplifying feedback loops. One of the key ways that Ops contributes to this amplification is by implementing rich monitoring instrumentation of operational conditions. The move toward more automated configuration management and the rise of cloud-friendly application performance management suites have […]
Don’t Leave Software Testers Out of DevOps
The term DevOps implies that software delivery is all about integrating the development and IT operations teams. But the software testing team is an important, if oft-overlooked, part of the picture. Here’s why. Could you deliver software continuously without involving the QA team in the continuous delivery pipeline? You could try, but it would probably […]
Every Business Has Become a Technology Business
Contributor: ITSM ACADEMY-Drew Lapatin Every business has become a technology business. Let that one sink in for a moment. With the internet of things ever increasing it has become ever more imperative for us to make wise decisions about how to move forward on which IT services we should be delivering into the future […]
Making Performance More Than a Best Practice
Yes, you read that correctly: SRE means that strong application performance—speed, reliability and availability—no longer is simply a best practice. It is a must. Site reliability engineering, or SRE, is a term Google coined several years ago, and while there is no universal definition, SRE can be thought of as a discipline that blends software engineering […]
Don’t Be Samsung: Here’s How You Can Protect Yourself
Imagine a factory building 100,000 units a day, and you can see how a small error can have huge consequences. Now imagine that factory is a database. The world’s top smartphone maker this month pulled the plug on its $882 Galaxy Note 7 after phones overheated and caught fire, concluding in a disastrous recall for […]
What the Current DDoS Landscape Means for DevOps
Businesses, governments, hospitals, schools, charities and even individuals—they’re all the same to a DDoS perpetrator. If you have a website, it’s likely to be targeted by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack at some point. DDoS has the potential to shut down your site for days and create havoc with an organization. They can […]
Why PR, Legal and HR Matter for Continuous Delivery
By most definitions, DevOps involves making developers and IT Ops teams work better together. But integrating other parts of an organization, such as legal and public relations, into DevOps is also important. Here’s why. DevOps has become popular because it helps to speed the delivery of software. The goal is to reach continuous delivery, which […]
‘Best’ is Relative, but Starts at the Top
Your aging mom needs a new car. You are picking it out for her because she quit paying attention to cars long ago. All you ever buy is Fords. You also always buy trucks. Do you pop off and buy your Mom an F350? Not unless she actually needs an F350 (highly unlikely, but aging […]
To DevOps Or Not To DevOps
Although enterprises today all claim to be software companies, there remain four distinct groups of organizations: the technology leaders, the technology followers, the technology hopefuls and the technology laggards. The first group are the industry leaders who are paving the way. These are the organizations coming up with new technologies, processes and cultural shifts. They […]
DevOps Dozen Finals Voting is Open!
Sometimes, good things are worth waiting for. I am happy to say that the voting for the DevOps Dozen finals is now open! There are 12 Categories with up to 12 finalists in each category. All of the finalists came from nominations by you our audience. In fact that is why it took so long […]
Infrastructure’s Impact on Shifting Left
If you lead big honkin’ software development projects at a big honkin’ enterprise, you’re probably doing everything you can to shift QA left. That’s because the earlier you discover defects and shortfalls, the faster and less expensively you can bring great software to market. Unfortunately, above a certain scale, it takes more than just better […]
The Real ROI of DevOps
Many established enterprises are stuck in reverse. Dragged down by legacy IT systems and sclerotic software workstreams, these businesses simply cannot adapt and get up to speed in the continuously changing, high-velocity global marketplace of the 21st century. Delta Airlines’ recent technology crash, for example, dramatically illustrates how aging and inflexible IT systems can cripple […]
An IT Practitioner’s Guide To DevOps
Two technology innovations of the past decade have fundamentally changed how IT works and given rise to the “DevOps” phenomenon. Before we dive into what DevOps is and how IT organizations should adopt this culture, let’s review what gave rise to it in the first place. Pull from Agile Development The last decade has seen […]