The changes in software development in recent years go by at full speed. Customers, especially those who for some time have had no more to do with developing parties are surprised with completely new terminology and methods. And not just customers of development parties are confronted with it. Also, the service providers have to participate in this changing world.
When I recently was visiting one of my relations, he suggested the remarkable whether I was in my network a little old-fashioned website developers had been. I had to laugh and obviously asked the question again what he meant. He said his six-year-old shop needed was to be renewed and that he had invited four parties to see if they could help him. “I did not believe my ears,” he said with indignant tone. “They have only about Agile and Lean! Everybody is Scrum. It’s about ‘sprints’ and’ user story’s. The old-school planning board has been replaced by a Kanban board. And oh yes, everyone is talking about improvement continues “…
His indignation and unfamiliarity with the matter had led to a degree of irritation. And who was apparently so high that none had yet been able, for the parties to reach him when they started naming the benefits. In all calmness I could try. And so we were soon on shortening the time-to-market, on the possibility of interim exerting influence on the result, on the understanding during and in the process, and an optimal return on investment ( roi).
I explained to him that the conventional development process is no longer appropriate to the times. He had expected a functional design there would first be presented. And that draft, after its approval, have formed the basis of the actual development. Probably had between first contact and the actual completion sat a period of several months. And even then it was only the question whether what he had in mind was actually delivered.
Speed and flexibility
Today, we do it differently ‘, I could explain to him. Each party developer knows his clients more than ever asking for speed and flexibility. “Business rules” and as it now is to see that ever changing. As marketing today think of something they want to have live tomorrow preferably. And it does not stop there. They want to try out. They want to test what for instance the impact of changing the color of a button, just to mention something so basic. My interlocutor interrupted me: “Oh yes, they were all also talking about … ‘user experience’ and ‘customer journey’ was mentioned regularly .; I attempted to explain to him what that entails then. “Bottom line is that you do all you users and visitors as possible to deliver the highest quality. And this quality should ultimately lead to them, as is the case with you, more will be ordered, will act as ambassador, come back, and so on.
Slowly I saw thaw him. He began to see the benefits of it and it all still just settle. I wondered if he understood it all. The question he then pointed out, however, made it clear at once that he weldegelijk in seeing what all this entailed. He said that these developments also come to us (I work for a leading managed services provider) would bring the necessary cause. And with that he hit the nail on the head.
Faster than fast
The movement that put in motion policy matter that managed service providers need to change. And sooner rather than later. From a conventional perspective, they facilitate development, test, acceptance and production environments (for experts: the famous OTAP). This road is used to roll out new releases in a structured way. In keeping with ITIL processes. The implementation of new applications in this manner contributes to a high degree of quality and a usually predictable result. But of course there are also disadvantages. Especially if we react against the aforementioned “continues improvement. One of the most important is perhaps the turnaround. For how flexible your organization are, going through a otap process takes time. And time is today pretty much the key. Everything must indeed faster than fast.
My interlocutor was naturally curious to see how our industry then responds that. I walked to a whiteboard and wrote two words: Automate and culture. That was the stepping stone to the rest of my argument.
“If a developer kinds of tools and methods embraces leading to an accelerated implementation of new software (be it an application or a website is) then the party who facilitates the infrastructure and the management also takes this into account must take steps to. And so it is expected that they will agree. That automation of processes of crucial importance speaks for itself. In fact we are talking about the facilitation of ‘continuous delivery’ and ‘continuous integration. Not so easy to explain in a few words, but it comes down to is that we process from development to test to production acceptance and to automate as much as possible. Things that we used to do “manually” we do through various tooling. Puppet, OpenStack, Chef and Jenkins are some examples, but it certainly did not keep it up. ” The revealing look towards me, told me I had to tie in. I was in fact something started much enthousiamse the subjects containerization and micro services and achieved en passant also stopped container management, orchestration and workflow management to. And I had not even got around to AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean and all other public cloud providers where we ‘something’ with need.
Eliminate errors
“Automation allows for acceleration of processes, but also contributes to eliminating mistakes “, I continued my argument. “The quality thus increases, not only of the code, but also of the underlying service. But there are even more benefits. Precisely because of the tremendous acceleration of processes, it is now possible to roll out relatively minor changes and, if desired, to test for a limited audience. ” I took the aforementioned color of a button on. “There are all sorts of mechanisms in order to make a change is not readily available to everyone, but to do it in batches. Does it result from? Then turn it back. It does what you expected then give everyone her new position. We apply for it ‘canary releasing’ and ‘A / B testing’ them. Facebook does not otherwise. There are around the world several releases in circulation. Everything is put monitored and analyzed closely, but at the same time the availability is guaranteed.
So what does all that with your managers? “I heard from the other side of the table. “They must still change too?” That proved to be an excellent bridge to the next topic: Culture
DevOps
‘To go along with the development of software development all disciplines involved must change drastically. We will have to work together more than ever. An administrator must know what drives a developer and vice versa. There must be a joint project, a common purpose and a common effort. Tooling, processes and compensation will have to be coordinated. No more and no islands ‘this is not my problem’ mentality. In short, a shared responsibility
And so we arrive at that other phenomenon of our time:. DevOps. Development and Operations crawl as it were against each other. The traditionally existing line to be demolished, but you can imagine that goes beyond sec facilitating automation. It is a complete change of culture both in the average software developer and will have a managed service provider still quite some doing, but we are working on! “
Good old-fashioned
The ‘listening ear’ stood up and asked if I still coffee wanted. I followed him into the kitchen and was pleasantly surprised to see that he still put filter. “Whether it takes you too long?” He asked. I shook. Some things have to let good old-fashioned
.
This article is derived from Computable.nl (https://www.computable.nl / article / 5675607). © Jaarbeurs IT Media.
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