We discussed in my previous blogs that DevOps is a culture requiring the orchestrated functioning of multiple stakeholders in an organization – development, operations, user assistance, and customer relations, to name a few.  Today, I dwell on the role of information development (ID) in the DevOps orchestra. As we know, DevOps is best suited to situations where the need to respond to customers quickly manifests itself in the continuous delivery model.  There are two kinds of changes that this software development cycle... [More]

Tags:  information-development agile-alm rtc continuous-delivery user-assistance rqm devops clm devops-culture devops-service

A couple of months ago at our Interconnect conference, I was on a panel that led to an interesting discussion with a customer. The panel was on “Shift Left Testing”, but I had also introduced the idea of moving some testing to production.  The customer said to me, “so some testing is shift-left & some is shift-right.”  For me it was an “aha” moment crystallizing things I’ve been thinking a lot about and I’m co-opting the term. Indeed, that’s exactly what we need to do when... [More]

Tags:  agile devops ibmstory devops-culture lean continuous-delivery continuous-testing

Themes are percolating in my brain spurred by everything from my Twitter feed , to LinkedIn to hallway conversations with colleagues.  There’s a lot of angst about responding to market changes and customer expectations. The techniques we all talk about: Lean , Agile , Continuous Delivery , DevOps , Design Thinking have everyone wondering how to reconcile all of these themes into an action plan to address those expectations. I keep thinking it doesn’t have to be that complicated.  There’s no secret formula that if... [More]

Tags:  continuous-delivery ibmstory agile lean devops devops-culture

It is quite common for organizations to deploy their applications onto multiple environments. For example, most teams need environments for development, test, pre-production, and production. Dealing with all these environments is never easy, and it requires collaborative work between development, tests, operation, and 3 teams. IBM DevOps Services recently (Oct 2) improved the Delivery Pipeline to support multistage deployment.  If you have multiple Bluemix spaces, you can configure the pipeline to deploy to these different environments.... [More]

Tags:  continuous-integration deployment continuous-delivery delivery bluemix devops-service pipeline agile

Over the years, I’ve been on a lot of test teams and I’ve talked to a lot of customers’ test teams. I noticed this pattern a few years ago, and used to think it would be nice to skip the usual mistakes. But now, I’m thinking it’s become an imperative to actually change the pattern. The Pattern So, let me start at the beginning. The test automation beginning that is.  Most teams (myself included) start by focusing on a test tool to do end-to-end customer focused testing. This almost always leads to a GUI... [More]

Tags:  devops-culture continuous-testing ibmstory devops continuous-delivery

There’s been a refrain I’m hearing lately: “The team has six weeks of manual testing at the end of every release cycle. In order to get to continuous delivery, we have to address all this technical debt and automate those tests– we can’t possibly find enough time or resource to do that. “ Are you sure? Right now you’re thinking this is going to be another one of those exhortations to prioritize technical debt because it’s killing the team.  Nope. I’m suggesting you forget about it and... [More]

Tags:  continuous-testing devops devops-culture continuous-delivery ibmstory

DevOps is a culture in the world of software development organizations.  A culture that ushers in a new way of working, requires new tools, and keeps customers happier.  We'll talk about the new way of working and these new tools in a while.  But first, a word about this different organizational culture. DevOps requires all the folks that make and use software to work together a lot closer than they have been used to in the pre-DevOps world.  DevOps is not just about development and operations, but it is about people in... [More]

Tags:  ibm continuous-delivery urbancode devops devops-services devops-culture

As few weeks ago I ran across a  good article on adopting “Continuous Delivery practices”. In the white paper, “ Adopting IBM’s approach to continuous software delivery ,” the author, Paul Bahr discussed IBM’s adoption framework for iteratively introducing new capabilities and planning improvements.  Here is the link to the survey:  IBM DevOps Practices Self Assessment survey . In that article it described the first step as conducting a Devops assessment workshop... [More]

Tags:  devops agile continuous-delivery agile-safe agile-dad continuous-integration continuous​-delivery

In March 2014, we released th e IB M Wo rklo ad A utom atio n as a s ervi ce (WA aaS) offering, hosted on the public Softlayer cloud. One of the major characteristics of this offering is the automated delivery process that allows us to deploy the latest available product features, controlling a continuously testing and code promotion flow (QA -> Staging -> Production).   In this blog I want to show you how we provide continuity of service to our customers. Using  IBM UrbanCode Deploy to implement our delivery process we built,... [More]

Tags:  continuous-delivery ibmtws softlayer cloud wa saas devops udeploy workloadautomation

In March 2014, we released th e  IB M Wo rklo ad A utom atio n as  a s ervi ce   (WA aaS) offering, hosted on the public Softlayer  cloud. One of the major characteristics of this offering is the automated delivery process that allows us to deploy the latest available product features, controlling a continuously testing and code promotion flow (QA -> Staging -> Production).   In this blog I want to show you how to build a remote package repository for IBM UrbanCode Deploy to use in the context... [More]

Tags:  udeploy saas wa softlayer ibmtws cloud workloadautomation devops continuous-delivery

In March 2014, we released the  IBM Workload Automation as a service  (WAaaS) offering, hosted on the public Softlayer  cloud. One of the major characteristics of this offering is the automated delivery process that allows us to deploy the latest available product features, controlling a continuously testing and code promotion flow (QA -> Staging -> Production). In this blog I want to show you how using IBM UrbanCode Deploy we manage the environments dynamically provisioned in the SoftLayer cloud.... [More]

Tags:  workloadautomation saas devops udeploy softlayer ibmtws cloud continuous-delivery wa

Scaling Agile practices in support of DevOps A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to participate in the "Release and Deploy workshop" at the 2014 Innovate conference. During the day long hands-on workshop, we learned about several new UrbanCode Release (UCR) capabilities.  While there were several interesting capabilities, UCR's abilities to "visualize" the deployment pipeline and to track the  del ivery lifecycle for a particular set of "applications" being released together showed how effective it... [More]

Tags:  safe dad chef ucr agile-safe continuous-delivery continuous-integration agile-alm urbancode

When I was a kid, we would either chant or whistle when walking or driving by a graveyard. According to Wiktionary , the meaning is clear:                     "To enter a situation with little or no understanding of the possible consequences." Or otherwise stated, an incantation can protect you from something you ultimately can’t avoid. I.e. one day, we are all headed to the graveyard. I think about this saying a lot when talking to teams who say “we... [More]

Tags:  story devops continuous-delivery

A new Infinite Undo blog article provides some great examples from Google, Amazon and Facebook that demonstrate that “ Continuous Delivery is mainstream .”  Core practices and techniques that support DevOps and continuous delivery have been around for years. Not only is continuous delivery possible, but surveys are demonstrating that there is significant value in embracing continuous delivery. The 2013 DevOps Survey showed that high-performing organizations are delivering 30x more frequent releases than their peers and with much greater... [More]

Tags:  continuous-delivery devops agile #agile transformation lean