Articles
 |
Measuring the Performance of Your Operations Center Many organizations have problems with consistently tracking and measuring system outages. Issues aren't logged, admins make changes to systems without going through change management, and a high number of issues turn out to be recurring problems. Implementing a performance measurement process calculates system reliability and can help you improve consistency. |
|
 |
DevOps: Collaboration with a Purpose Development, operations, and QA have long recognized the importance of coexistence, but they've still had weak or unbalanced relationships. DevOps emphasizes collaboration, rejecting the "us versus them" mentality. Every department needs information, feedback, and support from every other department, helping everyone see how they enable each other. |
|
 |
Testers: An Integral Part of the DevOps Team Building innovative software faster and better is imperative to an organization’s success, so it makes sense to take advantage of DevOps. But what some teams fail to consider is that testing is a crucial part of the process. Without a “test early and often” mentality, DevOps would only be able to release software faster—not better. |
|
 |
Deploy Automated Testing to Create Better Software Receiving feedback on your testing results should yield dividends in quality. And the sooner you get that feedback, the quicker you can start seeing improved and consistent quality and faster time to market. So the question becomes, why wait to jump on the automated testing bandwagon? |
Better Software Magazine Articles
 |
Bridging the Bimodal Divide between Waterfall and Agile Most software developers are in either the agile or the waterfall camp. Agile is required to be competitive, but many enterprise processes still rely on waterfall practices for stability. They can coexist. |
|
 |
How Can You Get More Effective with DevOps? By emphasizing better communication and collaboration between software development and IT, this article explores ways to establish trust by focusing on customer value. For example, Manoj Khanna suggests continuous integration and validation as techniques that helps build that trust. |
|
 |
What's a Professional? For years we've all heard how software development and IT are a mixture of art and science. As our industry matures and becomes more mainstream, Johanna wants to upset the apple cart by suggesting that there's a missing and sorely needed ingredient—professionalism. |
|
 |
Green IT: A Sustainability Perspective for Portfolio Optimization As organizations grow and diversify, they end up with a large number of IT systems. However, by quantifying sustainability metrics, they can optimize their IT infrastructures and introduce a greener side of IT. |
Interviews
 |
Using DevOps to Solve Your IT Problems: An Interview with Sherry Chang In this interview, Sherry Chang, chief architect for Intel IT's DevOps initiative, explains how DevOps can solve many of your lingering IT problems. She defines the term, details how DevOps can be seen as disruptive to some teams, and lists what techniques you should consider using. |
|
 |
Scaling DevOps in the Enterprise: An Interview with Anders Wallgren
Podcast
In this interview, Anders Wallgren, the CTO of Electric Cloud, explains how to help DevOps travel from small, individual teams to the entire organization. He covers the benefits, risks, and best paths to success if you want to make your company faster and more effective. |
|
 |
STAREAST 2015 Interview with Bryan Linder on Continuous Delivery
Video
In this interview, Bryan Linder defines the methodology, processes, and tools associated with release automation, outlines the benefits of more frequent, smaller releases, and talks about his overall experience at STAREAST. |
|
 |
From Steve Jobs's Leadership Style to IT's Evolution in the Workplace: An Interview with Eric Bloom—Part 2
Podcast
Eric Bloom is a writer for TechWell and is the president and CTO of Manager Mechanics LLC. In part two of this interview, Eric discusses how IT is becoming more interwined with management than ever before, career challenges for IT staff, and the idea of concierge tech support. |
Conference Presentations
 |
What’s Our Job When the Machines Do Testing?
Slideshow
After its highly hyped introduction decades ago and followed by a long, quiet “winter,” artificial intelligence (AI) has slowly crept back into our consciousness. While our Siri and Alexa assistants entertain us, machine learning (ML) has brought new conveniences into our lives with solutions including Nest and Netflix. Today, AI brings us to the tantalizing brink of the autonomous vehicle. The sea change of this 4th Industrial Revolution has begun to disrupt industry after industry. The emerging capabilities of these fascinating machines demand our attention as AI starts to be applied in ways that directly affect our workplaces. And the test community will not be immune. Geoff Meyer explores industry-wide applications of analytics and machine learning to testing, and shares an in-depth view into how this next generation of automation is being used to optimize test and IT operations. |
Geoff Meyer
|
 |
Rapid and Intelligent Test Engineering
Slideshow
Today’s IT plans tend to be defined as much by constraints as by requirements. Conventionally, the testing phase starts after the design and build phase. In today’s competitive and... |
Mathi Natarajan, Cognizant and Sreeram Gopalakrishnan, Cognizant
|
 |
IT Governance and Compliance in an Agile World
Slideshow
Establishing IT governance and compliance practices is essential for organizations that have regulatory or audit requirements. The good news is that you can be agile and still comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, CFR 21, HIPAA, and other regulatory imperatives. Done well, IT controls actually help you improve both productivity and quality. Bob Aiello describes how to implement IT controls in frameworks such as ISACA Cobit and ITIL v3 that many regulatory frameworks require-while maintaining agile practices. Bob's guidance includes specific examples of establishing IT controls: separation of duties, work-item to change-set traceability, physical and functional configuration audits, and more. Bob explains how these practices help government, defense, and corporations scale agile practices where audit and regulatory compliance is a must. |
Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
|
|
Cloud Computing: Powering the Future of Development and Testing
Slideshow
Developers and testers are under constant pressure to operate more efficiently, cut costs, and deliver on time. Without access to scalable, flexible, and cost effective computing resources, these challenges are magnified. Brett Goodwin explains how to create scalable dev/test environments in the cloud, and shares best practices for reducing cycle time and decreasing project costs. Learn how scalable, cloud-based data centers can run software without complicated re-writes; enable rapid defect resolution with snapshots and clones; and provide global collaboration for multiple product and release teams. Brett presents a case study of Cushman and Wakefield, the world's largest privately held real estate services firm, which struggled with an on-premises development and testing environment. |
Brian White, Skytap, Inc.
|
Recommended Web Seminars
Featured Resources
Visit Our Other Communities
StickyMinds is a TechWell community.
Through conferences, training, consulting, and online resources, TechWell helps you develop and deliver great software every day.