The ITKO Blog: Application Lifecycle Optimization tag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-1657906 2012-01-23T10:32:22-06:00 ITKO, a CA Technologies company. This blog covers agile enterprise software development practices and technologies, including Service Virtualization, DevTest Cloud Labs, Continuous Integration and Testing. We invite you to participate in a quality discussion with ITKO on this forum. TypePad Cloud Chaos for App Dev: Who Should Manage the Change? tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e552a438b888340168e5c3831d970c 2012-01-23T10:32:22-06:00 2012-01-23T10:32:22-06:00 We've often mentioned that Dev and Test are the best, first activities to move to Cloud. But what happens if different teams select different Cloud approaches? Or, even scarier, what if the company migrates or evolves their overall Cloud strategy over time, as some of the first generation Virtual Lab Management (VLM) offerings are already being replaced by newer vendors and systems? Jason English

We see a lot of enterprise IT teams saying "this year is the year we will take charge of our app dev environments and move them to Cloud."  Indeed, Cloud should empower these dev and test teams, and ease the time and expense of standard lab provisioning practices greatly. We have often said that the best, first application of Cloud is for software development itself.

But what happens if different teams select "Hybrid Cloud" approaches? Or, even scarier, what if the company migrates or evolves their overall Cloud strategy over time, as some of the first generation Virtual Lab Management (VLM) offerings are already being replaced by newer vendors and systems?

CloudProvisioningProblemWhat this has done is create a new kind of Cloud Chaos for software development labs: one where you might have each software team spending time configuring and working with various Cloud lab provisioning approaches, instead of focusing on developing and testing functionality that delivers value for the business.

One major energy customer we worked with literally sent 600 developers and testers to Lab Manager training to learn how to provision VM systems - only to find that the next quarter, the IT operations group selected new Cloud infrastructure to replace that system!

We recommend an approach that does not dictate a particular Cloud hosting, lab server virtualization or management platform to give teams access to their software devtest environments - changing the "many to many" issue to a "one to many" capability.

CloudProvisioningDCM_CALISAsolutionBy using LISA's DevTest Cloud Manager (DCM) technology, a company can centralize the provisioning of all Cloud environments through one system, so multiple development teams can get access to all the labs they need - including the VLMs that deliver both server VMs and Virtual Services to simulate off-cloud or "big data" dependencies that cannot be conventionally replicated.

The DCM approach mitigates the consequences of change, and eliminates the need for development and testing teams to know exactly where, or how their Cloud environments are hosted and managed.

End dev and test consumers make a request to LISA DCM and instantly stand up a lab environment that is ready to go, with the systems, test data setups, and virtual services needed for distributed enterprise software development. They no longer need to focus on whether their environment is hosted in a Private cloud with CA's AppLogic, run as a Hybrid Cloud with AutoSuite or IBM solutions, or whether that capacity for a big Performance Test lab gets pushed out to Amazon or MS Azure and managed using VMware tools.

The main point of agile development and testing in the Cloud is to allow teams to focus on high-value activities -- meaning they are building and assuring software that meets business needs, instead of managing and setting up environments. The trend for all companies to move more software functionality to the Cloud will only continue. Let's embrace this high rate of change and increasingly heterogeneous future without sacrificing the productivity of software development.

We appreciate your questions and feedback on Cloud development and testing practices. Look for more articles from ITKO on this topic soon.

 

 http://blog.itko.com/2012/01/hybrid-clouds-for-app-dev-who-should-manage-change.html Fast, Cheap & Good? Virtually Breaking the Limits of Software Development tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e552a438b888340168e5c21b42970c 2012-01-19T13:38:45-06:00 2012-01-19T13:38:35-06:00 Webinar recap: A new kind of virtualization can fundamentally change your ability to deliver business value for customers. Or, as Theresa put it more simply: "Software IS the business." Software touches everything, from sales, to manufacturing and delivery, to back end accounting and strategic planning. The ripped-from-the-headlines software failures she mentioned yesterday in banks, telcos, retail are moribund, and making headlines every day. Jason English

We had a well-attended ITKO webinar with analyst firm voke on Lifecycle Virtualization (see an archive here) with almost 200 live attendees yesterday - clearly a lot of interest in these new developments, and thanks to all who attended.

Voke_LifecycleVirtualization_forecastIn the first half, voke's Theresa Lanowitz described her research on Lifecycle Virtualization (LV) as an emerging technology space that encompasses several major vendors and niche players in Service Virtualization, virtual lab management (VLM), cloud platforms, network and device virtualization. She predicts an LV market will come to fruition and demonstrate value for IT by 2013 -- not so far off for something so new. But then again, remember how recently Cloud was a new concept?

As everyone knows by now, you can't simply cost-cut your way to differentiation and leadership in these competitive times. Hardware and desktop virtualization made a big one-time impact on IT costs by reducing the number of Intel boxes, but now what? Is there opportunity for another field of Virtualization that could be focused around meeting customer needs?

For most industries today, your ability to successfully deliver software is your ability to deliver business value for customers. Or, as Theresa put it more simply: "Software IS the business." Software touches everything, from sales, to manufacturing and delivery, to back end accounting and strategic planning. The ripped-from-the-headlines software failures she mentioned yesterday in banks, telcos, retail are moribund, and making headlines every day.

A couple of the more pointed questions we got during the webinar really made me think about how far we've come since the limits of the Rule of 3 in software development:

Wp_heads_2012"Fast, Good, or Cheap Software:
-- You can't have all 3!"

In fact, simply making strides against this rule was a main goal of ITKO's in the very early days (around 2003-2006) when we were selling quality assurance software for complex architectures like J2EE and SOA. Hey it's not cheap to get skilled programmers and testers for these applications, so do automated component testing earlier, save some time and money and avoid costly project failures. There was just one missing piece though: How could we move this lifecycle forward faster as software became more and more distributed, while not having access or control over so many systems we need?

Service Virtualization is already becoming a proven and essential practice, with solutions from leading vendors -- and it will fundamentally reset the value equation of software development. Call SV part of Lifecycle Virtualization if you like, but it definitely fits the bill of replacing physical and manually copied development infrastructure with automated, virtual infrastructure.

This new virtual environment, whether on-premise or in the Cloud, is flexible enough to allow software development and testing activities to happen in parallel, at much lower cost and extreme efficiency. Yes we can now do Better, Faster, Cheaper - all of which enable the enterprise to deliver software that perfectly meets customer needs.

Thanks for your questions yesterday, and we invite you to recommend yesterday's webinar archive replay now on our site, and download a complimentary licensed copy of voke's latest Market Snapshot overview on Lifecycle Virtualization if you have a colleague who might benefit from this info.

Next up on the ITKO Blog: Who Manages Cloud Chaos??

 http://blog.itko.com/2012/01/fast-cheap-good-lets-revisit-the-limitations-of-software-development.html Webinar 1/18: What is the Lifecycle Virtualization Market, and Why Service Virtualization Matters tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e552a438b888340168e54e1c4c970c 2012-01-10T14:39:23-06:00 2012-01-12T16:02:32-06:00 Just what is this new "Lifecycle Virtualization" space? Will it float? Here's a chance to learn about Lifecycle Virtualization and a new generation of technology encompassing Service Virtualization capabilities, and much more. Join voke analyst Theresa Lanowitz and ITKO/CA "Chief Geek" and founder John Michelsen for this live webinar Wednesday, Jan. 18th. Jason English

You've seen a rapid barrage of market news in just the last 12 months about Service Virtualization (or SV) technology lately. CA buys ITKO for LISA's Service Virtualization capabilities, and many more acquisitions and announcements from major players in this space happening. Why now?

Sm_LVfish_itkoWe've been talking about this practice of SV for almost 5 years now at ITKO, but clearly all these companies don't arrive at these conclusions unless there is a market movement afoot with customers. Indeed, Service Virtualization is part of a bigger shift toward more agile development using a new form of virtualization in shared environments such as private and public DevTest Clouds that will allow increased parallel development, with on-demand capacity for performance and earlier regression testing, thereby speeding up the overall application development lifecycle.

One analyst we respect on these matters, Theresa Lanowitz of voke, has a term for this new space that floats above the conventional requirements, development and test tools of the ALM portfolio - she calls it "Lifecycle Virtualization."

Here's a chance to learn about Lifecycle Virtualization and this new generation of technology encompassing Service Virtualization capabilities, and much more. Join Theresa and ITKO/CA "Chief Geek" and founder John Michelsen for this live webinar Wednesday, Jan. 18th:

Webinar: Lifecycle Virtualization - A New Practice of Optimizing Application Development, featuring voke and ITKO

January 18, 2012 1:00pm-2:00pm Central

Theresa has been talking to both end customers and software vendors in this space for many years as an IT analyst following emerging trends in application development. Here's her take on Lifecycle Virtualization from her latest blog "Part of An Overall Lifecycle Virtualization Solution":

"Lifecycle virtualization is defined as the use of technologies such as virtual lab management, service virtualization, defect virtualization, device virtualization, virtualized cloud platforms, etc, to enhance the application or product lifecycle through reducing defects, lowering costs, speeding time-to-market, and increasing customer satisfaction."

We hope you attend this webinar and find out how the application development industry is evolving to meet the difficult challenges of complex, interconnected systems and increasing customer demands for high performance, flawless service. Call it Service Virtualization, Lifecycle Virtualization, or whatever you like -- customers are realizing the value of much faster delivery with less risk today, while saving millions in infrastructure costs.

Also as a primer, we suggest you pick up the latest voke Research Market Overview paper on Lifecycle Virtualization (available for a limited time) which provides a good Overview of this new technology space.

 http://blog.itko.com/2012/01/webinar-118-what-is-lifecycle-virtualization-and-how-does-service-virtualization-fit-into-the-pictur.html ITKO retrospective with John & Shridhar in D Magazine tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e552a438b888340162ff1fd013970d 2012-01-09T11:14:46-06:00 2012-01-09T11:13:34-06:00 ITKO's own John Michelsen and Shridhar Mittal recently appeared at a Dallas-area business forum to share their unique experience of building a little private software firm into a global software player, and writer Glenn Hunter from D Magazine's CEO business publication was there. Read this interesting personality piece here: Jason English

Lisa_01.ashxDmagITKO's own John Michelsen and Shridhar Mittal recently appeared at a Dallas-area business forum to share their unique experience of building a little private software firm into a global software player, and writer Glenn Hunter from D Magazine's CEO business publication was there. Read this interesting personality piece here:

D CEO Magazine: The Triumph of LISA
iTKO scores with a revolutionary software product, thanks to the geek who invented it and a CEO who knew how to grow.

It has been an incredible ride -  less than 6 years from initial funding to reshaping the application development market with Service Virtualization innovations, and then becoming a strategic part of a leading software company like CA Technologies. But this story is far from over...

[link:] http://www.dmagazine.com/Home/D_CEO/2012/January_February/iTKO_the_Triumph_of_Lisa_Software.aspx

 http://blog.itko.com/2012/01/itko-retrospective-with-john-shridhar-in-d-magazine.html Forum: What was the biggest development for Cloud in 2011? tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e552a438b8883401543896058c970c 2011-12-20T11:26:15-06:00 2011-12-20T11:25:16-06:00 The most obvious thing we saw in Cloud was a continued increase in consumerization and public level awareness, thanks to the usual suspects of Amazon, Apple, Google & Microsoft. But what about big business? How effectively did major companies in other industries embrace the Cloud? Jason English

Participating again in the eBizQ forum on Cloud - and starting the process of looking back on a very eventful year for ITKO (and CA Technologies) in 2011, and picking our horses for what will happen in 2012.

John-Michelsen-114pxThe most obvious thing we saw in Cloud was a continued increase in consumerization and public level awareness, thanks to the usual suspects of Amazon, Apple, Google & Microsoft. You would be hard pressed to complete a download of consumer media or software these days without an invitation to claim your own Cloud spot for storing information or streaming your playlists.

But what about big business? How effectively did major companies in other industries embrace the Cloud? I just wrote a little piece on this here: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/ebizq_forum/2011/12/what-was-the-biggest-development-in-the-cloud-for-2011.php

The biggest development for the cloud this year was, well... development IN the cloud. The categorization of Cloud as "another place to host your apps" provided some incremental efficiencies, yes, but that's a pretty commoditized activity. We always knew the cloud could do more!

Setting up elastic, on-demand dev and test environments in cloud actually turns out to be the best first use case of cloud in the enterprise. As developers need to create new functionality and verify its performance and quality on top of layers of existing stuff, they all inevitably demand their own environments.

We've seen many enterprises that have dev and test environments outnumbering production environments by 7-to-1 or more - and with inconsistent accuracy, as there is a great deal of manual setup and maintenance involved in each of those instances. Let's harness all that excess computing power and pool it inside the company as Private clouds -- and for higher capacity or seasonal needs, instantly provision ready environments in Public clouds. [more >]

Hopefully that makes sense to our readers who live in the application development and testing world -- you are in the vanguard of Cloud simply because these activities are the most natural first step, and there are immediate infrastructure efficiencies to be gained right off the bat.

As for the rest of our predictions and a look back, stay tuned...

 http://blog.itko.com/2011/12/forum-what-was-the-biggest-development-for-cloud-in-2011.html Mock & Roll will Never Die tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e552a438b888340162fd6f3fc0970d 2011-12-15T10:00:00-06:00 2011-12-13T16:39:23-06:00 We had a lot of questions in our sessions about the development shop that has already "rolled their own" system of stubs and mocks - and what that meant for Service Virtualization practices. When a company says they already have a mock system, we normally view that as a very positive sign - and tell them as much. Often we have to show customers that incomplete and unavailable systems are development problems that need to be solved, before we can talk about LISA. Whereas the customer with a mock system already understands this is a real problem that needs to be solved. Jason English

If you already have built a "mock system" in order to advance development, why would you need something better? I recently had a good conversation with our East architecture lead Ken Ahrens (see more of his work here) after a great CA World event for ITKO was winding down in Las Vegas. We had a lot of questions in our sessions about the development shop that has already "rolled their own" system of stubs and mocks - and what that meant for Service Virtualization practices.

When a company says they already have a mock system, we normally view that as a very positive sign - and tell them as much.  Often we have to convince customers that incomplete and unavailable systems are development problems that need to be solved, before we can even talk about the idea of Service Virtualization capabilities. Whereas the customer with a mock system already understands this is a real problem that needs to be solved.

I usually comment at this point about how we’ve replaced several mock systems at other customers (banks, utilities, telcos, etc...) with LISA's service virtualization. SV really is the productization of the stub and mock space, with enough sophistication to support more complex logic and performance scenarios. Similar to how you wouldn’t write your own database nowadays, it doesn’t make sense to build your own mock system when there is an industry standard solution for this available.

Some questions that usually come up:

  • Does your mock system meet 100% of your needs and is it used on every single project?
  • How expensive is the mock system to build and maintain?
  • How fast do you need new mock services built, and are they ready on time?

If a development shop is mocking a single binary transaction -- that is a simple enough problem to solve with a bit of code. But as soon as multiple systems talk to each other, and multiple business scenarios need to be validated - the manual stub approach quickly starts to trip over its own weight, and the process of mocking and massaging test data and environments can drastically slow down delivery.

On one recent visit to an East coast utility, the customer team decided that LISA began to win (from a cost perspective) after only 10 rather finite services were mocked.  One of our favorite banks established a "center of excellence" for enabling teams with Service Virtualization instead of stubs, and measured a full return in about 6 months - then did something even more interesting by rapidly fixing issues found in production by virtualizing production behavior into the dev environment.  A successful customer like this doesn't just buy software, they take the adoption of the practice seriously - and it's usually the guys who have experienced the pain of rolling their own mocks that see the potential benefits the fastest.

In short – if you already do mock services we think it’s a good thing, so tell us about your story!

 

 http://blog.itko.com/2011/12/mock-roll-will-never-die.html Emergency Alert Message: Seek a Virtual Environment Immediately! tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e552a438b888340154383fa797970c 2011-12-13T16:17:47-06:00 2011-12-13T16:20:07-06:00 Did you hear about yesterday's "Government Alert" test message broadcasted to Verizon mobile subscribers in New Jersey and other Eastern US states? The message said: "CMAS Alert - Civil Emergency in this area until 1:24 PM EST Take Shelter Now U.S. Govern." Thousands of panicked callers immediately flooded 911 lines wondering what went wrong, and where the "Take Shelter" should happen. Jason English

Did you hear about yesterday's "Government Alert" test message broadcasted to Verizon mobile subscribers in New Jersey and other Eastern US states? The message said:

"CMAS Alert - Civil Emergency in this area until 1:24 PM EST Take Shelter Now U.S. Govern." (story in NJ.com)

Thousands of panicked callers immediately flooded 911 lines wondering what went wrong, and where the "Take Shelter" should happen. State Police and the NJ branch of Department of Homeland Security were on the case. As it turns out, the company apologized later that the message was just a test the carrier was running to verify their participation in the government's CMAS, or Commercial Mobile Alert System. Cmas-alert-large

Events like this are a ringing endorsement for the practice of Service Virtualization - coupled with a solution like LISA that could have been used to simulate the back-end systems, the message relay, or any number of end-user phones receiving the message -- so Verizon could complete their development and test cycles. Outside of the constraints of limited access time to live systems, and the high costs of securing or replicating solid test infrastructure and data, there is a brimming risk factor for end customers.

Testing your software against (or anywhere near) the live system is inherently volatile and risky. One wrong destination address left in the code, one unauthorized data change executed by developers, can generate very troublesome results indeed. The ability to message everyone with an alert only works if we can be assured that the message is real. We hope these teams make the call to decouple themselves from live systems and customers, and immediately start testing them in a virtual service environment.

 

 

 

 http://blog.itko.com/2011/12/emergency-alert-message-seek-a-virtual-environment-immediately.html Giving Caesar His Due at Gartner AADI 2011- New Agile and Composite Dev Reports Available tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e552a438b88834015437886e50970c 2011-11-28T14:58:45-06:00 2011-11-28T14:58:45-06:00 This issue features a new report called "The Three C's of Agile" from two Gartner analysts that cover the App Dev space very thoroughly, David Norton and Thomas Murphy. Get your copy of this research here, as well as a couple new papers and articles from ITKO providing further insight into Enterprise Agile and Service Virtualization best practices. Jason English

We're heading to Las Vegas again this week to Caesars Palace - at the Gartner AADI (Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit) 2011 where we are appearing as a Platinum Sponsor, and joining our colleagues from CA Technologies to talk about the ties between ensuring application performance and increasing the agility of application development.

This is the topic of our latest joint Newsletter with Gartner that just came out today (complimentary view/download):

ITKO Insights, with Gartner Research, Issue 2 -
Winter 2011 - Ensuring Agile Composite Application Development
Gartner_insights_page

This issue features a new report called "The Three C's of Agile" from two Gartner analysts that cover the App Dev space very thoroughly, David Norton and Tom Murphy. Get your copy of this research here, as well as a couple new papers and articles from ITKO providing further insight into Enterprise Agile and Service Virtualization best practices.

That's one of the biggest themes we're hearing from end customers as they work with the leading analyst firms - "Enterprise Agile" is the next big thing, and it's coming to fruition now. We all know IT budgets have been cut - but today's enterprise cannot cut its way to profitability in an uber-competitive market. Faster delivery of new services that customers demand requires an extremely strong plan for developing and delivery quality to market at a much greater pace.

If you are going to Gartner AADI, please stop by the ITKO booth at the Solution Expo, and reserve some time for our Session on Tuesday with our LISA product manager Chris Kraus: ""Optimizing the Application Lifecycle with Agile Collaboration and Cloud DevTest Labs" Tuesday, November 29, 3:30-4:30 PM, Octavius 16. 

To successfully deliver critical customer-facing services faster, enterprises must first leverage Cloud to optimize software lifecycles. As companies move applications to Cloud, they find these environments intertwined with dependency constraints on other off-cloud systems, limiting the elasticity and overall usefulness of Cloud environments. This session discusses how multiple software teams increase agility and collaboration using virtual infrastructure in DevTest clouds. Time-to-market is accelerated when lab infrastructure and data scenarios are in place on-demand, enabling teams to “shift quality left” and eliminate issues early.

 

 

 

 http://blog.itko.com/2011/11/going-to-gartner-aadi-2011-new-agile-and-composite-reports-available.html LISA Customers at CA World'11 - An Excellent Hour of Real Stories and Results tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e552a438b8883401543708b050970c 2011-11-22T14:16:47-06:00 2011-11-22T14:27:29-06:00 The CA World 2011 ITKO Customer session - This was a real LISA customer panel that has been there, and done that -- and the consensus was that the challenges of realizing optimization in the software lifecycle aren't technical in most cases. The panel explained how they got the buy-in and adoption of not just one development or test team, but IT ops, management, and the line of business that depends on software for its offerings. Jason English

Most of us ITKOers are just back from our very first CA World -- and it couldn't have been a more exciting time, as we see LISA solutions becoming a key part of of the CA family of solutions and optimizing the application lifecycle for a whole new set of customers. Thanks to everyone who visited our booth and attended our fun outdoor reception Monday night.

IMG_0738The pinnacle of the conference, for me at least, was the ITKO Customer Session on Tuesday, where some of our leading customers at HSBC, IBM Global Services, Sprint and SoCal Edison shared their real-world stories and results of implementing LISA to eliminate constraints from their application lifecycles.

Highlights included:

  • An estimated 50% faster time to market for new product/functionality delivery across the board - meeting management's critical requirement for more agile innovation.
  • As much as 94-99.6% faster system testing cycles. The customer said "I would have reported 100% improvement because of the level of automation, but nobody would have believed me!"
  • For 2000+ development and test resources, increased the availability of environments to consistently identify defects 2 phases earlier (40-70% cycle time reduction), and realized ROI within 30 days.

One of the coolest things we've ever seen came up in the last spot - a fun internal education videos SCE's Hector Sotelo showed here during his talk - "I Need An Environment":