DevOps: New HP software plugs the dev-ops gap

• There are silos between development and operations teams, leading to delays and potential defects
• HP says new software portfolio bridges the gap and brings business agility to organizations

HP has announced enhanced software offerings that increase collaboration between development, testing, infrastructure and operations teams, claiming they help organizations break down IT silos so they can quickly deliver high-quality, innovative applications.

In other words, it’s the company’s first foray into the DevOps environment (see accompanying article, DevOps: Smashing through software development silos).

“DevOps is not new – it’s industry terminology, not HP’s,” says Kamal Dutta (pic), vice-president of business units for HP Software in Asia Pacific and Japan.

“Continuous delivery automation is another term for it. It is more or less the same – what it does is it bridges the gap between developers and operations, and key to this is automation, collaboration and quality,” he adds.

DevOps is a set of software delivery practices that stress better communication and collaboration between application development, testing, infrastructure and operations teams. It helps unify IT silos through a set of common standards and automation practices, enabling continuous delivery of applications and services that adapt to changing enterprise needs, according to HP.

The company also likes to use the term “business agility.”

“In an ‘agile’ environment, the focus is on smaller teams, smaller initiatives – you develop ‘smaller’ code and roll it out. Quality is effectively integrated into the development cycle, and then you scale to enterprise,” says Kamal.

“That’s the design criteria – it needs to scale,” he adds.

Today’s software world has to take into account the speeded-up development lifecycle – used to be, you had three to four years to bring an application to market. These days, a mobile app has to be up and running within four months.

Applications also have to reach out to new channels, like mobility and social media.

HP has enhanced its HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) 11.5 platform to provide preconfigured reports with on-going information about application progress. In addition, it is now integrated with HP Enterprise Collaboration software, which enables social media style, context-based conversations between key stakeholders across the application lifecycle.

The new HP Performance Center (PC) 11.5 software for application performance testing improves application quality prior to release with a nod to ccontinuous application delivery. This new feature enables operations and testing teams to share real-time performance data for use in application performance testing scripts.

HP Software Professional Services for Application Lifecycle Management provides consulting, upgrade and implementation services to shorten time to business value for DevOps based on HP ALM 11.5.

 “I used to be a developer – there’s an old saying that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of software is in the executing,” he adds.

In the old way of doing things, when writing the code, once you got the executable to work, you were done.

“The developer would then just bounce it off to the testing guy and to production. The testing guy would say, ‘Hold on, let’s put it to a User Acceptance Test (UAT)’ and put it on a UAT server

“And it wouldn’t work. And the developer would say, ‘Well, it works fine on my machine’. All this because of different versions of Java, or because of different paths or patches,” says Kamal.

“With automation, all these different parameters can be automated. Whatever I’m developing, I am capturing the environmental parameters, the scripts, the operating system versions – everything – and automating the process of putting that application into production,” he adds.

The new Lab Management Foundation Service enables organizations to accelerate application testing while maintaining application quality.  These services automate the deployment and provisioning of test environments and the scheduling of test execution, the company says.

“Application innovation is hindered by the silos that exist between development, testing and operations teams, leading to delays, missed opportunities and potential application defects,” says Chew Kai Peng, country manager, HP Software, Malaysia.

“By integrating information and processes from IT operations into application life cycle management, HP provides a critical foundation for DevOps, enabling organizations to drive business results through the continuous delivery of innovative applications.”