News from the World of Software Development – August 2017

Welcome to our regular look at interesting stories from the ever dynamic software development world; this time from the month of August. Hopefully, you find a bit of actionable information to help in your daily coding activities or perhaps the strategic direction of your organization. If interested in last month’s news digest, simply click on the following link.

New Product helps Companies keep track of DevOps Metrics

As DevOps continues to become part of the technology mainstream, companies struggle with determining the return on investment on their transition to a new methodology. DevOptics, a new product from CloudBees, aims to provide a means to track the efficacy of an organization’s DevOps processes and procedures. News about DevOptics appeared in August in Enterprise Times as well as other sources.

One of CloudBees’ major features is a real-time view of an organization’s software development pipeline, allowing managers and other key personnel to track the status of code changes as they are pushed from development to QA and eventually production. The hope is to lessen the number of meetings that tend to siphon productivity. Sacha Labourey, the CEO of CloudBees, commented on DevOptics.

“This is about data. We go through a lot of code changes, use a lot of tools, make a lot of modifications but all of the data vanishes. DevOps has been adopted in many, many cases as a feature that we replicate across the organizations. It’s a feature at scale not an enterprise solution. Now we are moving towards building a system of record for IT processes,” said Labourey.

If your organization is interested in how DevOptics can help keep a handle on your DevOps implementation, contact CloudBees to schedule a demo of the product. It just might be the missing piece of the puzzle for managing your software development projects.

Continuous Delivery – powered by AI – is the Future of Software Development

A recent article in The Next Web wonders if continuous delivery, assisted by artificial intelligence algorithms, is the future of software development. Considering how often we cover DevOps and continuous delivery here on the blog it is safe to wonder if that future is actually already here.

The Next Web article cites recent survey data from Evans Data that shows while a majority of companies – 65 percent – are using continuous delivery as part of their software development process, they only leverage it on a subset of their projects. Only 28 percent of surveyed organizations use it for all their applications.

Leveraging AI and machine learning as part of automation will play a key role in making continuous delivery commonplace. This is the opinion of Diego Lo Guidice of Forrester Research. “AI can improve the way we build current software; it will change the way we think about applications — not programming step by step, but letting the system learn to do what it needs to do — a new paradigm shift,” said Lo Guidice.

Expect artificial intelligence to continue to make inroads throughout the software development world, but especially in improving processes currently using automation. Once it does, continuous delivery – and DevOps for that matter – will truly become an industry standard.

Stay tuned to the Betica Blog for additional insights from the wide world of software development. As always, thanks for reading!