Software testing, while often underappreciated, is arguably the most crucial step to get right with Agile and DevOps. Testing organizations have a huge impact on your delivery speed.
They have an even bigger impact on quality, risk, and compliance. One automation opportunity often overlooked in continuous delivery is tightly integrating not only your test management system with your ALM, but also tightly integrating test environment management.
When you add a user story to a sprint it should kickoff process in both your test management systems and test environment software. For example, a tester would receive the requirements and get tasks to create test cases. At the same time, a test environment would be scheduled to be provisioned with the appropriate requirements.
As Agile has matured, we continue to break new barriers. But, it will be the ones like ING who say it can be done that lead us into the future. When software is ubiquitous, agile needs to be likewise. A recent global survey of almost 1, IT and business leaders found companies are keenly aware of the importance of agile. Around three-quarters of executives in the survey, sponsored by CA Technologies, said that it can play a crucial role in delivering the right products and services, accelerating decision-making and speed to market, while also improving the customer experience and staying ahead of the competition.
Most companies report that while there is some use of agile practices throughout the organization, implementation is not broad or deep. However, the report found one group, the Agility Masters, who have been able to leverage agile throughout their company, reporting 60 percent higher revenue and profit growth than the rest of the organizations surveyed.
Most organizations reported that they are embracing agile within the software development area: Eight out of ten organizations have committed to adopting it. DevOps and Agile have grown increasingly intertwined as organizations seek to both develop and deliver quality software more efficiently, with greater speed and providing greater value to customers.
The full report is available from the CollabNet VersionOne site. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy. Got News? Contact Us. And you could argue that, in the pharmaceutical world, Roche has been taking a real leadership stance but with a very different angle around creating agile leaders and what that means. And the list goes on. I would say those are still companies that are on a journey. Sherina Ebrahim: Just to add in other industries, I think we are seeing it with Walmart, which is in a very different industry that is starting to see benefits of using that methodology.
Shail Thaker: Absolutely. But I would argue, that is also where a ton of value-creation potential is, because those are the companies that were built based on a simple premise: the matrix is a great structure for leveraging skill—and frankly, being the pound gorilla and stomping on your competitors. Alright, that is a wonderful construct for that. It is not a great construct if you have to move at speed. And on the other end of the spectrum, we have very large global companies—highly matrixed, functional.
So we have already talked about how a large organization just starts to think about changing, really think about moving to an agile organization, with the right backbone. Incumbents: huge amounts of stable, not a lot of dynamic. Sherina Ebrahim: Yeah. And so, this notion of what should be stable and what should be dynamic is really an important distinction that people should think through, because the stable enables people to come to work. They know their role and what might be their career path.
And they know where their home is, if you will. And the dynamic is actually ways of working in which you can bring different people together so that they can quickly get something done and then move on to the next one. And a pretty important success factor, I would argue, is the notion of dynamic resource allocation, which larger, more stable companies are not used to.
They're used to yearlong planning cycles, budget cycles, but to be much more agile, you have to think about quarterly. Finance organizations are not built to move money around. But sitting above all of this is also a massive change in management mindset.
We have an entire cadre of leaders. To do that, I accept that, if things change, the budget I thought I had, the financial and human capital, can and should be reallocated.
Sherina Ebrahim: Another difference is very much how you think about incentives. That changes the entire mindset and behaviors of the people.
Again, easy to say. Simon London: So let me just pick up on a term you used earlier, Shail. You talked about a blueprint. That implies to me an overall mapping of the different elements of this end state that you want to get to. Just double-click on that for us. What are the elements in the blueprint? Companies can start by piloting. Now, what is in a blueprint? Your agenda around applying agile working practices is strongly linked to the ability to create value.
And that refers to which parts of your business system actually could create more value by being faster or more adaptable and, indeed, which ones could create more value by having more dynamic resource reallocation. Shail Thaker: And you identify nodes. So there are bits of your business for which agile working practices are massively relevant and create a huge opportunity.
Now, they play an important role in the system. But the blueprint first identifies these nodes of value. Where is agile going to make a difference? Shail Thaker: Yeah, absolutely. And you may think that agile working practices equal a cross-functional team. There are plenty of working models that contribute to agility—by the way, going all the way back to lean working practices and some quite old-fashioned but very relevant concepts. There are quite a few more Lego bricks than you might think.
The step two of the blueprint is, you apply these dynamic models and choose the right model for the right node of value to create the most value, right? You have almost a patchwork. Often, it could be shared vision, common career path—think job descriptions.
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