DEVOPSdigest

The move toward DevOps is reshaping how organizations approach software development and deployment, and according to research conducted by Appvance Inc., an effective DevOps strategy and addressing unified testing are major concerns for the majority of CIOs and other decision makers.
 
The research shows that 91% of CIOs and other key decision makers agree that executing a DevOps strategy is a top priority for their organization. Also, 91% of respondents agree addressing integrated unified testing is a critical aspect of their DevOps requirements. Appvance conducted the research with Vanson Bourne, polling 200 enterprise IT decision makers in the United States in September 2015.
 
The shift to DevOps requires new development tools, Ops/IT tools, and a new approach to QA, as indicated with the survey. So what are CIOs looking for in their DevOps solutions?

■ The survey shows 87% identify increasing velocity and productivity as top priorities.

■ Nearly all agree there are gaps in the current approaches to testing, and 89% noted ensuring confidence in the quality of releases is critical to the success of DevOps efforts.
 
Nobody is happy with the current QA situation. They are making dangerous trade-offs in quality and security to attempt to improve velocity, and are looking for something new. Effective and efficient DevOps operations require both velocity and quality. Legacy processes use five to ten siloed tools and teams, each requiring different scripting languages and methods, and taking weeks or more to create and run automated software tests. It’s frankly untenable, and arguably a broken system.
 
A majority of respondents agreed (68%) that the number of tools required to perform complete testing is slowing their time to market. As scripts can be one of the largest pain points in many testing programs, both time consuming and potential points of failure, 86% think a unified platform combining all the testing needed without scripting would greatly improve time to market.
 
The majority (86%) indicated their budgets for DevOps have increased over the last year, and 85% will see their budgets continue to increase in 2016. To improve DevOps processes, 76% are evaluating new DevOps QA technologies to replace their current sets.

Tony Rems is CTO at Appvance.