DevOps is a movement for developers and operations professionals that encourages more collaboration and release automation. Why? To keep up with the faster application delivery pace of Agile. In fact, with Agile, as development teams deliver faster and in shorter cycles, IT operations finds itself unprepared to keep up with the new pace. For operations teams, managing a continuous stream of software delivery with traditional manual-based processes is Mission Impossible. Vendors have responded to DevOps requirements with more automation in their release management, delivery, and deployment tools. However, there is a key process that sits between development and operations that seems to have been given little attention: testing.   

In fact, some key testing activities, like integration testing and end-to-end performance testing, are caught right in the middle of the handover process between development and operations. In the Agile and Lean playbook, I’ve dedicated my latest research precisely to Agile testing, because I’ve seen testing as the black beast in many transformations to Agile because it was initially ignored.

There is no doubt that Agile growth in the market is significant, and the growing daily number of inquiries I’ve been getting on Agile from end user organizations in 2012 gives me the impression that many are moving from tactical to strategic adoption. Why’s that? Many reasons, and you can read about them in our focused research on Agile transformation on the Forrester website. But I’d like to summarize the top five reasons from my recent research “Determine The Business And IT Impact Of Agile Development” :

• Quality was the top — quite astonishing, but both the survey we ran across 205 Agile “professional adopters” and the interviews across some 21 organizations confirmed this. My read is that this is about functional quality.
• Change was second to quality. We live in an era where innovation strives and organizations are continuously developing new apps and projects. But your business does not necessarily know what it needs or wants upfront. The business really appreciates the due-course changes that Agile development allows, as they enable the business to experiment and try out various options so it can become more confident about what is really right for the organization. Cutting edge cutting edge systems-of-engagement (Mobile, Web-facing, Social-media, etc) require lots of Change in due course.

Hi all,

My colleague and friend Mike Gualtieri wrote a really interesting blog the other day titled "Agile Software Is A Cop-Out; Here's What's Next." While I am not going to discuss the great conclusions and "next practices" of software (SW) development Mike suggests in that blog, I do want to focus on the assumption he makes about using working SW as a measurement of Agile.

I am currently researching that area and investigating how organizations actually measure the value of Agile SW development (business and IT value). And I am finding that, while organizations aim to deliver working SW, they also define value metrics to measure progress and much more:

• Cycle time (e.g., from concept to production);
• Business value (from number of times a feature is used by clients to impact on sales revenue, etc.);
• Productivity metrics (such as burndown velocity, number of features deployed versus estimated); and last but not least
• Quality metrics (such as defects per sprint/release, etc.).

If you've been reading the research I've been writing over the past year, you know that I'm a fan of implementing an application life-cycle management strategy that focuses on increasing development flow and supports high-performance teams. You don't need to religiously implement all 22 CMMI processes or deliver dozens of intermediate development artifacts like some leading processes advocate. Rather, there are certain important processes that you should spend your time on. We wrote about change-aware continuous integration and just-in-time demand management in last year's Agile Development Management Tools Forrester Wave™. They are two of my favorite areas of focus, and they are great areas to invest in, but once you have them working well, there are other areas that will require your focus. In my opinion, the next process where you should focus on flow is everything that happens post build and preproduction. Most folks think about this process as release management or configuration management, but I think there's a better term that focuses on how quickly software changes move through both processes. It's called continuous delivery. When you focus on establishing a process of continuous delivery, you'll find that your capacity to release changes will increase, your null release cycle will shrink, and a larger proportion of the productivity gains you've seen from your Agile development efforts will flow through into production.