Compuware recently commissioned Forrester to explore how firms approach the challenge of a growing mainframe environment, yet shrinking workforce.

The study asked firms how measuring performance in quality, velocity, and efficiency would accelerate their digital business.

The study found that, despite its reputation as an old platform, mainframe powers a critical portion of customer experience.

Furthermore, 72% of the respondents said their customer-facing applications are completely or very reliant on mainframe processing, while 23% of firms reported losing their mainframe workforce in the last five years.

The post Forrester study finds mainframe powers customer experience appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

According to the report, to fully adopt DevOps practices, changes must be made regarding culture, automation, lean, measurement, sharing, and sourcing methods.

The report found that I&O professionals are “heading in the right direction” across multiple teams and functions, which is critical to breaking down silos between different organisations.

The report also found that in order to offer a better customer experience, organisations must speed up release cycles of applications and services.

Forrester’s Q1 2017 Global DevOps Benchmark online survey found that I&O professionals are demonstrating great results with the DevOps competency model: 63% of respondents indicated they have implemented or are implementing and expanding DevOps, while 27% are planning to implement it.

The survey also showed 61% of I&O professionals agree that team collaboration is encouraged and rewarded.

Forrester’s Q1 2017 Global DevOps Benchmark online survey was fielded by 623 individuals who work in technology management.

Written by Leah Alger

The post Forrester report: Six trends that shape DevOps adoption appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The software development industry has gone through changes with agile, DevOps, microservices, and low-code approaches over the last two years.

Next year, according to Forrester’s predictions for 2018, modern software development is going to continue as new innovations are made.

Forrester said in a report: “The truism has become true: Every company is in the software business. As software becomes the central differentiating factor in customer engagement, an effective, well-aligned software factory is an increasingly crucial business imperative.”

Forrester said to the SD Times the software industry should be prepared for the following changes in 2018:

• Devtest bots will be used to automate delivery: While automation is not a new concept, Forrester believes machine learning and artificial intelligence will continue to replace manual and repetitive tasks through bots.
• DevOps tools will proliferate and consolidate: In 2018, DevOps teams will look to use a single vendor for their CI/CD solutions rather than using a custom built development toolchain approach.
• Agile will continue to scale: Agile will slowly, but steadily continue to scale. According to Forrester, enterprise agile adoption grew to 59% in 2017, compared to its 23% in 2015.
• DevOps will drive the use of APIs and microservices: The need for digital transformation will force businesses to invest in APIs and microservices as well as build their development lifecycle around automation.
• New software jobs will emerge: Project managers, manual testers, database administrators and basic developers will transform into product manager, scrum master, test engineer, data scientist, low-code developer and business expert roles.
• Serverless programming patterns will take over: Serverless architectures will take over containers and virtual machines in order for developers to separate business logic from infrastructure code, and build more modern applications.
• Low-code features will continue to advance: New low-code features will emerge to address “special requirements of digital process automation, dynamic case management, content management, eCommerce, business intelligence, and analytics.”
• There will be an increased interest in AR development: New software development kits like Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore are removing the barriers to augmented reality development.
• Conversational computing will be more common: As voice recognition, natural language processing, natural language classification, and natural language generation continue to advance, conversational computing will become more popular next year.

Forrester added to the SD Times: “For AD&D leaders, 2018 will be a year of parallel initiatives. First, they will continue on their journey toward modern software development practices and architectures — agile, DevOps, microservices, and automation — that underpin continuous delivery. At the same time, they will take on new opportunities that new technologies and platforms — especially AI and low-code — will present.”

Written by Leah Alger

The post Software is crucial for businesses, says Forrester appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The new feature, Success Metrics, enables DevOps teams to measure and quickly assess the ability of its automated open source govonernance programmes.

According to Sonatype’s report, 2017 State of the Software Supply Chain, DevOps organisations reduce the use of defective open source components by 63% by actively managing the quality of open source components that flow into production applications.

‘Innovation is king’

Sonatype’s CEO, Wayne Jackson, said: “We live in an age where innovation is king, speed is critical, and open source is centre stage. Today, components of varying quality are flowing through development lifecycles and landing in production applications.

“The best software will be built by those organisations that harness software supply chain automation practices to not only improve the quality of their applications but accelerate their ability to identify and remediate defects.”

The report also states the importance of supporting expanded investments in automation and measuring the speed of remediation in DevOps practices, to significantly reduce defects.

‘Measure success and improve future performance’

To assess license, security and architectural quality associated with open source, and third party and proprietary components used in development, Sonatype customers analyse over 650,000 applications to track its mean time in remediation through Success Metrics.

Diego Lo Giudice, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, an American market research company that provides advice on existing and potential impact of technology, added: “Ultimately, companies are most concerned with whether their application delivery efforts are winning, serving, and retaining customers and furthering their business technology agenda.

“Analytical data about customer usage and experience coupled with operational measures of performance, reliability, scalability, and security gives these organisations the means to measure success and improve future performance.” 

DevOps teams can also use feedback from Success Metrics to improve the hygiene of their applications and the processes that deliver them.

Written from press release by Leah Alger

The post Sonatype to measure automated programmes through Success Metrics appeared first on DevOps Online North America.