Few things will kill the buzz of a productive DevOps partnership like the tension of looming deadlines that might not be met. How to stay on time and on budget? It helps to have the collaborative approach that is integral to any effective DevOps project. Both the "Dev" people (product developers and others) and the "Ops" people (system engineers and others) will need planning and communication strategies to help them prioritize their speed-to-market goals ...

Software testing is still a bottleneck, even after the implementation of modern development processes like Agile, DevOps, and Continuous Integration/Deployment. In some cases, software teams aren't testing nearly enough and have to deal with bugs and security vulnerabilities at the later stages of the development cycle, which creates a false assumption that these new processes can't deliver on their promise. One solution to certain classes of issues is shift right testing, which relies on monitoring the application in a production environment, but it requires a rock solid infrastructure to roll back new changes if a critical defect arises ...

Business demands agility — ever-increasing speed to deliver new functionality to the customers and to stay ahead of competitors. DevOps and agile development deliver on this business goal and are being widely adopted across industries. It's also well established that we need to find how to insert security into DevOps to ensure that security does not get left behind. Which begs the question — why hasn't this happened, why haven't we figured out how to insert security into DevOps ...

For most organizations, the ongoing management and deployment of database changes are by far the slowest and riskiest part of the application release process. Why? Most of these changes are performed manually by database administrators (DBAs), who spend countless hours to create, review, rework, and deploy database changes in support of rapid application delivery. This creates a huge bottleneck for the overall release process, as database changes happen every day ...

Wherever you are in the world, data privacy is now a major regulatory and consumer concern. The introduction of the GDPR in 2018 ushered in tough new rules for anyone dealing with the personal data of European Union citizens, while a string of cases involving either hacking or the improper use of data has led to consumers everywhere becoming more aware of how their information is used and protected ...

The way that we develop and deliver software has changed dramatically in the past 5 years — but the metrics we use to measure quality remain largely the same. Despite seismic shifts in business expectations, development methodologies, system architectures, and team structures, most organizations still rely on quality metrics that were designed for a much different era. Every other aspect of application delivery has been scrutinized and optimized as we transform our processes for DevOps. Why not put quality metrics under the microscope as well? ...