*This blog originally appeared on Service Assurance Daily.
It can by optimizing application lifecycle.
This Tweet caught my eye yesterday:
My response:
To me, this rush to be first – no matter who is doing the rushing: an IT group rolling out a new product/service or a journalist trying to break a story – is hurting overall quality. As @jpitkin’s tweet so succinctly put it, what happened to planning and testing?
It doesn’t have to be this way. The whole DevOps movement, in which the development and operations sides of the house knock down the wall between them to collaborate on new/enhanced applications and services, is a step in the right direction toward enhancing quality. Instead of development throwing new applications over the wall without any prior input from the Operations team, both teams work together to build, test, and deploy applications. The goal behind DevOps is to create software and services that work as expected and deliver a good end-user experience out of the box. (Even though most software and all SaaS-based applications no longer come in a box.)
CA Technologies facilitates the DevOps movement by helping drive performance testing earlier in the development process. We do this through our unique approach to optimizing the application lifecycle, which leverages our CA Application Performance Management (CA APM), CA LISA, and CA Capacity Management solutions. By leveraging this combination, our customers can test applications without the need for a carbon-copy production environment using Service Virtualization (CA LISA), base tests on the real-world performance data of existing applications (CA APM), and then properly model the production environment to effectively support the new or enhanced application (CA Capacity Management).
You can read more about this approach to optimizing the application lifecycle in this Solution Brief.
While the technology behind all of that is sophisticated, the approach is pretty simple. The benefit is being able to test applications using fewer resources and to do so earlier in the development cycle so IT can figure out where problems might lie and get them resolved more quickly. By doing so, IT can plan and test while still being first.