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.

The essential shape of the enterprise marketing landscape hasn’t changed much over the years. In last week’s Revisiting The Enterprise Marketing Software Landscape, I dissect technologies into the four basic categories of marketing management, brand management, relationship marketing, and interactive marketing. Consumers are rapidly changing behaviors, and marketing as a practice is evolving dramatically, but the technologies that marketers buy continue to come in essentially the same containers.

Notice, however, all of the decision management systems employed across the marketing landscape. From interaction management to online testing to recommendations to contact optimization, marketers are using automated systems to make an increasing number of customer-facing decisions. Viewed from the perspective of those decisions, the landscape of marketing technologies is shifting under our feet.

So is it time for a new take – say, customer decision management (CDM) – on marketing technology?

Why Do We Need Customer Decision Management?

Given that we’re already awash in marketing technology, do we need another three-letter acronym? Yes, because customers are:

Seriously. I recently spoke with a client who swears that software quality improved once they got rid of the QA team. Instead of making QA responsible for quality, they put the responsibility squarely on the backs of the developers producing the software. This seems to go against conventional wisdom about quality software and developers: Don't trust developers. Or, borrowing from Ronald Reagan, trust but verify.

This client is no slouch, either. The applications provide real-time market data for financial markets, and the client does more than 40 software releases per year. If the market data produced by an application were unavailable or inaccurate, then the financial market it serves would crumble. Availability and accuracy of information are absolute. This app can't go down, and it can't be wrong.

Why Does This Work?

The client said that this works because the developers know that they have 100% responsibility for the application. If it doesn't work, the developers can't say that "QA didn't catch the problem." There is no QA team to blame. The buck stops with the application development team. They better get it right, or heads will roll.

As British author Samuel Johnson famously put it, "The prospect of being hanged focuses the mind wonderfully."

Can This Work For You?