{"id":8125,"date":"2016-08-02T13:02:19","date_gmt":"2016-08-02T13:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.devopsonline.co.uk\/?p=8125"},"modified":"2016-08-02T12:03:35","modified_gmt":"2016-08-02T12:03:35","slug":"a-tools-directory-for-digital-programmes-and-devops-regimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devopsnews.online\/a-tools-directory-for-digital-programmes-and-devops-regimes\/","title":{"rendered":"A tools directory for digital programmes and DevOps regimes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Gerrard introduces the Tools Knowledge Base<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

The digital revolution is driving change in the software development and testing community. New processes, disciplines and the tumbling walls between silos mean tools are essential and the challenges of continuous delivery, DevOps regimes and shift-left are forcing testers to rethink how they test and where tools fit. The automation challenge has moved from selection and implementation of two or three tools for each discipline to selection and implementation of 20 or 30 tools for a project team using DevOps.<\/p>\n

High volume of DevOps tools<\/h2>\n

Digital and DevOps are everywhere in the software blogs and media. Although DevOps is primarily a cultural change designed to reduce the delays in delivery and deployment, there is a focus on tools as an enabler. In principle, all of the processes to support continuous delivery are automated \u2013 now or at some point in the future. The tools required to provide this support include virtualisation and containerisation, source control, provisioning and of course, testing.<\/p>\n

One key goal of digital is to continuously deploy to production to conduct experiments. The DevOps tools chain, as it is called, extends into production and includes logging, monitoring and analytics, so the range of tools required is much broader than we are used to. Nowadays, companies require twenty or so tools to be fully automated.<\/p>\n

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Tools to support digital programmes and DevOps.<\/p><\/div>\n

But increasingly, requirements, story, release and task management and other collaborative tools are seen as part of the DevOps tools chain. The full tool chain might now have 30 tools. The schematic above attempts to place the tool types involved into a more meaningful structure.<\/p>\n

The challenge of acquiring integrated tools chains is more complicated (and expensive) than before.<\/p>\n

Curated listings of tools<\/h2>\n

Now, for as long as the web has existed, there have been websites that provide lists of references to tools that support for example, test automation. These web pages and sites have usually been set up by individuals, wishing to share their knowledge of software tools for their own communities. But it\u2019s a burdensome task to create and maintain these lists. Vendors move webpages around, they rename tools, they merge and split tool functionality, they add new tools and new vendors and tools are popping up all the time. It’s really hard to maintain the accuracy of lists like these.<\/p>\n

If you look around the various websites that provide such lists, this is what you tend to find:<\/p>\n