We’ve been covering every aspect of the software development lifecycle here, but this new Skytap paper, “Transform your SDLC with Parallel Dev & Test in Cloud Environments” pretty much covers everything you’d need to know about how constraints in software delivery are resolved in public and hybrid cloud environments.
Download a free copy of this new, awesome 12-page report by clicking on the link above, or the picture of it to the right. Or click here, where you can download the PDF of the white paper. So why should you care about this paper?
The software lifecycle is fundamentally broken.
We are finding that at every new customer we visit, they have an essentially broken SDLC. Put simply, the most valuable people responsible for delivering new technology to support business — both dev/test and IT Operations — are constrained and consistently failing at their job, because their environments for getting work done are constrained. This is especially true in the largest enterprises, where there is a large technical debt of existing systems that must be brought forward with each release.
The net result? Pre-production environments for dev and test are seldom representative of production, so teams contend for access, lining up to use the “best known” environment. The only thing predictable here are delays and poor quality software getting thrown over the wall to the IT Ops team.
How did enterprise software fall so far behind?
You’d think that as an industry, the software development world would have figured out a way around these constraints by now, similar to the way automotive and high-tech companies adopted constraint-based optimization in the 80’s and 90’s to streamline operations, predictably deliver to schedule and drastically increase quality.
It’s not for a lack of effort. We adopted agile development, service-based architectures and continuous integration to attempt to decouple functional requirements into bite-sized chunks and automate some aspects of delivery. The advent of Cloud infrastructure also offered a new delivery platform, ideal for net-new applications, but still failing to deliver complex environments that mirror the production characteristics of larger enterprises. There’s just too much change and complexity to nail them down, without basically hiring a full-time “Environments Team” to maintain custom environments at massive expense.
The Solution: Environments for Parallel Dev & Test
We’ve seen enterprises shift from stalled, broken SDLC models, to very agile, repeatable and predictable software delivery processes by addressing the primary constraints of their most valuable people in software and IT Ops teams: environments, so they can develop and test in parallel, without conflicts.
What’s great about addressing environments in a purpose-built solution like Skytap is that you can completely automate the design, sharing and management of these cloud environments, without having to rebuild and maintain the infrastructure for each use. Just stamp out as many copies as you need, hook it up to your preferred tools for testing and deployment, and start rolling.
We hope you find this new Skytap paper as exciting as we do, because it summarizes the most current situation we are finding in the field today.
