Author: Idexcel Technologies

Driving Innovation with DevOps – Idexcel DevOps Roundup

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1. Driving Innovation with DevOps

DevOps isn’t just about working faster, more effectively, and at a lower cost. A big part DevOps is also about driving business innovation. Sure, DevOps correctly applied is known to cut costs and reduce downtime, but as this Rackspace 2014 survey found, DevOps is also, across many organizations, increasing sales as well as employee and customer engagement.

But DevOps is also enabling organizations to deploy more capabilities more quickly. As the most recent Puppet Labs DevOps report contends, DevOps organizations are deploying updates 30 times more rapidity and with fewer failures. And they’re recovering 168 times faster from failures and have 60 times fewer failures due to code changes. “What we are seeing is the quality and speed has definitely increased. So people are producing changes that are of higher quality and changes that require fewer rollbacks,” said Nigel Kersten, CIO at Puppet Labs. in this interview with Ericka Chickowski. Continue reading…

2. What does #DevOps mean to the roles of Change & Release managers?

One of our team raised this question in our internal #DevOps Slack channel this week and it sparked off an interesting discussion that we thought was worth sharing with a wider audience.

Firstly, let’s start with one of my favourite definitions of DevOps:

“DevOps is just ITIL with 90% of stuff moved to ‘Standard Change’ because we automated the crap out of it” – TheOpsMgr

Now that’s a bit tongue in cheek, obviously, as the scope of DevOps in a CALMS model world is probably wider than just that but it’s not a bad way to start explaining it to someone from a long-term ITIL background. Continue reading…

3. DevOps Isn’t a Job. But It’s Still Important

TRADITIONALLY, COMPANIES HAVE at least two main technical teams. There are the programmers, who code the software that the company sells, or that its employees use internally. And then there are the information technology operations staff, who handle everything from installing network gear to maintaining the servers that run those programmers’ code. The two teams only communicate when it’s time for the operations team to install a new version of the programmers’ software, or when things go wrong.

That’s the way it was at Munder Capital Management when J. Wolfgang Goerlich joined the Midwestern financial services company in 2005. Continue reading…

4. How devops will change the way that you think and work

Devops is exciting for developers, and can also be scary. It will change what you need to know and the skills you need in order to succeed. Doing devops requires that you learn new tools and embrace deep cultural changes to the way that you think and work. You’ll have to adapt to new processes in the shorter term, while also anticipating long-term organizational changes. Adopting devops means you’ll learn to work differently than you have before, alongside other developers and sysadmins who are also making this big shift. Continue reading…

5. A Sneak Peek of DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015

The DevOps Enterprise Summit (#DOES15) will gather the best practitioners, thinkers, and innovators in the DevOps space. Whether you’re well on your way in your own efforts to adopt DevOps practices, or just beginning to wonder whether DevOps isn’t something you should try, this is the event to accelerate your DevOps journey.

On stage will be leaders from Target, Disney, Nationwide, Nordstrom, Capital One, Raytheon Software, CSG, and many other organizations across a variety of sectors. These are individuals working in large-scale, complex environments who have dealt with the same problems you are struggling with now. Some of them are returning from last year to share their progress. Continue reading…

The Power of Continuous Performance Testing – Idexcel Testing Roundup

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1. The Power of Continuous Performance Testing

One of the key tenets of continuous integration is to reduce the time between a change being made and the discovery of defects within that change. “Fail fast” is the mantra we often use to communicate this tenet. This approach provides us with the benefit of allowing our development teams to quickly pinpoint the source of an issue compared to the old method of waiting weeks or months between a development phase and a test phase.

For this approach to work, however, our development and QA teams have to be able to run a consistent suite of automated tests regularly, and these tests must have sufficient coverage to ensure a high likelihood of catching the most critical bugs. If a test suite is too limited in scope, then it misses many important issues; a test suite that takes too long to run will increase the time between the introduction of a defect and our tester raising the issue. This is why we introduce and continue to drive automated testing in our agile environments. Continue reading

2. How to Test an Application without Requirements?

Technically there are no applications without requirements. Imagine software that does nothing specific but is simply line after line of code stretching on. It will be like a stair case leading nowhere.

All software has requirements and is targeted at a particular task; specifically it is a solution to a problem. So requirement-less software isn’t a possibility.

However, software without documented requirements is a reality that unfortunately most of us face more often that we like. The only thing worse could be that, the documentation is insufficient, inaccurate or terribly outdated. Sadly, this happens too. Continue reading

3. Building an Effective Lean Testing Strategy

Organizations are constantly under pressure to streamline their operations and ensure that they are using their assets as effectively as possible. However, this is often easier said than done. For example, if a new vulnerability comes up in an app, more time may be spent fixing the issue than normal due to additional steps required to ensure that the software runs as expected.

To reduce wasted resources, businesses have adopted lean practices that consider the expenditure of assets to be wasteful if they’re used for anything other than creating value for the end customer.

Here are a few strategies quality assurance professionals should concentrate on to implement an effective lean testing strategy. Continue reading

4. Discussion: Taxonomy of Software Testing Terms

If you frequent TEST Huddle, now is the time to provide some feedback. The TEST Huddle team is looking to create a taxonomy of terms which it will use to make resources on the website easily discoverable by relevant subject matter.

“The goal is to create a bank of content that can be efficiently searched by testers trying to solve a particular problem – whether directly related to testing or indirectly e.g. advice from others on managing people; communicating to stakeholders etc.”
Have any terms in mind? Contribute your ideas here!

Big Data and its Challenges

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Digitally progressing towards a world with immense amount of data, businesses are constantly looking for a feasible and practical way to analyze the information so that this flood of the data can be utilized in a meaningful manner for growth and development. Data is being collected at the unprecedented pace, and it is coming from the gamut of resources, available as soon as it is generated. Big Data is a broad term involving initiatives and technologies that involve massive, diverse and continuously changing data. It can changed the way organizations are doing business, gaining insight, are dealing with their customers and are making decisions by offering a synergy and extension to the existing processes. Big data is also changing the way businesses are approaching product development, human resources and operations. It is touching every aspect of the society including retails, mobile services, life sciences, financial services and physical sciences. It can be touted as the biggest opportunity, as well as the biggest challenge for the statistical sciences because if the numbers are crunched accurately, Big Data can offer huge rewards.

Companies may know the types of result they are seeking but these might be difficult to obtain. Or, significant data mining might be required to obtain specific answers. For statisticians, the challenge is dealing with the data which is not only big, but also very different. They need to deal with “Look-everywhere effect” and extract meaningful information from a huge haystack of data. Additionally there are challenges with the algorithms as they often do not scale up as expected and can get extremely slow when gigabyte-scale dataset is involved. To improve the speed and theoretical accuracy, these algorithms need to be improved, or new algorithms need to be designed. The algorithm must be capable of handling next-generation functional data, and should be able to look through data for hidden relationships and patterns.

Another challenge is the analysis of too many correlations, several of which can be bogus that may appear statistically significant, and magnitude of the big data can amplify such errors. Additionally, big data is quite efficient in detecting subtle correlations, however, it is left to the imagination of the user which correlations are meaningful, and this may not always be an easy task. The statistical analysis cannot be a wholesale replacement to the scientific inquiry, and users must start with the basic understanding of the data. Also, once the users gain the understanding of the big data, it can easily be gamed. A good example could be “spamdexing” or “Google bombing” where companies can artificially elevate website search placement. At times, the results of the analysis may not be intentionally gamed, but they can be less robust than expected. Most of the big data comes from the web, which is a big data itself, and this increases the chances of reinforcing the error.

Undoubtedly, big data is a valuable tool and it has made a critical impact in selected few realms. However, it has proved its worth in analysing common things, falling short in the analysis of less commonly used information, not living up to the perceived hype. Big data should be here to stay, however it is not a silver bullet, and we need to be realistic about its potential and limitations.

DevOps – A Collaborative Approach

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There are lots of different opinions about what encompasses the definition of DevOps. Speaking in very broad terms, born to improve the IT service delivery agility, DevOps facilitates collaboration, communication and integration between IT operations and software developers. DevOps environment consists of a team with cross-functional team members including QA, developers, business analysts, DBAs, operations engineers and so on. Incorporating DevOps helps companies get done more, and deploy code more frequently.

Businesses these days are facing some common problems. After application delivery, businesses are sceptical to change. The reason usually is the vulnerable and brittle software, and the platform which it sits on. Software is risky, prone to errors, and is unpredictable. Introducing new features or fixing application problems takes long time mainly due to bureaucratic change-management system. There is also risky deployment where no one is completely confident if the software will actually work in the live environment, if code will cope with the load, or if code will work as expected. The product is usually pushed out, and teams just hope to see if everything works. More often than not, the problem start manifesting after the project goes live. The developers use a system to develop the code, which is tested in completed different system, and deployed on entirely different machines, causing incompatibility issues due to different properties files. If the business units are siloed, the issues get passed between different teams. There can be siloisation within teams as well. If the silos are not in the same office, or city, this leads to “them vs us” mentality, making people more sceptical.

DevOps approach believes in handling businesses in a more productive and profitable manner by building teams and software to resolve these issues. The above mentioned problems can be addressed by DevOps approach where people with multidisciplinary skill set are happy to roll up their sleeves for multidimensional role. They make connections and bridge gaps, tremendously impacting the businesses. This builds cross-disciplinary approach within the teams with maximum reliability across different departments, leading to faster time to market, happier clients, better availability and reliability and more focussed team energy. The goals of DevOps approach are spread across complete delivery pipeline, improving the deployment frequency. DevOps promotes sets of methods and processes for collaboration and communication between product development, quality assurance and IT operations. It encourages understanding the domain for which software is being written, develop communication skills, and there is a conscious passion and sensitivity to ensure that the business succeeds.

In the non-DevOps environment, the operations team’s performance is measured based on the stability of the system, whereas the development team is gauged based on the delivered features. In the DevOps environment, a single whole team is responsible for the system stability and delivering new features. There is continuous integration, shared code, automated deploys, and test-driven techniques. The problems get exposed earlier in the application code, configuration or infrastructure mainly because software is not just thrown to the Operations once the coding is over. The change sets are smaller, making the problems less complex and as the team members do not have to wait for other team to find and fix the problem, resolution times are much faster.

Additionally, in a typical IT environment, people need to wait for other machines, other people, or updated software. Employees often get stuck in resolving the same issues over and over again, and this can become quite frustrating, leading to job frustration. It becomes essential for the organisations to remove the ungratifying part of their employees’ jobs so that they can add more value to the organisation, making it more productive and profitable. Standardized production environments and automated deployments are the main aspects of DevOps that make the deployments predictable, and this frees up the resources from the mundane tasks. This software development method acknowledges and utilizes the interdependence of IT operations, software development and quality assurance to help companies create new products faster, while improving the operations performance.

There are several technical and business benefits of this collaboration across different roles. This includes continuous software delivery, faster problem resolution, reduced complexity of the problems, more stable operating environments, faster feature delivery and more time to provide value addition rather than fixing or maintaining. The DevOps movement is yet to reach its full potential, and the statistics have shown that this is not just a fleeting fad. It promises a paradigm shift, a significant revolution in the software industry to blur the boundaries.

Amazon Web Services

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Amazon Web Services or AWS is a cloud computing platform offering by Amazon providing a wide array of cloud services to the customers. Amazon AWS offers several cloud options including Amazon Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and Amazon WorkSpaces. This group of remote computing services that make up the cloud-computing platform over the internet are known as Amazon Web Services. Most of these services are not directly exposed to the end users. Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 are two of the most central and well-known offerings.

To enable the use of online services via REST, HTTP or SOAP protocols, Amazon first introduced Amazon Web Services in 2006. AWS launched two Amazon CloudFront edge location in India on 28th July 2013 joining 42 edge locations worldwide. This makes the services global, fast, flexible and cost-effective. Amazon Web Services is now a $6 Billion-a-year cloud-computing monster, and is considered Amazon’s most valuable asset. AWS generated the sales of $1.57bn in the first quarter of 2015, and firm’s total revenue for the quarter rose by 15% to $22.7 bn, which was much stronger increase than expected. AWS provides cloud computing services to several household names including Spotify, Dropbox, Uber, Netflix, CIA and Samsung.

AWS services include:

Cloud– Virtual Servers, Containers, Event-driven Computer Functions, Auto scaling and Load Balancing

Storage and Content Delivery– Object Storage, Block Storage, Archive Storage, File System Storage, and CDN

Databases- Relational, Caching and NoSQL

Networking– Virtual Private Cloud, DNS and Direct Connections

Administration and Security– Identity Management, Access Control, Key Storage and Management, Usage and Resource Auditing, Monitoring and Logs, and Service Catalogue.

Enterprise IT Applications from AWS include Desktop Virtualization, Email and Calendering, and Document Sharing and Feedback. Engineered for the most demanding requirements, AWS offers following advantages:

Secure– AWS cloud security infrastructure is one of the most secure and flexible cloud computing environments providing highly reliable and extremely scalable platform so that the data and applications can be deployed securely and quickly. Data and applications are not only protected by highly secure infrastructure and facilities, they are also protected by extensive security and networking monitoring systems that provide critical security measures such as password brute-force detection and distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection on AWS accounts. Additional security measures include built-in firewalls, secure access, private subnets, multi-factor authentication, unique users, dedicated connection options, encrypted data storage, centralized key management, security logs, perfect forward secrecy and so on.

Compliant– AWS’s Cloud Compliance ensures robust control to maintain data protection and security in the cloud. Compliance responsibilities get shared as the systems are built on top of AWS cloud infrastructure.

Private, isolated Resources– Enterprises adopting cloud computing require secure data and applications, increased agility, and reduced costs. However, some organisations also need to take into consideration the unique requirements for regulatory compliance and resource isolation. AWS offers private network, private compute, private storage, enterprise governance, and private encryption resources for completely private cloud experience.

Hybrid– AWS offers solutions and tools to integrate existing resources of the organisation with the AWS cloud to extend and enhance the capabilities and accelerate the adoption of cloud computing. Offering a wide range of options to develop architecture, hybrid architecture involves integration of storage, networking, management and access control. The capabilities include integrated networking, integrated Cloud back-ups, integrated access control, and Integrated resource management and workload migration.

Amazon Web Services have changed the game in several ways. You pay only for what you use, scale up or down easily within few minutes based on the demand. Servers can be added to different parts of the world to provider faster services to the customers. Additionally, Amazon periodically keeps adding features and services to their existing offerings, making it a preferred choice for organisations in different domains. Recent AWS add-on includes Amazon Machine Learning. However, with IBM, Google and Microsoft emerging to grab some of the market share, it needs to be seen how Amazon is able to hold its margins high over the long term.

Data analytics isn’t about Insights. Idexcel Big Data Roundup

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1. How To Use Data To Outsmart Your Competitors

The pressure’s on to use data to outsmart your competitors. Here are six ways companies can use data to imagine and even re-imagine what’s possible.

“Business as usual” can be a risky business practice, especially when there’s cultural resistance to change. While some companies are embracing agile practices, there are a number of data-related barriers that keep companies from reaching their potential, most of which have to do with people, processes, and technology. Read more…

2. Ten Ways Big Data Is Revolutionizing Supply Chain Management

Bottom line: Big data is providing supplier networks with greater data accuracy, clarity, and insights, leading to more contextual intelligence shared across supply chains.

Forward-thinking manufacturers are orchestrating 80% or more of their supplier network activity outside their four walls, using big data and cloud-based technologies to get beyond the constraints of legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems. For manufacturers whose business models are based on rapid product lifecycles and speed, legacy ERP systems are a bottleneck. Designed for delivering order, shipment and transactional data, these systems aren’t capable of scaling to meet the challenges supply chains face today. Read more…

3. How Data Projects Drive Revenue Goals

The vast majority of organizations have either already implemented a big data project or plan to do so, according to a recent survey from CA Technologies. The report, titled “The State of Big Data Infrastructure: Benchmarking Global Big Data Users to Drive Future Performance,” indicates that a great deal of these projects are integrated throughout the entire organization. Companies are pursuing big data and analytics primarily to improve the consumer experience while adding to their customer base. However, there are formidable challenges, including a lack of trained staffing to make data projects succeed, as well as the inherent complications of such implementations. Read more…

4. Importance of Big Data Analytics for Business Growth

Until recent years companies have always evaded the question of using data analytics for business execution, leave alone big data. Most of the time it was due to cost of analysis that the organisations kept in mind while keeping away from data analytics. With everything going digital, data is pouring in from all kinds of sources imaginable. Organisations are getting inundated with terabytes and petabytes of data in different formats from sources like operational and transactional systems, customer service points, and mobile and web media. The problem of such huge data is storage and with no proper utilisation of the data, collecting and storing is a waste of resource. Earlier it had been difficult to process such data without relevant technology. Read more…

Bug Reporting is an Art – Idexcel Testing Roundup

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1. Why Bug Reporting is an Art That Should Be Learned by Every Tester

When it comes down to it, a tester’s primary responsibility is to test an application or project and report back on the issues. But it isn’t here that the responsibility ends, from here, the real work begins. It’s absolutely essential for testers to understand why their bugs are being rejected or being marked as “not reproducible” and how to react in these situations. Read more…

2. How Was This Tested?” Providing Evidence of Your Testing

Many testers have a tendency to minimize the information they record when testing. The challenge comes when problems are found later, possibly after the software is in production. How do we remember what we did, and when? What records do we have to refer to? How do we, as testers, answer the question “How was this tested?” Read more…

3. The Advantages of Utilizing Formal Test Design Techniques

When it comes to test design, there are those who firmly believe in the use of formal test design techniques and those who believe that those same techniques cause rigid thinking and limit creativity. I believe formal techniques have value as a basis for formal analysis and design as well as for creative thinking. Read more…

4. Discussion: Should Trivial Bugs Be Logged?

A poster to the Test Huddle forum referenced this blog from Eric Jacobson in which he argues that reporting trivial bugs tends to waste everyone’s time and that testers shouldn’t log them. The forum poster’s question: Do you agree or should all bugs be logged despite the severity?

Reponses from both sides have already been submitted to the thread. Contribute your own thoughts on the matter here!

How to Build a Bigger, Better Talent Pool – Idexcel Staffing/Talent Roundup

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1. How to Build a Bigger, Better Talent Pool

In an ideal world, when a job order comes in you always have the perfect candidate in mind and ready to go. The reality is that finding and placing quality talent isn’t usually that simple. Fortunately, there are plenty of fish in the sea — you just have to bait and catch them. Read more…

2. The Road More Traveled

Mobility programs have become a key talent management strategy in today’s war for talent, giving companies a way to deploy the best people to the right locations in support of their business goals.

And as more of these organizations expand globally, the need to mobilize their employees has steadily increased — especially as they expand overseas. Company growth and lack of local talent tied for the top factors that affected relocation volumes in 2014, according to Atlas World Group’s 2015 Corporate Relocation Survey. Read more…

3. Trust Me, the Sharing Economy Is Changing Staffing

It’s no secret to the staffing industry that trust is the cornerstone of all good business. Our clients trust us to send them good people. Our employees trust us to find them better jobs.

So what happens when someone else finds a more efficient way to create that trust? Or what if they compete with legit staffing companies unlawfully and without our cost structure? Read more…

4. How To Get Your Career Unstuck

You’re bored out of your mind and can’t see an obvious next step within your current employer. You might be stuck behind an ungrateful boss, or perhaps you’ve just been doing the same job too long. No matter the details, that feeling of “being stuck” saps your energy and makes you feel like there is no hope for your career.

“THBPBPTHPT!” as they say in the cartoons. That’s sheer nonsense. You just need to break out of your rut. Here’s how to get started. Read more…