Internal and external customers are making increasingly higher demands on the platforms and applications they use. They want new functionality and they want it implemented quickly. At the same time, as an IT manager you have to work on achieving a high level of customer satisfaction and limit the risks. And all that at the lowest possible cost.
COPING WITH CHANGE
The world is constantly changing and these changes are taking place at a rapid pace. In business too, opportunities and threats follow each other in rapid succession. To seize opportunities and avert threats, it is crucial that an organization can respond quickly. For the IT department, this means, among other things, that software must be able to be adapted quickly to distinguish itself or to manage risks. Customers expect the latest functionality in their software and they want the software to be delivered ever faster, without compromising on quality or reliability.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
To obtain a fast, agile organization, a digital transformation is needed.
The entire C-suite, but especially the Chief Information Officer, has an important role in this transformation. The CIO is expected to have vision and a proactive attitude. The CIO does not (only) facilitate old systems and processes for internal customers, but must take the lead in bringing digital competitive advantage to the organization. DevOps and test automation play a leading role in this digital transformation.
DEVOPS
If an organization wants to improve the speed and quality of software development, it needs a different way of working. DevOps is the latest method in the evolution of software development. In DevOps, the development and operations functions are integrated into one team. In addition to developing new software, the members of the team are also responsible for managing the software. And thus also for solving incidents and problems that have arisen from the supplied software. Organizations that work with DevOps can deal with an accelerated production process much more flexibly than other organizations.
TESTAUTOMATION AND MONITORING
In order to do more work with an equal number of team members, automation is necessary. Designing the software and building it remains mostly manual work. Compiling, testing and deploying, on the other hand, should be automated as much as possible. This leaves time to deal with incidents and to develop new software.
With 'continuous delivery', automatic compilation, testing and deployment can take place without a handover moment to functional management outside the team. There is thus a fully automated corridor from development to production where all steps in a framework are automatically tested. This makes it possible to frequently release software to production in small batches. Those updates are so small that the impact of an error is often zero.
Ideally, a number of test cases developed in Dev (development and test) should also be used in Ops (management). The new functionality can thus be tested directly in Dev, included in performance and regression tests, and monitored together with existing functionality in Ops.
FASTER, BETTER, MORE STABLE AND LOWER COSTS
By automating the software development process and testing, software can be delivered faster at lower costs. In addition, it is possible to respond better and faster to customer requirements, which improves customer satisfaction. Good monitoring then ensures that after delivery, the quality and stability remain guaranteed.
