webinar: removing barriers to continuous delivery of business value

© 2014 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Removing Barriers toContinuous Delivery of Business ValueKurt BittnerPrincipal Analyst

@ksbittner

© 2014 Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited 2

The Half-Life Of Innovation Is Shrinking

7 years

Images copyright © 2014 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.


Customer Demand Is Increasing Complexity

“Navigate The Modern Application Delivery Landscape”, February 12, 2014


The Software-Powered Value Delivery CycleFast Feedback Drives Better Business Results

› Less waste

› Lower cost

› Happier customers

› Increased revenue

› Lost revenue avoidance

› Increased profitability


The road to faster delivery is well-marked and increasingly well-traveled

http://buckleysautorepair.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/iStock_Road-SignsSmall.jpg


Lean Value Stream Mapping

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_stream_mapping


Value Stream Mapping Applied To Application Delivery

Maximize Utilization ➔ Maximize Throughput


Idea proposed

Understand Needs & Invent

Solutions

Develop, Commit & Build

Functional Testing

Deploy Solution

Customer Value

Load, Performance, Security, …

Testing

UAT/Exploratory

Testing

ReleaseDecision

Typical Bottlenecks

Too Much WIP

Lack of access to Dev & Test Environments

• Lack of Effective Build/Integration Automation

• Manual Testing• Design Complexity

Lack of effective API-driven test automation

Lack of effective effective release candidate quality information

Manual environment management and deployment

Lack of Effective Customer Insight

Ever-present bottleneck” hand-offs and wait time


Idea proposed

Understand Needs & Invent

Solutions

Develop, Commit & Build

Functional Testing

Deploy Solution

Customer Value

Load, Performance, Security, …

Testing

UAT/Exploratory

Testing

ReleaseDecision

Typical EnablersSmaller batches/payload

Infrastructure As Code, Environments On Demand, Cloned/ Templated Environments

• Continuous Integration

• Continuous Testing• Loose Architectural

Coupling

Continuous Testing

Sufficient Test Data to make decisions

• Infrastructure as Code

• Release Automation

Application analytics, CX data

Everywhere: Cross-functional teams, simplified roles


Continuous Testing

UI – Presentation Layer

API Layer

Resource Layer (including other Applications)

Test Harnesses


Enables independent change, removes bottlenecks

› Services are versioned to allow interfaces to evolve

› Resources can be replaced without affecting applications

› Risk is reduced by isolating and eliminating dependencies

› The unit of release becomes an API change, not an application

› Applications and services can choose when they “upgrade” to a new interface

Loose Architectural Coupling

API Layer

Resource Layer (including other Applications)

UI Layer


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› Manually built and configured

› No auditability of changes

› Often, no control over change access

› No repeatability

› “It works fine in my environment.”


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› Standard VM/Container configurations

› Configurations version controlled

› Managed Change authorization

› Changes automated, repeatable, auditable

Environments on demand


Infrastructure As Code In Practice• Configuration information (settings, users, permissions,

accounts, installed software, properties, …) saved in SCM tool

• Scripts necessary to build new environments from configurations saved in SCM tool

• Environments automatically created, configured and populated with test data using automation


Environments On Demand

• Self-service – no waiting for Ops, no submitting requests, no “tickets”

• Typically cloud-based, sometimes VM-based

• No delay for even automated provisioning (i.e. Infrastructure-as-Code) when using standard configurations

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Test Data Management

Key practices

› Reduce test data set size while maximizing scenario coverage

› Anonymize data

Benefits realized

› Reduce time spent copying, manipulating production data

› Eliminate privacy concerns

› Reduce cost of provisioning testing environments


Service Virtualization

Key practices

› Simplify creation of mocks and stubs

›Manage mocks and stubs for components and systems

› Simulate load and performance characteristics

Benefits realized

› Reduce environment provisioning complexity

› Test partial solutions earlier

› Eliminate component dependency bottlenecks


Benefits of Infrastructure As Code

Reduction in Production Incidents

› Reduction in production incidents due to environment configuration errors

› Elimination of “it works fine in my environment” excuses

Increase in Velocity, Reliability

› Eliminate wait-time for environment provisioning

› “Clean” test environments prevent false-positive and false-negative results

A large corporation reported that 18% of their production incidents were caused by configuration differences between environments. These were eliminated by moving to an infrastructure-as-code approach.


Traditionalpractices

Delivery Speed

Risk of Failed

Release

High

LowYears Days

Continuous Deliverypractices

CD Practices increase speed, reduce risk


Thank youKurt Bittner

[email protected]

@ksbittner


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