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

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

Sometimes it feels like almost everything we used to do (and thought was so very important), just doesn’t fit anymore.  The times they are a-changin’ everywhere. For instance, in the past we spent a lot of time reviewing the capabilities of tools before deciding to even kick the tires. The “explore” and “experiment” phases of tool selection could be quite long. We would have a list of prioritized requirements and if the tool didn’t measure up on paper, we wouldn’t look any further.  We... [More]

Tags:  devops continuous-delivery agile automation tools devops-culture

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

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 agile-safe continuous-delivery 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 wa cloud saas devops workloadautomation udeploy