DevOps

Cloud-based development, delivery, and deployment environments are the future of IT operations. Thomas Stiehm shares the hard-learned lessons of setting up and running cloud-based solutions that implement DevOps for geographically distributed agile projects. Thomas describes...

The last exciting era in testing was the late ‘90s when the web turned technology on its ear, the agile movement overthrew our processes, and the rise of open source gave us accessible and innovative tools. However, since then, Jonathan Kohl finds it has been a lot of the same-old, same-old.

Mature agile organizations are introducing continuous delivery as a crucial step to realize their goal of delivering business value rapidly. Andrew Phillips highlights implementation issues about how agile development can fit with enterprise release management policies and governance needs. Andrew outlines proven practices and selection criteria for tools to help you address these issues. Then, he presents a DevOps case study demonstrating the continuous delivery process for building, packaging, deploying, and testing a complex application. Find out about deployment support for server and resource configurations, application binaries, database upgrades and rollbacks, messaging, and enterprise service buses. With the right tools and processes you can develop an open, extensible framework that supports additional services and platforms.

Picture this scene from three years ago: Employing the corporately mandated processes, a software engineering team is delivering system updates about once every nine months. When their senior user suddenly demands the next delivery in twenty-two weeks-half the current cycle duration-the team realize that they must quickly change development practices. Mathew Bissett describes how Her Majesty's Government did precisely that-and much, much more. First, they reduced delivery cycles from unpredictable dates every nine months to predictable releases every six weeks. Then, they cut releases cycle time to once every week. By identifying and mitigating risks early in the work intake process, enforcing quality gates, executing multiple test levels concurrently-and more-they dramatically increased throughput with the same or better quality. Today, these new processes provide their teams the best balance of structure versus agility.