The release is part of the company’s initiative to give companies a concrete way to break down organizational silos with a single view of shared metrics and business outcome insights.

“For far too long, a black box has existed between business strategies and how software isdelivered against them,” said Razat Gaurav, CEO of Planview. “To thrive in today’s fast-paced environment, the entire C-Suite, from CEO to CFO to CTO, need shared, real-time, actionable data regarding the health of their entire organization’s business and digital transformation initiatives. Planview delivers an innovative way to leverage predictive delivery insights and sentiment details and put them back into portfolio, value stream, and team plans, helping organizations create faster feedback loops that yield better decisions and deliver better outcomes—ultimately shining a light on that black box.”

The new Digital Product Insights system utilizes AI-powered sentiment analysis to gather data from comments. It categorizes the language as positive, negative, or neutral, offering a comprehensive view of plan performance. This data-driven approach supports proactive decision-making and increases confidence in predicting successful deliveries.

Planview also launched two innovations focused on delivering data-driven visibility to further strengthen the connection between software delivery and business outcomes.

The first is Planview Universal Connector, which extends connectivity across the enterprise toolchain, allowing organizations to continue their use of in-house or industry-specific applications as part of their value delivery.

The other, Roadmaps for Teams helps organizations translate plans into visual timelines for achieving their business outcomes and completing deliverables and can be used in conjunction with Digital Product Insights. 

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Successful teams have workflow durations less than 10 minutes, recovery from failed runs in under an hour, success rates above 90% in the default branch of their application, and deployments at least once per day, though the actual number depends on the business. 

Workflow duration is a measure of how efficiently a software delivery pipeline provides feedback on the quality of code. The report states: “An exclusive focus on speed often comes at the expense of stability. A pipeline optimized to deliver unverified changes is nothing more than a highly efficient way of shipping bugs to users and exposing your organization to unnecessary risk. To be able to move quickly with confidence, you need your pipeline to guard against all potential points of failure and to deliver actionable information that allows you to remediate flaws immediately, before they reach production.” 

To achieve productive feedback throughout the pipeline, extensive testing is needed at all stages, so the optimal pipeline is the shortest time it takes to run through all of those tests. The 10 minute benchmark seems to be the shortest time to generate those test results.  

For companies surveyed in the report, the median performance was 3.3 minutes. 

Mean time to recovery measures the average time that it takes to go from a failed build signal to a successful pipeline run. For companies that have created a pipeline where they have a complete picture of their code health and possible failure points, it is easier to bring systems back to a deploy-ready state following a failure. 

“Diagnosing the failure and implementing a fix becomes a matter of evaluating test output and correcting or reverting defects rather than embarking on an endless bug hunt,” the report states. 

The report also revealed that while the benchmark for this metric is 60 minutes, the median performance across companies is slower than that at 64 minutes. 

Success rate is defined as the “number of passing runs divided by the total number of runs over a period of time.”

According to CircleCI in the report, a failed signal isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the more important metric is the team’s ability to ingest the signal quickly and fix the error. 

Survey respondents fell below the industry benchmark of 90% on the default branch; The average success rate was 77%.

“While neither number reaches our benchmark of 90%, the pattern of non-default branches having higher numbers of failures indicates that teams are utilizing effective branching patterns to isolate experimental or risky changes from critical mainline code. And while success rates haven’t moved much over the history of this report, recovery times have fallen sharply. This is a  welcome sign that organizations are prioritizing iteration and resilience over momentum-killing perfectionism,” according to the report. 

And finally, throughput — which is the average number of workflow runs on a given day — is used to measure team flow because it tracks the units of work that are moving through the CI system. The industry median was 1.52 times per day. 

CircleCI did note that throughput isn’t necessarily a measure of quality of work, so it’s important to consider it alongside the other performance metrics to get the full picture. 

“Far more important than the volume of work you’re doing is the quality and impact of that work. Thoroughly testing your code and keeping your default branch in a deploy-ready state ensures that, regardless of when or how often changes are pushed, you can be confident they will add value to your product and keep your development teams focused on tomorrow’s challenges rather than yesterday’s mistakes,” the report wrote. 

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“Enterprise-class tooling for Argo – built on GitOps best practices – enables faster software delivery and smoother, scalable DevOps automation, and this is crucial to our customers’ business success as it gives them a clear competitive edge in the marketplace,” said Raziel Tabib, the CEO and cofounder of Codefresh. “CSDP allows our customers to innovate more quickly and deploy software more frequently, reliably and confidently.”

CSDP offers detailed deployment insights and analytics across environments and deployments through a centralized UI. 

Other benefits include built-in pipeline speed optimizations, traceable image deployments, flexible resource sharing, and centrally managed versioning.

Customers also have access to stringent security governance that directs all communication from clusters through protected firewall connections and with “no need for ad hoc security permissions.”

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NeoLoad, the performance testing solution for enterprises looking to verify application response time, availability, and scalability for mobile, web and packaged applications will be added to the Tricentis portfolio. 

“Today’s Agile and DevOps teams are looking for ways to be more strategic and eliminate manual tasks and implement automated solutions to work more efficiently and effectively. As part of Tricentis, we’ll be able to eliminate laborious testing tasks to allow teams to focus on high-value analysis and performance engineering,” said Thibaud Bussière, the president and co-founder of Neotys.

Cloudera SQL Stream Builder
Eventador’s SQL Stream Builder is now being relaunched as Cloudera SQL Stream Builder after Cloudera’s acquisition of the company late last year. 

It is now fully integrated with Cloudera’s Data Platform’s Shared Data Experience, which means that it will have access to the same unified and governance capabilities that the rest of the platform has. 

SQL Stream Builder continuously runs SQL via Flink and offers syntax checking, error reporting, schema detection, query creation, sampling results and creating outputs. 

Additional details on the solution are available here. 

Next.js 10.1 released
Next.js 10.1 features a three times faster refresh rate, improved installation time, next/image improvements with Apple Silicon M1 support and more. 

Customers can also have even faster performance and better build times by signing on to Webpack 5 with a new ‘future’ flag.

Developers can also use a new, flexible layer for composable e-commerce apps and add their own logo and branding to error pages. 

Additional details on all of the new features are available here.

Thoma Bravo invests in Applitools
Thoma Bravo announced that it made a strategic investment in Applitools, a provider of visual test automation software.

Applitools provides engineers with AI-based and cloud-powered solutions to help automate functional and visual testing.

“At this moment of dynamic change, businesses are looking for peace of mind and reliable, AI-augmented toolkits to maintain continuity across digital touchpoints. We look forward to partnering with Thoma Bravo to double down on our significant business momentum, drive continued product innovation and take our unique technology to new heights,” said Gil Sever, the CEO of Applitools.

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The technical integration of the company’s offerings “will offer dev teams detailed project visibility and team-based metrics by correlating data across projects, code, Git activity and releases,” the companies said in their announcement of the partnership.

In a December interview with SD Times, Dan Lines, COO at LinearB, explained that project management historically had a top-down mindset that gave metrics to executives, but didn’t help developers. The LinearB solution, Lines told SD Times, “can see where a pull request stalled and send a Slack message to get someone to review it,” among other developer-focused features. He went on to explain that the features in LinearB are tied into ceremonies such as a daily standup and retrospectives. With LinearB, development teams don’t have to give status updates at the standups; that information is automatically provided in the tool’s dashboard. Instead, those teams can talk about the problems they’re having advancing the project toward its goals. “Commits, branches, and pull requests all have visibility” with LinearB, he said Meanwhile, Clubhouse also emphasizes developers in its collaborative project management solution, which aims to overtake Atlassian’s Jira by providing a project management tool that “complements and enhances [developers’] existing workflows,” the company said in the partnership announcement. 

In a March 2019 interview with SD Times, Clubhouse founder Kurt Schradere  said, “I think we’ll see a movement away from structured, monthly road maps to sort of a continuous flow of information, your big things, and we want to enable that so organizations can move quickly, have their work in there but be able to pull back so everyone that needs to participate can get the next feature, the next value out the door, and still work together in sync.”

In today’s partnership announcement, LinearB co-founder and CEO Ori Keren said, “Coupling LinearB Software Delivery Intelligence with Clubhouse team-focused project management provides data-driven insights to gauge project progress in real time and better focus team resources on the work that matters most.”

Among capabilities the integration will provide is a pulse timeline view that the announcement said gives “detailed visibility of every feature, bug and chore by showing a live feed of activity from branches, PRs and releases for Clubhouse stories.” Further, it said the integration will enable real-time improvement of active projects by highlighting blockers, delays, high-risk code and branches merged without review for Clubhouse stories.

A shadow work detector helps with more accurate resource allocation by finding developer work in Git that’s not attached to a Clubhouse story; and an advanced cycle time dashboard adds bottleneck detection by visualizing the time across individual development phases such as coding time, PR pick-up time, PR review time and release time, the announcement stated.

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“Software project management is broken,” Lines told SD Times in a recent interview. “Developers don’t want to have ‘Big Brother’ looking over their shoulder.”

LinearB has created a new tool to help development teams overcome challenges with extant project management tools that are “good for planning but don’t add value once dev teams start building,” the company said in a statement about today’s product rollout.

In its announcement, LinearB said its solution provides developers with actionable information where they work — in Git and Slack. The solution, Lines told SD Times, “can see where a pull request stalled and send a Slack message to get someone to review it,” among other developer-focused features. He went on to explain that the features in LinearB are tied into ceremonies such as a daily standup and retrospectives. With LinearB, development teams don’t have to give status updates at the standups; that information is automatically provided in the tool’s dashboard. Instead, those teams can talk about the problems they’re having advancing the project toward its goals. “Commits, branches, and pull requests all have visibility” with LinearB, he said.

This improved visibility helps organizations gain clarity into what to work on, when to add staff and where to invest in automation, the company said in its announcement.

And, with the coronavirus pandemic accelerating the work-from-home culture that is growing, LinearB supports asynchronous development by giving everyone real-time visibility into projects, so they don’t need to wait for status meetings or manual updates to advance their work.

LinearB also hosts a Discord community to give project leaders a home to exchange issues they face or gain tips from their peers, Lines said. Right now, there are about 350 development leaders in the community.

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In its announcement, the BizOps Coalition said a recent survey showed that more than three-quarters of respondents indicated that “the disconnect between IT and business units results in significant costs,” while also creating waste and stymieing innovation.

“To us, this is a progression of 20 years of transformation in the industry,” said Serge Lucio, an author of the manifesto and vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom, which is driving a BizOps initiative. “It started about 20 years ago with the Agile Manifesto, and as we’ve seen in the last five years, a lot of standards and agile consultants have started talking about elevating agility to encompass the business level.”

According to the coalition, the BizOps Manifesto lays out a dozen guiding principles for organizations to follow to better achieve the business outcomes they desire though IT. Among those principles are:

• Business outcomes are the primary measure of success;
• Business leaders need to make informed technology investment decisions that drive business growth, improve customer experience and increase profitability;
• Requirements can and should change frequently, based on changing market, customer and business requirements.
• Changes are welcome even after software is in production; and
• The most efficient way to build trust and confidence is through transparency, communication and shared objectives.

“I see BizOps as a fundamental competence for companies with a significant technology investment — one that will improve their business agility and enable them to fulfill their purpose and serve their customer, no matter what the future brings,” Evan Leybourn, a BizOps Manifesto author and CEO and co-founder of the Business Agility Institute, said in a statement.

The issue of bringing business and IT efforts into alignment has been much-discussed over the last quarter-century, and it remains an issue today. Some of the disconnect involves different KPIs for IT and business. On the IT side, KPIs usually revolve around delivering on-time and on-budget, while business KPIs might revolve around the number of shopping cart purchases closed, or the number of seats booked on an airline, for example. The challenge for IT is to understand the KPI they ultimately need to deliver on, and Lucio said that at times, even the business doesn’t have this crisply defined. 

But Lucio believes the time is right for that to actually be realized. Among the reasons he cited were shorter development cycles, in which business and IT can no longer work under what he called “a contractual relationship,” and more continuous feedback loops exist for developers and decision-makers as to what is being developed.

Further, the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing organizations to more quickly follow through with digital transformation plans. “Just quoting Satya Nadella, he famously mentioned that he believes there’s been more transformation month to month than in the last two years,” Lucio said. “So there has been two years of transformation in just two months. There’s been way more of an imperative to transform now.”

Meanwhile, a new generation of CIOs and development leaders who come into this from a different culture. These “Gen Z’ers and millennials” want to understand their purpose, what they are doing, and ultimately what kind of value they are delivering. 

Finally, the advancement of tooling, leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning, gives organizations the ability to bring together different kinds of data that enables people from different department and organizational units to share it and use it as a common foundation to make decisions.  

To learn more about the BizOps Coalition and the manifesto, Lucio, Mik Kersten of Tasktop and distinguished professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College take part in a discussion on Oct. 15 at 11 AM Eastern time.

The founding members of the manifesto are:

• Serge Lucio, vice president and general manage of the Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom
• Patrick Tickle, chief product officer at Planview
• Mik Kersten, founder and CEO of Tasktop
• Sally Elatta, CEO of AgilityHealth
• Evan Leybourn, CEO of Business Agility Institute
• Tom Davenport, distinguished professor and author
• Dave West, CEO, Scrum.org
• Kevin Surace, chairman/CTO of Appvance.ai

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The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) establishes a cadence of planning and increments, which must be orchestrated and managed at different levels. Managing this planning at the level that directly concerns development teams is part of our role as Scrum masters.

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Scrum masters act as bridges between developer teams, business objectives and what can be realistically expected and achieved. We must ensure that we have oversight of the obstacles developers are likely to face, gauge the level of understanding of business goals and manage the elements that may detract from their ability to reach them. Effective communication is key, but so too is an ability to manage the day-to-day tasks of software development.

To understand our role, and the challenges we face, here are four key areas of focus for Scrum masters: 

1. Stick to ceremonies

For us, the four Scrum ceremonies (sprint planning, daily meeting, sprint review, and sprint retrospective) are essential, and we must ensure these take place and are attended by all those responsible for meeting objectives. This means working with individual developers to help them take ownership of tasks, i.e. stories defined by the Agile methodology, and providing them with the support they need.

Making sure JIRA boards are up to date and preparing the next iterations requires us to work closely with product owners, encouraging them to address backlogs of tasks, revisiting priorities and challenging them when it comes to reassessing the product roadmap. Story pointing is an essential part of establishing the areas that require the most attention. We need to make sure that sprint goals are being achieved and that the stories being progressed are not just those that are more interesting or fun, but rather those that move us toward delivering a feature.  

2. The importance of communication 

Establishing the weight of a story is a key part of daily planning as it gets teams talking to one another and allows a more dynamic and transparent assessment of priorities. This helps developers, Scrum masters and product managers to arrive at a mutual understanding for a project, centred around the delivery of a feature.   

The Agile structure prioritizes collaboration over hierarchy. Effective communication is therefore a key skill for Scrum masters. We must fully comprehend business objectives and customer requirements and ensure developer teams are mindful of these as we progress. But there are of course challenges to be overcome.

Working in Agile means being able to adapt to change when necessary. Developers are driven by their stories, but should not be single-minded in this approach, as the endpoint is achieving our sprint objective and delivering what customers want. The main caveat to this core principle, however, is that we must not make perfect the enemy of the great, nor even great the enemy of the good. This is why transparent communication internally is essential. 

3. Pushing back to push on

If a change is requested during a sprint, we must assess the capacity of teams, as well as how essential the change is. In an ideal world, there would be no new requirements introduced during an iteration, but this is rarely ever the case. Last-minute change is more of an expectation than an inconvenience, so we have to build in the unforeseen to our planning. 

Scrum masters do not like to incorporate last-minute change on the fly, preferring instead to push new changes into the next increment. This is where we must work with product managers to decide on the “must haves” for a certain feature, which again requires an acute understanding of customer requirements, as a workable solution can often fulfil these before the ideal is possible. 

As we begin implementing features, we also learn new constraints and dependencies that slow us down, which may necessitate refocusing priorities. We may, for example, need architect validation to merge code and for pull requests that allow us to deploy it. But architects typically do not have the same time constraints that a Scrum team has, as they focus on the entire increment, rather than the sprint timelines developers work to.

Working through these challenges is a vital part of our retrospective meetings. In SAFe, we are able to do this at a team level on each iteration with Scrum retrospectives, as well as at the end of Program Increments with Inspect and Adapt (I&A) workshops. These help us to identify where issues may have caused bottlenecks and to establish better processes going forward. 

4. Understanding the developer mindset

Working in Agile means developers are responsible for how their code performs in the production environment. Reviewing code is not the sole responsibility of QAs, as a story is only “done” when the code is deployable. 

Speaking from first-hand experience, writing and verifying code is what developers want to do, as they are goal oriented and enjoy achieving milestones and progressing along product roadmaps. But as the definition of “done” relates to code that is ready for end users, there are no hand-offs to other teams, QA or otherwise. This means that developers must always work with the assumption that their code will be deployed. 

This is where a DevOps mindset is crucial, as teams share responsibility for the end-user’s experience and fully understand their own integral part in the value chain when it comes to delivery. This is empowering for developers and is also advantageous for Agile workflows. 

 As Scrum masters, reducing work in progress is a key part of our role, which is why a DevOps mindset, emphasizing collaboration and total ownership of work, informs how we interact with and organize teams and tasks. 

Another important point of attention we have, is to reduce as much as possible the number of objectives for a given sprint. Ideally, having a single objective, on which all team members can contribute, increases the delivery of value (only achieved when stories are done) and contributes to establish/(re)enforce the team spirit.

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“It is something that is super important in our current era. We keep saying that software is eating the world, and yet we don’t really have a way to manage the delivery of software much like we have software to manage things like sales, marketing or finance. We don’t have that for software delivery. What we are observing in organizations is a lot of them have acquired a lot of different systems to develop and deliver better and different teams have different needs and that leads to a lot of silos among those teams and even within teams,” said Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder of CloudBees.

RELATED CONTENT: Going ‘lights-out’ with DevOps

As a result, the company announced the early preview version of its CloudBees SDM Platform. The platform is designed to tie together all of the artifacts, data and events within an organization’s DevOps toolchain and bring them together in a unified system of record.

“There are many things you want to know about your organization. Sometimes you want to know why it is not working. Why it is not working fast enough. Where are the bottlenecks. How can you do things better. We are building this SDM that is essentially a data backend. It makes it possible to aggregate all the data from those different systems and have a unified data model for all of DevOps,” said Labourey.

Bringing all the data together will make it possible to extract insight that can be extremely useful in unlocking value for the business, seeing where the bottlenecks are and understanding why you are not getting the outcomes you are looking for, Labourey explained.

In addition, Labourey said the SDM platform is not just a dashboard for viewing everything in one place, but it also helps connect common processes and data within the software delivery life cycle. Features include a product hub, policy engine, efficiency dashboard, contributions dashboard, real-time value stream management and integrated feature flag management.

Additionally, the company announced updates to its Application Release Orchestration platform and CloudBees Accelerator at the conference.

Version 9.1 of the CloudBees Flow platform features release command center customization, data archiving, visibility into how a release is progressing, release portfolio feedback and release pipeline execution.

CloudBees Accelerator version 11.1 aims to cut build and test cycle times. Features include support for SSL and TLS cryptographic protocols, improvements to CloudBees Electrify, enhancements to the Linux Foundation’s Yocto project, and improvements to out-of-the-box CloudBees Accelerator support.

The post CloudBees tackles software delivery management at DevOps World | Jenkins World appeared first on SD Times.

“Most organizations are facing two primary dilemmas in their software delivery: ‘how do I know if a release is ready to move forward, and once it has, how do I know how well it’s doing?’ Even with common testing and monitoring tools in place, there’s still a large degree of uncertainty once code is released into the wild,” said Tal Weiss, CTO and co-founder at OverOps. “OverOps now arms our customers with concrete data in an easily digestible format to validate the quality of any code or infrastructure change to an environment.”

According to Weiss, OverOps had previously only been able to find and fix production errors, but this new solution is meant to stop errors from happening in the first place.

Other features include reliability scorecards and release certification, true root cause drill-downs, and reliability trends over time. The scorecords and certification uses scores such as newly introduced errors, increasing errors and performance slowdowns so that DevOps teams can quickly go in and see what requires their immediate attention. In addition, it includes new Jenkins integrations to provide insight into any anomalies introduced in a release, OverOps explained.

True root cause drill-down provides a dashboard for gaining deeper visibility into low-scoring deployments, apps and infrastructure tiers. It will also show corresponding anomalies, code and variable state at the moment an error happened.

Lastly, reliability trends over time tracks and identifies patterns so teams can compare releases and see how well apps and deployments do over time. It will include error volume, unique error count, newly introduced or increasing errors and slowdowns.

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