DevOps is a rapidly evolving organisational model with teams arranged around a product or service to deliver value to their users more quickly. Through breaking down organisational silos, the delivery teams work on a product or product improvements instead of projects which are usually no longer maintained or supported after they’re completed. For many organisations, it is a significant culture shift when transitioning to product or service orientated teams and adopting DevOps practices helps to make the transition easier.

Nowadays, DevOps is much more than just getting development and operations teams to work together. This is a culture where trust, collaboration, communication and a failing fast mindset are a part of the day-to-day work of the delivery teams as well as the whole organisation. It’s also a model where our users are at the heart of everything we do. We identify the user needs by exploring the problem area, then improve our service based on the user feedback and continually learn about our users throughout the whole service lifecycle.

Therefore, the DevOps culture can also be described as a culture of continuous improvement where the teams continually learn about their users, innovate and evolve through creating new ideas and taking daily efforts to make things better, faster and more efficient.

The Build – Measure – Learn feedback loop is a very common practice through which the teams build a solution, measure the results based on data and learn based on the user feedback. This cycle can be repeated and applied to new ideas, experiments or product developments. Therefore, the ultimate goal is to deliver value to our customer, our customer’s customer and keep up with their changing needs through adopting DevOps practices.

The DevOps teams bridge the gap between Development and Operations as they work in small cross-functional teams to bring together all of the skills and capabilities needed to deliver DevOps solutions. They share tools and practices which include agile planning, agile software development (iterative and incremental development), continuous integration, continuous deployment, automated and continuous testing, and proactive monitoring of the production environment.

In order to identify what value you’re trying to deliver and what is your user’s biggest pain, many DevOps teams embed a UX professional (UX, product or service designer) into their cross-functional team. This is to ensure we solve the right problem and we understand the real user needs.

What is UX?

User experience (UX) is a scientific, psychological, and problem-solving side of product, experience, and service design. It focuses on having a deep understanding of users, what they need, what motivations and habits they have as well as limitations. It also takes into account the business strategy and business objectives with the purpose of delivering an end-to-end solution.

It is very important to understand your end user to make sure you deliver the service they need and that they’re going to use. UX helps you truly understand what your users need so that you know their needs early on, and you can decide to pivot or abandon the idea.

UX with DevOps!

When UX is integrated into the DevOps team, requirements are researched and designed, the solution is user-tested before the engineering team builds it. If the user or business stakeholder changes their mind, UX is a part of the process so the team can quickly adapt and change the direction of the service by implementing the user feedback.

On the contrary, when UX is not integrated into DevOps, the team receives the requirements from the client or the wider business and builds the solution straight away. Then, it gets to production and it’s delivered to the client who often says: ‘That’s not what I wanted!’

After the team receives the feedback, the new solution needs to be built and the whole cycle repeats until they get it right. As a result, a lot of time and money might be wasted as the delivery teams build the wrong thing or the user requirements change too many times – ultimately reducing speed to market.

If your DevOps team supports the internal development teams, their users are not only external customers but also development teams from other parts of the business who will use their DevOps solutions. The DevOps team’s goal is not to throw their work over the fence but to understand the developer’s needs and treat them as customers.

In this case, UX should be similarly integrated into the DevOps team. For example, I’ve been working with a DevOps team who have built different DevOps solutions, but the users preferred to use their own continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines and monitoring tools. As a result, none of the solutions have been used by the development teams. This means the user needs weren’t identified, and the problem area explored enough, to understand what solutions would have solved the user’s biggest problem and pain points.

‘What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case, what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?’ Identifying your users and value is one of the main ‘lean’ principles Eric Ries talks about in his book Lean Start-up.

A common challenge for many large organisations is that their development teams may struggle with different parts of the development process and have different needs depending on their maturity, therefore different opportunities may arise.

Design Sprint Concept

Apart from traditional user research techniques (one-to-one user research interviews, workshops and observations), the DevOps teams can use a ‘design sprint’ concept as a powerful UX technique to identify developer needs for the CI/CD pipeline.

On my most recent enterprise project, the centralised DevOps team and I created user personas and decided to implement the design sprint approach because the level of cloud experience within the development teams varied significantly. This is to understand the user needs and business value, find commonalities, create a prototype and validate a few CI/CD pipeline design concepts with the users to get feedback. All work has happened during four intensive days of work with the purpose of reducing the risk of spending six months and delivering the wrong thing.

The results have been impressive and the benefits outstanding to the whole organisation. The Proof of Concept (PoC) has been proven to reduce a significant amount of time – from a project initiation phase, to deploy, to production – but more importantly, it’s greatly improved the user and stakeholder engagement.

Engagement & Needs

Engagement is particularly important if you want to stay up-to-date with the user needs. The user needs change all the time so if you want them to remain fresh and timely, engage with your users regularly, do ongoing user research and user testing throughout the whole service lifecycle (Discovery – Alpha – Beta – Live), and not just during discovery when the project is initiated.

When organisations embrace the DevOps culture, engagement is also crucial for organisational change as face-to-face communication increases across all teams and departments and organisational silos are starting to break down.

Another principle that allows you to stay closer to your users is a ‘lean’ principle – go see for yourself. If you wonder what your users may like or what they struggle with, go and talk to them directly. You’ll see the benefits of engaging and interacting directly with your users very quickly. Even though the users can’t see if your team applies agile or lean principles or how many sprints you need to build the service they need, they will definitely see the user experience.

They may ask questions:

• what made you choose the systems you chose?
• who tested the service with people like me before it was released to the public?

While most organisations agree that DevOps focuses on driving business value, they’re challenged to move beyond the typical IT-focused metrics. Even though there are very good team IT metrics (cycle time, mean time to recovery, deployment frequency, fewer support tickets, reduced time to deploy a ‘change’ to production), it’s important to remember what business change our IT initiative is going to drive and how are we going to measure its success.

User-focused metrics such as user satisfaction surveys or a number of adopted DevOps solutions should give you a good understanding of whether your internal users (development teams) are delighted with your service within your organisation.

Similarly, reducing cost and time spent by each development team building their own tech stack or components through identifying repeatable patterns and building common solutions will bring the most value to your organisational metrics. Instead, the teams can spend more time on delivering value to their end users or customers.

Lastly, if you’re working on an end-to-end DevOps transformation programme and using a DevOps framework assessing your organisation’s or team’s DevOps maturity, try to apply a variety of DevOps metrics within technology, people and process capability to adequately measure the DevOps transformation success.

Iwona Winiarska
Agile Delivery Manager
Automation Logic

The post Integrating UX with DevOps appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

But step back from your Instagram story and stop swiping in vain to figure out Snapchat’s redesign, and think about what goes into launching this new functionality. With billions of users at any one time, there is almost an unprecedented demand when it comes to launching and testing, while any mistake or miscalculation could cost millions in lost revenue or reputational damage. So, how easy is it for some of the world’s biggest apps to test their products, and what is actually involved?

Make sure your app works

Now, this might sound obvious, but even if your app is technically sound, if the user experience isn’t right, people won’t be shy in relaying their feedback. Even the masters don’t always get this right. Snapchat’s controversial major update, where the old Stories page was replaced with a new Discover page, is a good case in point.

It’s safe to say that the new page has left many users confused. And for Snapchat, one of these users was Kylie Jenner, who tweeted about her annoyance and immediately wiped US$1billion dollars off the company’s stock market value.

Lesson learned? Testing user experience is key. It’s essential to test the full user experience across apps and websites, and the companies that are getting it right are combining protocol-level load injection with application-level UX validation across all platforms to test the true UX. It means they are doing end-to-end user testing across all components of their functionality.

Let’s hope Snapchat’s ‘Insights’ tool, designed to provide data to influencers, giving them the information they need to grow and thrive on the platform, will help the app bounce back.

Make sure you can handle the load

Whether it’s launch day or every day, if new functionality isn’t supported by an app or site that is performing well, most users won’t come back again. Even when an app can deliver a great user experience, functionality can still fail due to the poor implementation of infrastructure or delivery – something that is most critical at launch time. If you launch functionality that is so popular that your app or site falls down, you run the risk of users leaving permanently, or, in the least, not engaging with new functionality.

This is where load testing comes in. Load testing is used to create a wide variety of virtual users to simulate real user activity. To test a website application simulates the HTTP requests that a real user would send while navigating your website. Or, virtual users can simulate the actions of a real user by automatically driving an actual browser instance for popular web technologies like HTTPS, Sharepoint, AJAX, and web services.

Vero, the Instagram competitor, knows all about why it’s important to load test. The app is simply not able to keep up with the huge amounts of interest it has generated, and cannot keep up with the nearly 1 million users who have signed up. As it has tried to release new functionality, the company has blamed high traffic for the problems users have experienced in signing up and posting.

AI-driven continuous testing and monitoring

While new functionality may be controversial, today’s platforms need to compete in a crowded marketplace, and in order to keep up, they do need to frequently roll out new functionality so that they can differentiate. It’s critical that businesses are able to achieve continuous testing at speed and to do this, large platforms are using AI-driven test automation and continuous testing to monitor against critical business objectives.

This is essential in order to release apps fast and move to a culture of continuous development, while also continuing testing in production to produce analytics that can drive insight to solve problems.

‘It’s complicated’

When it comes to releasing new functionality and ensuring your app, site or product is continuously monitored, there are a lot moving parts. Releasing new functionality frequently that pleases users is no easy feat, but if you can achieve this using the right testing strategy, every new feature release is an opportunity to grow your user community while growing your business.

Written by Antony Edwards, CTO of Eggplant

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Even established industry players still experience challenges when it comes to maintaining a culture of constant availability, and moving forward this year, we’re set to see companies get proactive to ensure availability, top performance, and ultimately, unparalleled user experience.

So, what issues are organisations at the forefront of user experience excellence looking to tackle?

Availability needs to be addressed before companies can compete on user experience

2017 saw more than its fair share of major website and application outages, from Virgin Money Giving going down the night before the London Marathon, to WhatsApp crashing over new years – forcing people to actually talk to one another…via Facebook probably. The impact on organisations’ reputations, not to mention their pockets, ranged from inconvenient to disastrous.

It’s not just an overwhelming volume of online traffic that is reducing many critical websites and applications to near failure – it’s the so-called glitches we’ve seen in IT layers behind these channels which make it tough for sites to function as they want.

Recently, it was revealed that hundreds of parents in the UK are struggling to access their tax-free childcare benefits via an HMRC-run website, resulting in many nurseries and other childcare providers not being paid and parents scrambling to allocate personal funds. In some extreme cases, parents found that all records of their childcare benefit funds had been wiped from the system without explanation.

It’s examples like these that show how far many organisations still have to go before they can even compete on a user experience level. Regardless of whether it’s down to the prevailing organisational attitude, failing to ensure a 24/7 culture of availability and user-first culture impacts how competitive you can be in the market and in many cases, how you can deliver critical services.

Businesses will look to improve user experience by exercising and testing the supply chain

Application supply chains are becoming longer and more complex as digital enablement is bolted on top of legacy systems putting new and unforeseen workloads on applications.

This means that it is no longer viable to assume a good user experience from the monitoring of individual components and that the experience needs to be measured at the edge at a macro level.

For organisations looking to differentiate from a user experience point of view, exercising and testing the supply chain could be a real market differentiator in 2018.

UX requirements will drive evolution of the C-suite

As organisations become increasingly digitally enabled, it will become more important for the whole C-suite/board to be involved in looking at the ‘performance dashboard’.

Roles will have to transform in 2018; the CIO and CDO (Chief Digital Officer) will start to merge as the necessity for customer awareness and UX appreciation supersedes technical expertise alone.

The head of customer experience will rise to become one of the most important roles supporting digital services. In some companies, this may mean that CDOs begin to address more customer experience requirements, and in others, it may mean that CDOs morph into the customer experience role over time.

In both instances, CDOs will need to begin to work more closely with UX design teams, playing a key role in user research and people-centric design before moving on to play an integral part in the direction of application load testing to ensure services work on all levels, end-to-end.

The ultimate goal here is to design user-friendly digital services that perform during peak traffic times, allowing large industry players to deliver a user experience in line with customer expectation, and giving smaller competitors the opportunity to compete in the fastest evolving digital landscape we’ve seen to date.

Organisations will prioritise web and application monitoring and load testing

If you don’t know by now that unhappy users make for an unprofitable business (presuming that you haven’t cornered your market entirely), then what you might not be aware of is the scale of the impact that poor website or application performance can have on the success of your business. Let’s take website homepage loading time, for example. How long is ten seconds? Long enough to lose you 40% of potential users if they can’t access what they want in that timeframe.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if a site or service’s graphic user interface is optimised for an amazing user experience – if performance and response times are not up to scratch, organisations will lose users. In 2018, we’re set to see CEOs prioritise web and application monitoring and load testing so that user experience teams can focus on what they’re good at: developing innovative digital services that make the user experience easier and better.

Written by Tim Cox, global head of operations, Apica.

The post 2018: Time to tackle new customer experience challenges appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The software launch brings a new user experience to Jenkins based on a personalised, modern design that allows users to graphically create, visualise and diagnose continuous delivery pipelines.

Allowing less experience members of DevOps teams to use Jenkins

This is more than just putting a modern face on Jenkins: Blue Ocean re-imagines the Jenkins user experience by enabling teams to more easily adopt continuous delivery.

CloudBees, Inc., the hub of enterprise Jenkins and DevOps, founded the Blue Ocean project and subsequently open sourced the software.

With the official release of Blue Ocean, Jenkins now allows any member of a DevOps team to adopt continuous delivery without having the expert knowledge previously required to use Jenkins.

Continuous delivery pipelines are inherently complex, making it difficult for team members – from developers to IT operations to management – to get a common understanding of the progression of software through the pipeline. Blue Ocean simplifies the development of software pipelines by allowing developers to create them with a visual pipeline editor and then visualise the process flow in an intuitive way, such that the whole organisation, not just developers, can understand it.

Blue Ocean naturally fosters collaboration by providing a common view of the end-to-end pipeline that all team members can understand. Using Blue Ocean, team members gain a graphical overview of the entire pipeline, enabling them to quickly identify issues and then drill down to find the source of the problem.

The implementation is underpinned by Pipeline as Code which enables the pipeline definition to be stored with the application code and infrastructure as code; allowing teams to reproduce previous configurations and processes easily when things go wrong.

User experience features

CloudBees and the Jenkins community have collaborated to architect and develop the Blue Ocean user experience with key features such as:

• Visual pipeline editing – Team members of any skill level can create continuous delivery pipelines from start to finish using the intuitive and visual pipeline editor. No code or text editing is required. Anyone can create sophisticated pipelines with just a few clicks.
• Pipeline visualisation – Enables teams to visually represent pipelines in a way anyone in the organisation can understand – whether technical or not, improving clarity into the continuous delivery process for the whole organisation.
• Pinpoint troubleshooting – Blue Ocean enables teams to locate automation problems instantly, without endlessly scanning through logs or navigating through many screens.
• GitHub and Git integration – Pipelines are automatically created and run for all feature branches and pull requests, with their status reported back to GitHub. The whole team has visibility into whether changes need work or are good to go. Blue Ocean provides native, in-depth integration with Git.
• Personalisation – Team members can make Jenkins their own by customising their dashboard so that they only see the pipelines that matter to them.
• Built with and for declarative pipeline – Any pipeline created with the visual editor can also be edited in your favourite text editor bringing all the benefits of Pipeline as Code.

Enhancing the usability of Jenkins

“The Blue Ocean project has had incredibly positive feedback from the community since its inception. It brought a breath of fresh air to the working horse of developers everywhere that is Jenkins,” said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Jenkins Founder and CTO at CloudBees. “The new and very modern and intuitive UX makes Jenkins more approachable and continues to enhance the power and usability of Jenkins.”

Jenkins is the most popular automation server in use today. With continued annual growth in active Jenkins installations of about 30%, the Jenkins community now has 533,839 active nodes, with more than 11 million jobs defined in Jenkins on them.

Edited from press release by Cecilia Rehn.

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Don’t miss the gaming sector pieces, looking at security testing and mobile games in detail. You’ll also see a profile on South African DVT, looking to bring a new outsourcing option to post-Brexit Britain. 

Click here to read TEST Magazine online

The post Agile, UX, outsourcing and more in the latest issue of TEST Magazine appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

It might seem like a cliché that testing and quality assurance (QA) have moved away from being a reactive pursuit. But it is definitively important to reiterate and reinforce that the philosophy of testing today is unequivocally proactive. Whether it be in the use of tools and methodologies, or in testing consumption patterns, QA organisations are now involved right at the outset of the product’s (or services’) lifecycle in assuring end user satisfaction and fulfilment.

The shift in focus on customer experience has led to a fundamental change in the delivery of products and services. Digitisation has become the norm. Brands are being consumed in many different digital guises with omni-channel at the forefront of such consumption. Using this new knowledge of how products and services are consumed, QA specialists are simultaneously engineering to deliver to product quality and a fulfilling experience. Customer feedback and sentiment has, in fact, become critical in deciding on the ‘official’ version of the product. Assurance now means considering the customer’s experience from the beginning.

It sounds controversial, and perhaps a little preservationist, but without this evolution to the modern proactive assurance model, there would be no marketplace left for testing alone. There simply isn’t room for forces that slow down delivery today. Gone are the days when the QA focus was merely on preserving KPIs!

Therefore, as we see speed to market growing in influence, we find assurance specialists innovating and keeping pace; which is why it’s all about the business impact and the customer experience now. And powering these imperatives is a complete reimagination of QA – intelligent automation, agile assurance, DevOps, and a whole new generation of QA tools and frameworks.

It is with this backdrop that we can discuss the innovations in the assurance sphere. While the term innovation means many different things to different stakeholders, this article will summarise some key assurance innovations from process, tool and people perspectives.

Shifting left the right way

The most talked about concept in testing in recent times – shift left – is also the most important innovation in quality assurance. There has been a huge change in attitude towards and within testing through the adoption of this trend. It has had a far reaching impact not only on the time taken for testing, but it has also helped bring down costs, increase overall quality through early detection and fixing, and helped breathe life into rapid release cycles (which are critical for a number of businesses today).

On the face of it, shift left is a fairly straightforward process change. But just like most ideas, it is deceptively simple to understand, yet gloriously difficult to execute. While it espouses early performance testing and more unit testing, it requires the right combination of business, development and testing knowledge. Which is why most QA folks do not shift left the right way!

Under the hood structural quality

Another innovation in testing has been the introduction of structural quality, which has contributed immensely to optimisation in cost of quality. By analysing the cracks prevalent in the code itself, testing and assurance have taken on a proactive role at the building block level, carrying out pre-emptive checks and fixing problems even before they can arise. Structural quality assurance has aided in acceleration and velocity of production in a big way. Today, there are plenty of tools in the market which help QA organisations look for structural anomalies in the existing ecosystem.

Velocity-wise service virtualisation and intelligent testing

Two of the most exciting innovations have been that of service virtualisation and intelligent testing. Through the power of virtualisation, QA organisations can carry out end-to-end testing, without the erstwhile need to wait for someone or a system to process the request on the assembly line. Service virtualisation has enabled a greater number of testing cycles to run in the same amount of time. It has ensured that testing and QA are no longer obstacles or impediments to business.

When meeting today’s speed to market demands, this aid to acceleration has been a vital innovation, along with the evolution of intelligent testing. New automated tools have completely reimagined the way QA organisations provision test data and how they handle test analysis. With elements of automated test bed preparation, self-generating and self-rectifying test scenarios from requirements, completely independent test data and test case preparation and of course, rapid test execution, intelligent testing systems are all set to become the norm.

The two together have increased test coverage considerably and have helped secure a lifelike production environment. They are assisting assurance professionals in safeguarding quality with much more accuracy than ever before.

The DevOps continuum

The most recent development in the QA arena has been that of DevOps. Adding a whole new dimension to ‘shift left’, DevOps takes the concept to an entirely different plane. It not only has an impact on the QA organisation, but to ensure maximum gain, needs to envelop the entire IT organisation as well. The potential of this innovation in process and people aspects is gaining ground.

The assurance people tree

And now, perhaps the most under rated development in testing: the way in which assurance professionals have reinvented themselves. From rapid skilling beyond traditional testing methods to equipping themselves to cope with the need for agile methods in delivering to the contours of quality and speed to market, assurance professionals have redefined what it means to be in QA. The shift isn’t just in the development lifecycle; it is a shift in mind set as well – from reactive to proactive, from detection to prevention, from manual to automated, from bugs to business! Multi-disciplinary teams with techno-functional expertise and skills around assuring customer experience are being created. And a career of choice in this discipline is seen as a viable proposition for many engineers.

Future of assurance innovation

Looking ahead, it is clear that a wide world of possible innovation awaits us all. There is disruption in the air, from new products, new emerging industries and new ways of thinking about assurance. Robotics has become more mainstream, and when you consider the world of smart devices, wearables and the internet of things (IoT), we’re seeing a different ball game altogether. Whether you’re dealing with products that are worn on human bodies, or smart technologies inside the private sphere, there is opportunity for testing and QA to innovate.

It is already at a stage where it is no longer just about assurance for requirements, design, test cases and test data. It is now getting into the realm of virtual reality with more simulations of real life scenarios taking place. Cognitive and behavioural sciences too, along with hardware, software and firmware are coming together to create the most optimum testing arena for the best consumer experience.

The future will also see a change in how we deliver solutions. Cloud services have become popular, and will become the default. Brands and consumers alike will expect no delay in delivery, and the first time right mentality will prevail.

Changes across the different market sectors

As the future looms, we see varied patterns in different market and industry segments. By approaching assurance as a business unit, you get to see both sides of the coin. At TCS we can analyse and evaluate both the similarities and differences in the markets.

There is already a lot of development in the omni-channel space, which offers significant opportunities for brands in the retail and banking sectors. We are seeing a change in how these companies and e-Commerce sites are connecting with different demographics of consumers, and taking full advantage of digitisation and cloud technology. By using predictive analytics, the omni-channel environment can successfully implement forces such as focused advertising, instant social feedback, cross selling and upselling.

In the insurance industry the advent of IoT will have massive repercussions. There will be new product considerations out there, and new ways of dynamically computing insurance calculations. For insurance companies, IoT offers sophisticated ways for real-time claims settlement and a direct link between the insurer and the consumer. This new direct channel will lead to a whole host of exciting opportunities.

The healthcare and wellness sector will also be radically changed in the coming years, as more digital technology is brought in. Regulatory and compliance challenges will ensue, but once taken care of, a new revolution in personal individual healthcare will progress. Digital devices will connect consumers to medical professionals, and metrics and data can be used in everything from calculating personalised tariffs to increasing incentive programmes.

In the telecoms/media/entertainment sector one key change is the mass adoption of digitalised consumer content. We’re already seeing the vast popularity of streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify. This new business model of leasing content to consumers while selling metrics, patterns and analytics directly to advertisers will continue to disrupt the more traditional entertainment industry.

What’s the role of assurance in all this?

Certainly it’s not about test cases and test defects and experience alone. Instead, as the value chain across different industries is being reimagined, the role of assurance will be to ensure that the integrity of this value chain is preserved. Assurance is about making sure there is no dilution in terms of dissemination of information flow from consumer to company.

There is a need for stronger advocacy for the usage of assurance, and to continually push these best practices to the market. A few IT firms recognised early on that while testing was always going to be necessary, today’s fast pace and changing user consumption patterns mean that ‘checklist’ testing or any form of QA that could be considered a hindrance or slowing down of product development and release was going to fall out of fashion, quickly.

Conclusion

The practice of quality assurance lies at the convergence of what the brand wants and what the consumer wants. And it will only get more important as future technology gets developed and more areas of our lives become digitised. Technology disruptions in the future promise complexity for those who want to avoid it and opportunity for those who embrace it. It is important to stay grounded and to listen to the market forces around us.

The post Staying Ahead of the Game: The Future of Innovation appeared first on DevOps Online North America.