The notion of continuous delivery of software requires the automation of test, build and deployment processes for the rapid, incremental release of functional code. To manage that process, ThoughtWorks Studios, which champions continuous delivery, today released Go, its new release management platform for agile development.
Go replaces Cruise, the company’s solution for continuous integration, and joins the Mingle project management software and the Twist testing software in the company’s Adaptive ALM suite of products. Continuous delivery emphasizes collaboration between departments to bring development, QA and IT operations together with the objective of delivering software based on business needs, not operational constraints.
Jez Humble, a product manager at ThoughtWorks Studios and co-author of the upcoming book “Continuous Delivery” (for Addison-Wesley), said that in traditional waterfall development (and even agile development using continuous integration), the steps of analysis, design, development and testing occur before the QA and deployment handoffs occur. Even if you’re working in iterative steps, he said, operational constraints aren’t even talked about until after the business and development sides say the software is ready to go.
Cyndi Mitchell, managing director at ThoughtWorks Studios, said the Adaptive ALM suite “is a new generation of tools more reflective of how agile teams work.” Go offers dashboards for monitoring processes and environments; users can see which version of an application is running in a particular environment and trace it back to the source, she explained.
The software also offers what Mitchell described as parallel test intelligence, meaning users can see which tests broke, which check-ins broke them, and then aggregate the results across the grid.
Further, Go introduces a new user interface for DevOps, providing a centralized infrastructure for the management of projects by both developers and IT operations, as well as new templates for managing a large number of projects and branches, and defining reusable workflows, she said.
Go is available now as part of the Adaptive ALM suite. A Go Community edition is available as a free download, with annual support available for US$499.
