DevOps: BPMLinks Approach. White Paper

Transcription

1 DevOps: BPMLinks Approach White Paper

2 Introduction Businesses are under tremendous pressure to create new value for their customers with an increasing proportion of business innovation delivered through software, yet they are finding that traditional approaches to software development and delivery are not sufficient. Manual processes are error prone, break down, create waste, and delay response to business need. Technology by itself does not offer competitive advantage; however, delivery of technology-based innovation can be a competitive differentiator and, when sustained over time, a core competency. Sustained Innovation means continuously developing new ideas into innovative software, which in turn continuously improves the value delivered to users. We believe one significant means for achieving this sustained innovation is DevOps. BPMLinks believes one significant means for achieving this sustained innovation is DevOps-a contraction of development and operations, the two teams that form the core of an organization s technology department. In its conventional sense, DevOps refers to a closer collaboration of these two teams, and the integration of associated processes and tooling. But from BPMLinks viewpoint, DevOps is the blending of tasks performed by a company's application development and systems operations teams. DevOps promotes better communication between development and operations as more elements of operations become programmable. In its most narrow interpretation, DevOps describes the part of an organization s information technology (IT) team that creates and maintains infrastructure. The term may also be used to describe a team of software engineers who strategically look at the entire software delivery chain, overseeing shared services and championing the use of new development tools and best practices. By adopting EnCIME Solution Accelerator, organizations can unlock new business opportunities to address their development and delivery needs.

3 BPMLinks Approach Challenges and Existing Problems The concerns we hear from our customers are How do we release on-time?, How can we have a stable software release? or How can we address the problems before end users get impacted? Our solution to our customer is adopting BPMLinks DevOps solution. The majority of IT professionals or customers are not aware of DevOps or just have a partial understanding of the big picture. At BPMLinks, we see DevOps as a business driven software delivery approach, an approach that takes a new or enhanced business idea from design to development to testing and all the way to production, providing business value to customers in an efficient manner. Here are some of the existing problems in IT industry. Building and maintaining servers which is time consuming and unproductive No environment management - Differences in development and production environments Slow deployments Costly error prone manual process and efforts No shared ownership - Lack of feedback and proper metric leads Our Solution Collaborative Development Software development is an intense collaborative process where success depends on the ability to create, share and integrate information at a very rapid pace. With globalization comes a growing need to foster highly productive software development teams that can operate successfully in this global market. Distance creates an additional challenge to development processes, as fewer opportunities exist for rich interaction and direct communication occurs less frequently. Virtual team collaboration is the collaboration of teams that are not located in the same physical location. These teams could be either on-site, near-shore, offshore or a combination of the three types. Whether dealing with teams collaborating in the same location or virtual teams across multiple locations, collaboration is key to a successful DevOps transformation. Continuous Integration Continuous Integration is a technique that continually merges source code updates from all developers on a team into a shared mainline. This continual merging prevents a developer's local copy of a software project from drifting too far afield as new code is added by others, avoiding catastrophic merge conflicts. In practice, CI involves a centralized server that continually pulls in all new source code changes as developers commit them and builds the software application from scratch, notifying the team of any failures in the process. If a failure is seen, the development team is expected to refocus and fix the build before making any additional code changes. While this may seem disruptive, in practice it focuses the development team on a singular stability metric: a working automated build of the software.

4 BPMLinks Approach Continuous Testing During the continuous testing phase where nightly and weekend regression runs are automated for trunk and release branches it is testing that does the job of finding problems before the software release. During the development process the verdicts trends from testing are a primary measurement of progress. During the release deployment phase more testing verifies the release packages are ready for release. What DevOps really does is bring testing into the mainstream of development processes, and avoids the problems created by having big-bang testing left to the end of the cycle, such as release delays, and quality issues. Adopting EnCIME Solution Accelerator By adopting EnCIME Solution Accelerator, organizations can unlock new business opportunities to address their development and delivery needs that includes: Configurable application deployment settings (product, version, environments, schedules) Creates deployment ZIP file with required rules and associated data Performs pre-deployment validation, validating rules status etc. Creates deployment files which include zip files, configuration files, scripts & data instances Stores deployment files in a source-safe such as TFS / GIT Deploys based on the deployment schedule (imports ZIP and associated files) into the target environment Performs deployment validation by verifying logs, running application specific test scripts, checking performance Provides dashboard with deployment statistics and application performance post deployment Automated Verification Deployment Validation Pre-flight Deployment Snapshots Alerts / Logs Analysis Clipboard Size Analysis Notification and Reporting BUILD TEST DEV Target Environments Cofigure PRODUCT PACKAGE EnCIME Product / Version Zip file Deployment Schedule DB Scripts Validation Scripts Data Instances Sys Test UAT PROD Automated Deployment Repeatable Framework Approval Capability

5 BPMLinks Approach Conclusion Traditional approaches to software development and delivery are no longer reliable. Manual processes are error prone, break down, and create waste and delayed response. Businesses cannot afford to focus on cost while neglecting speed of delivery and they cannot choose speed over managing risk. EnCIME Solution Accelerator offers a powerful solution to these challenges which reduces time to customer feedback, increase quality, reduce risk and cost, and unify process, culture and tools across the end-to- end lifecycle including the adoption path to Steer, Develop/Test, Deploy and Operate. Benefits of EnCIME Solution Accelerator Delivering a differentiated and engaging customer experience that can build customer loyalty and increase market share by continuously obtaining and responding to customer feedback Obtaining fast-mover advantage to capture markets with quicker time to value based on software-based innovation, with improved predictability and success Increasing the capacity to innovate by reducing waste and rework in order to shift resources to higher value activities Eliminating activities that are not necessary for learning what customers want, which emphasizes fast, continuous iterations and customer insight with a feedback loop Eliminating wait times and delays caused by manual processes and reliance on tribal knowledge Enabling knowledge workers, business analysts, developers, testers, and other domain experts to focus on creative activities (rather than procedural activities) that help to sustain innovation Optimizing risk management using steering with meaningful delivery analytics that illuminate validated learning by reducing uncertainty in ways that can be measured

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