Indeed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the U.S. Treasury Department (Treasury) are reporting the recent attacks against cryptocurrency firms using phishing and malware in order to steal funds and conduct fraudulent blockchain transactions.

It is likely that the threats are coming from the Lazarus Group, known as APT38, to steal cryptocurrency and launder funds to support the North Korean regime. The attacks start with spear-phishing messages targetting developers and DevOps teams within cryptocurrency firms, which contain a malware-laced cryptocurrency application.

It is then vital that organizations and staff are vigilant and take the necessary measures to avoid these hacking attacks.

The post US government warn developers against malware attacks targeting cryptocurrency firms appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Indeed, organizations are now putting more emphasis on open source to foster business agility rather than on anything else. Low costs still remain a driver for open-source adoption, but security has taken its place at the top of the list.

Yet, this seems rather unexpected as many concerns were raised about open-source security due to the fact that it is open. Indeed, hackers can easily discover vulnerabilities in code and exploit them. Developers are thus always trying to make open-source code more secure.

Yet, it has become quite clear that even though open-source software isn’t completely secure, it offers a better process for securing code. When bugs are found out in open-source code, they can be quickly fixed due to the open process. However, this doesn’t guarantee that all users will apply the fixes to their code.

Security is a process and open source is the best way to deliver that process, hence driving companies to develop more low-cost, high-quality, and secure software.

The post Security to drive open-source adoption appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Indeed, with the abandonment of outdated practices, no more travel needed, the prioritization of developer skills, and the adoption of tech making hiring a better experience for candidates and managers, tech hiring has massively changed.

The report stated that since the outbreak of the pandemic, 42% of organizations have started using developer assessment tools, meaning that developers have more chances of having online coding assessment tools during the hiring process.

Assessment tools can provide unbiased opinions of a developer’s skill, thus recruiters are more likely to use them. Companies that don’t use them usually look for experience and skills in their hiring decisions.

Moreover, recruiters are now using more video interviews as well as collaborative coding tools, allowing candidates and interviewers to work together in real-time. Recruiters will also focus on developers’ soft skills.

The report predicted that companies will be looking for developers skilled in AI and machine learning as well as DevOps, data science, and back end. The hiring process should become more and more automated in order to eliminate any subconscious biases.

Developers looking for a job will also look at health insurance, flexible work hours, and company-sponsored training. They also stated that the best way to upskill is through coding platforms and boot camps.

The report revealed that the hiring process has never been easier due to the pandemic and that it will continue to change throughout 2021.

The post Developer hiring has changed during 2020 appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

So, how has the role changed over the last decade? And more importantly, how can developers cope with the pace of change they’re facing now? During my fifteen years in enterprise software development, I’ve witnessed much of this transformation first hand; as I helped develop products and solutions for optimising software quality and application lifecycle management – all against the backdrop of a fast-changing and unpredictable business environment.

The need for speed

The most significant change in the last decade has been the shift from waterfall development methods to agile. Digital transformation is accelerating the adoption of agile because digital is the main portal to customers and the customers’ expectation is to get more – faster and easier.

In a world where a bad review can go viral in seconds, better apps and faster service have created a make or break scenario for vendors – customers are much less tolerant of bugs and issues. In addition, fast innovation by handset manufacturers and operating system makers has created a continuous stream of innovation opportunities e.g. easier, more secure authentication using biometric support and new workflow opportunities, such as using pictures as part of the insurance claims process. Agile makes it possible to increase velocity whilst ensuring quality, but it brings some challenges too. One hurdle when making this move has been getting to grips with the concept of iterative development.

For waterfall organisations, the accepted way of working has been to design and lay out the entire project prior to beginning development. Of course, this might entail months of requirement gathering and design sessions before a team could even begin working on code and during this lengthy process user requirements may change: what was once appropriate no longer fits, resulting in wasted efforts. Agile processes have caused a complete change in direction, helping teams move to focused, small and iterative work and, as a result, allowing them to develop and deploy services quicker than before.

Of course, the shift from waterfall to agile, which went against developers’ previous training and experience, caused apprehension for many. This is normal and was expected. But the clear benefits of the agile methodology helped developers to immediately recognise its value.

And, for us, the primary value of agile is speed. Agile creates fast feedback opportunities between developers and users, enabling faster course correction and improved quality.

Indeed, it’s this need for speed and fast feedback which is a driving force behind many of the changes we’ve seen in software development – and it’s the reason, too, for development teams’ responsibilities expanding exponentially over the last decade. Where testers, developers and quality assurance (QA) teams once had distinctly different jobs to do, the functions are quickly merging and dev teams are now tasked both with making apps and services and also ensuring they are of the highest quality.Q

The need for training

The developer now wears many ‘hats’ and, of course, the problem for some is that these hats aren’t necessarily the ones they want to wear, or even signed up to wear! As well as writing code, developers find themselves focused on enhancing and, improving customer experience, boosting service efficiencies and lowering costs. All vital jobs of course, but very different from what they were initially trained to do.

Let’s take microservices as an example. The deployment of microservices (the loosely coupled, autonomous, fine-grained services which many commentators see as the holy grail of modern development), is a sea change for many. Deploying many microservices to a shifting number of users means that app deployment is getting much more complicated, and so no longer falls under a pure-play developer’s remit. Instead, it becomes the role of a wider, frequently shared, DevOps function, which has responsibility for the whole product development and production lifecycle, and which is the function where many developers now sit.

So, in this world, where job functions are increasingly fluid and complex, it’s important that organisations are committed to upskilling their developers and sharpening skill sets towards the goal of automating key activities during the DevOps pipeline. As always, speed is crucial and teams must focus their efforts on improving the processes that are slowing them down.

We believe that leadership is a critical aspect of helping developers seamlessly transition to what essentially constitutes a new job role. Diverse teams and personas call for strong leadership as a unifying force, and a leader’s active role in affecting change is crucial. Of course, part of leadership is to enforce stringent metrics and KPIs which help to keep everyone on track. The continuous measurement of both development productivity (the number of user stories per sprint) and quality measurements (the number of defects per release) are imperative.

The need for testing

In the past, we saw developers follow a linear process when it came to testing. Committing code without testing, or with minimal testing, wasn’t a problem when QA teams were on hand to catch issues and fix them. But today the QA phase has gone (at least in mature shops), and the iterative development process that is the hallmark of the new DevOps world means that testing and quality assurance needs to happen in tandem with development.

And, just as the developer’s role is changing, so too have our ways of measuring: not only our progress but also the effectiveness and performance of our code, tools and processes. This increased visibility is a good thing and helps to catch issues early. And, when the developer ‘owns the quality’, continuous testing becomes absolutely crucial; it’s key to improving quality, extending coverage, speeding up development, reducing costs, and saving man hours, and the de facto requirement to achieve the development speed objectives of modern development teams.

And it’s with this plethora of reasons that we now see so much emphasis put on test automation. The development process has been fundamentally changed – commit code is not complete without commit tests alongside it, and new test tools and platforms have been developed in order to help developers deliver quality code and stable automation tests.

Evolution for responsibilities

So, the development world has fundamentally changed over the last decade. And there’s little doubt any more that DevOps has evolved from being the bright, shiny object that everyone talks about, to be the necessary reality. Developers, as part of the DevOps function, now have significant responsibility in an enterprise. They own the availability and sustainability of the customer experience – and that can make or break a business.

But, we recognise that, for a developer, this merging of roles we’ve seen over the last decade can be tricky. As a developer, it may be that you have always been spending a fair amount of your time on the Ops side, but now it’s your responsibility to do both. And much more besides.

Of course, it’s difficult to have at least half your job consumed by doing something you didn’t necessarily go to school to learn, but this increased responsibility can be vital to the success of a business. In recognition that their role is a crucial one, it’s our responsibility as an industry to help developers cope with the change.

Written by Uzi Eilon, CTO, Perfecto (America)

The post The changing role of the developer: how to adapt in a fast moving world appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The company is based on the core developer technology, git, which gives developers a chance to work on the same software at the same time.

The funds will help GitLab grow its DevOps software business by building products that move it beyond simply serving as a place for companies to host their code repositories.

GitLab offers a continuous integration product, and plans to care more streamline tools, helping manage the process of putting code into production and maintaining it.

The leading integrated product for modern software development has recently started to become popular in the developer space.

According to Business Insider, GitLab “boasts” that it controls two-thirds of the market for “self-hosted git.”

Written by Leah Alger

The post GitLab raises US$20million in venture capital funding appeared first on DevOps Online North America.