DevOps is an obtainable practice for enterprises and businesses looking to rapidly build and release high-quality applications. It’s mainstream, and there’s a real reason companies are implementing their own DevOps strategy: It works.
Enterprises are reaping the benefits of implementing DevOps. Companies are building in automation and Continuous Delivery solutions, they’re shifting management and responsibilities, and they’re getting to market faster, while still improving the overall quality of their applications.
The issue today, as discussed by experts in the software development industry, is how companies get started with DevOps. There are different ways to approach a DevOps strategy, of course, but the first step is understanding the true value of DevOps. After that, it’s all about the process and scaling, while keeping in mind that DevOps is not something that happens overnight.
(Related: The importance of reliability, collaboration and user experience in DevOps)
Companies need to take a step back and have some sort of discussion on what they want to achieve. Why now? What is motivating the company? Those that aim for a successful DevOps strategy can pick and choose the aspects that work well for their business, and then begin to look at the myriad of software tools and the companies behind them.
These tools and the companies behind them act as a guiding light or North Star throughout DevOps transformations.
Who’s doing DevOps?
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) offers a range of solutions for those looking to move at the pace of DevOps, and HPE itself has been doing DevOps in its HPE IT and HPE R&D teams. Ashish Kuthiala, senior director of marketing and strategy, said that HPE has been “doing DevOps for a while,” and it actually started with the company’s LaserJet division back in 2008. He said at that time, costs were being cut and the teams needed to deliver more releases, so they looked at their processes and figured out how they could make the most of the DevOps movement.
“The market and demand has changed,” said Kuthiala. “We have decided to adopt [DevOps] within the HPE software organization, but our journey is not complete. I think there is never a journey that is complete within the DevOps transformation; you are always improving with quality continuous improvement.”
When it comes to implementing a DevOps strategy for bigger product teams, companies need to be wary of bumps in the road. Many hindrances come from actually adopting collaboration and cross-communication with common goals across all development teams, mostly because teams are often globally distributed.
Understanding these challenges, Neotys began its own agile journey for its application performance monitoring tool for web and mobile applications, NeoSense. Tim Hinds, director of product marketing at Neotys, said that they haven’t run into many problems while going through this transformation, mostly because their team is not large and they can communicate very well together.
“We’ve been working with a lot of ways to automate the QA process, and make changes internally for our source control and for Continuous Integration and deployment practices, as well as the spinning up of new environments so [as to use] more Docker-type containerization,” said Hinds.
With its small team, Neotys has its own way of communicating. According to Hinds, they have been improving collaboration with a process called continuous performance validation. Hinds said this starts with developers working on small tests at the API or microservices level, which are designed in NeoLoad, the company’s load and performance testing tool. Developers can then check what the Neotys Team Server and see the same projects.
“When each individual development team is working on whatever component they are doing, they can run that test, and then it gets passed on to an integration environment where it is merged in with the rest of the code for the entire application,” said Hinds. “Basically we use those same tests from the lower dev environments, merge them into a larger test, and then build on them.”
If anything goes wrong with any given test case, Hinds said developers can go into each environment and test what might have happened. The collaboration here is with the test cases themselves so teams can begin to “speak the same language around the performance SLAs,” he said.
Speed works
Like Neotys, XebiaLabs practices what they preach and uses their own products to become more successful with DevOps. According to Tim Buntel, XebiaLabs vice president of products, XebiaLabs uses its XL Release and XL Deploy to manage its own product development process. XL Release is also used to model and control the organization’s non-engineering process pipelines such as the marketing side of product launches, as well as product-management feature research and validation, he said.
“Of course, continuous improvement is always a goal, too,” said Buntel. “Like every digital enterprise, we are constantly exploring ways to improve our own processes.”
Buntel said that while DevOps isn’t a one-stop solution or magical formula to success, the full process of DevOps has a powerful central concept: to “empower people to work together effectively in order to successfully compete in a software-driven world.”
CollabNet also eats its own dog food and uses its tools to build new products as part of a recent DevOps transformation. According to vice president of marketing at CollabNet, Thomas Hooker, the company has been transitioning to extreme agile and extreme development over the past year and a half.
He said the company moved away from traditional waterfall methods and focused on agile methodology, all to achieve one thing: speed.
Speed is what helps the business meet the requirements of the customer, said Hooker, and the market demand of customers to consume the technology is the No. 1 driver. The question CollabNet asked internally (as many companies do when considering a DevOps strategy) is “How do we get faster?” or, “How do we advance our products at the speed of business?”
Hooker said the company had to consider how to change the tooling while still allowing teams to use the tools that work best for them. They also needed to consider how to change the processes around how the company brings products to market, as well as how to enable people to advance from creative ideas to getting involved in planning and development.
“The way to get it right is to go fast,” said Hooker. “Make the application smaller, so if a little thing goes wrong you can catch it quick and fix it quick.”
Quality software should be fast and reliable, but that doesn’t mean all software that is fast and reliable is high quality, said Yegor Yarko, TeamCity technical product analyst for JetBrains. He said companies should consider other factors to quality like usability, design, user experience, and ease of maintenance.
“Since it’s rare that a single piece of software can excel at them all, it’s usually beneficial to focus on those in demand to the customer,” said Yarko.
While everyone wants to achieve speed from a DevOps transformation, the process itself should not be rushed. DevOps is a gradual process that depends on a number of factors. For CloudBees, the challenges the company faced with its DevOps journey stems from the fact that they work closely with an open-source community, one that works at its own pace and has its own way of doing things, said Sacha Labourey, CEO of CloudBees.
He added that the company would have had difficulty creating new and stable features if they hadn’t gone through their own transformation first, making their processes more agile and applying more DevOps principles at the same time.
“A transformation is going to take years, it’s going to impact people, it’s going to impact processes, and yes, it’s going to require the best tools you can afford,” said Labourey.
The DevOps transformation
There are several ways to get started implementing a DevOps strategy, but there isn’t one way to get to the end results. This means companies will experience a lot of trial and error, experimentation, strategizing, and making improvements when necessary.
This idea of learning from failure is what HPE’s Kuthiala calls “continuous improvement,” and it’s an important aspect of a DevOps strategy. If the goal of a company is to speed up the release cycle and have a new feature come out every week, it’s up to the business to understand that even with implementing a DevOps strategy, this goal cannot be achieved overnight.
“You have to experiment and there has to be a tolerance of failure and an encouragement of learning from these failures [to] move forward,” said Kuthiala. “As long as you are making improvements each day, every week—and there will be some setbacks—it’s perfectly fine, you are moving toward that goal.”
According to Rogue Wave’s Ido Ben Moshe, vice president of global services, there is no negative factor in implementing automation, but the misconception he hears from customers is that it costs too much and requires too much time to invest.
He said when talking to customers, he finds about 30% feel that the DevOps process is too expensive. Also, they feel that their organization is not mature enough. Surprisingly, about 90% of people see the true value of DevOps, they just don’t know where to start.
“It’s about applying the same development values further onto the product life cycle, past the development itself,” said JetBrains’ Yarko. “The challenges [of DevOps] are as common as for anything new: Some time should pass before people stop regarding this as a new panacea, [and] feel and act according to the spirit and not the hype.”
Using leadership and automation to start the transformation
Choice Hotels International is an advocate of great hotel rooms with good rates, but the company is also an advocate of continuous improvement. Choice Hotels is always fine-tuning its processes and evolving them to meet the needs of the business, but in order to deliver solutions quickly to its customers, it needed to adopt DevOps patterns with the help of CloudBees Jenkins solutions.
Choice Hotels started its DevOps transformation by adopting a continuous strategy using open-source Jenkins, where all teams were required to have their projects built and released through it. The company is also adopting various techniques and strategies that do not require it to “boil the ocean,” said Brian Mericle, distinguished engineer at Choice Hotels .
One of the biggest challenges Mericle sees with DevOps is convincing people to change their current processes and technologies. He said it’s difficult to change people’s perspectives when they might be thinking of the age-old phrase, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The right DevOps strategy depends on how mature the company is, the right tools, forward-thinking leadership, and the ability to communicate the reason for change.
“I think one of the biggest challenges to adopting change is accepting the deficiencies in the current state,” said Mericle. “Most people take pride in their work, and introducing change can make some people feel underappreciated or undervalued. It is easy to get stuck in a ‘that is the way it has always been done’ mode.”
To solve these challenges, Mericle said there are a few critical solutions that will help. The first is having the ability to interact with an abstraction layer over the infrastructure, whether it’s private, hybrid, or public. Automation is a key enabler for removing manual efforts, he said, so the company uses the pipeline plug-in from CloudBees Jenkins to build its pipelines.
“We take advantage of the pipeline DSL to define exactly what each stage in our pipeline should do, and allow us to follow the same code life cycle standards as any other of our software projects,” said Mericle.
What major challenges do companies run into when trying to implement a DevOps strategy?
Tim Buntel, VP of Products, XebiaLabs: “There’s a tendency to look to DevOps ‘successes’ for inspiration when starting a DevOps transformation. But companies need to understand that as every team is different, so too will every DevOps strategy. Learn from others’ efforts (both triumphs and heartaches), but there’s no single formula for success that can simply be copied. Are you doing greenfield development, or working with existing software? Do you have a homogenous technology stack, or are there many technologies in place? Are you building in the cloud, or on-premise?
By all means, look to others for inspiration, but be prepared to experiment on your own. DevOps is a process of continual improvement and will always involve some trial and error.”
Yegor Yarko, TeamCity Technical Product Analyst, JetBrains: “Understanding that DevOps is no silver bullet, but just existing software development practices applied to more broad scope does not come easy and often requires some trial and error.
The key DevOps principle is integrating product deployment and production maintenance into the regular software development life cycle as opposed to keeping it a separate effort run by a separate team. Thus the implementation typically involves restructuring of the organizational departments and redistribution of the responsibilities. The challenges are common for those types of organizational changes.”
Tim Hinds, Director of Product Marketing, Neotys: “One main challenge we see often in organizations transitioning to DevOps is trying to cut out processes that can’t be automated or are difficult to automate. For example, one of the early opinions around application performance in DevOps was that having a robust performance monitoring and rollback system would eliminate the need for performance testing. That certainly works for some application where downtime and performance issues don’t pose significant risk to the business, but any business-critical applications can’t afford that risk.
In order to guarantee that an application is adequately performance-tested before being deployed to production without slowing down the process, testing needs to be automated with pass/fail results for every build.
Of course, this introduces additional challenges like transforming performance testers into performance test engineers. The job becomes less about recording and scripting test cases and more about ensuring that the automation is in place to sufficiently test performance and analyze results when builds fail.
This means that they rely on developers to ship updated test cases with their code. Of course, all of this requires a performance testing tool that is automated to this level, ties into their DevOps tool chain, and can be easily used and learned by all members of the team.”
Ashish Kuthiala, Senior Director of Marketing and Strategy for DevOps, HPE: “The biggest challenges that companies run into when trying to implement a DevOps strategy are finding out where and how to start, as well as changing the existing culture of the teams that have been delivering IT services to date. It is important to encourage teams to change the way they are used to working and encourage them to work collaboratively to achieve commonly defined goals and metrics. This is greatly facilitated by ensuring executive sponsorship that encourages constant experimentation, failing quickly, learning and constantly improving continuously toward better results every day.
Successful adoption of DevOps in large companies often starts with identifying pilot projects, building a Continuous Delivery pipeline that works toward the cadence at delivering at the speed at which business wants services delivered. A very good first step is to build an automated Continuous Testing framework to provide constant, immediate feedback loops as the applications are developed and fed into the CD pipeline and then delivered to production environments.”
Ido Ben Moshe, VP of Global Services at Rogue Wave: “We work with many companies who developed very successful DevOps strategies. Many of those have matured into a robust Continuous Delivery practice allowing high-quality software to be released on demand. However even though 90% of companies we encounter clearly see the value of DevOps, it is still very common to see organizations challenged in taking the first step.
There are a few contributing factors to delays in moving forward with DevOps. A common belief is that implementation of DevOps practices throughout the organization will require costly investment in processes, tools and team education. We asked over a thousand organizations in Rogue Wave’s annual Developer Pulse survey about their reasons for delaying their DevOps transformation. Only 21% of companies state that they have a fully implemented Continuous Delivery practices, and 33% of responders see the main barrier in cost or time investment. With tight IT budget and businesses’ demand for rapid release of application functionality, neither are acceptable.
There is a basis for this belief, that implementing a DevOps practice will take significant time. It usually ranges anywhere from six to 24 months to adopt a mostly automated Continuous Delivery workflow. What is often overlooked is the fact that productivity and quality gains can also be realized before a full process is implemented. The distinct steps of a Continuous Delivery process/Continuous Integration, release automation, infrastructure provisioning automation and application management will deliver significant measurable value even before they are fused to a completely automated software manufacturing assembly line. Companies should also understand the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment.
Even if your business does not require or benefit from deploying software to production often, having the ability to do so on demand is what delivers the efficiency, quality and productivity gains. Another 30% of the companies surveyed believe that their organization lacks the maturity needed to implement DevOps practices. Maturity can be either organizational or technical.
Lack of organizational maturity is driven by responsibility conflicts, having no single responsible party over the application with sufficient authority to drive change. Technical maturity gaps are usually evident by low unit test coverage and lack of a comprehensive test automation suite in general. Organizations that already have good testing foundation and some level of build and provisioning automation will adopt Continuous Delivery much faster.
Twenty three percent of companies claim that they just do not know where to start the transformational journey. They may launch a transformation initiative sponsored by the application stakeholder, often driven by a business need—primarily quality improvements, productivity gains or accelerating time to market.
To provide guidance for copanies looking for a place to start, the most common DevOps technology implemented is Continuous Integration at 53% of the companies surveyed, closely followed by application monitoring and diagnostics solutions at 45%. Thirty-five percent of the companies automate their application and release processes, 31% have adopted comprehensive test automation, and 25% adopted infrastructure provisioning and automating solutions driving standardization of their environments.
Regardless of the DevOps practice you decide to start your DevOps transformation with, value will be realized along the road even before completing the journey to Continuous Delivery.”
Sacha Labourey, CEO, CloudBees: “The single most significant challenge is cultural. Consensus on what DevOps is centers on the idea that DevOps is primarily about culture. DevOps is based on a set of principles inculcated within an organization. Organizations that have adopted this culture value collaboration, experimentation and learning. In a DevOps culture, all participants in the software delivery life cycle (not just development and operations) align around a shared goal: the rapid delivery of stable, high-quality software from concept to customer. Since DevOps is a cultural thing, technically it does not require automation.
However, automation of software development, testing and deployment through Continuous Delivery is widely recognized as a key enabler of DevOps. Automation enables organizations to deliver software more quickly while ensuring operations can have confidence in what is being deployed, and customers get the quality, security and stability they require.
Despite the tangible benefits DevOps provides, some organizations are reluctant to begin a DevOps transformation. Several factors underpin this reluctance, including simple resistance to change. But, as General Eric Shinseki, former chief of staff of the U.S. Army, said, ‘If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.’”
Thomas Hooker, VP of Marketing, CollabNet: “There are three major challenges that organizations encounter when trying to implement a DevOps strategy. The first is fostering a culture of trust and collaboration, which are both key foundational elements for success.
The second is aligning the tools and processes used across the development life cycle. As you move toward DevOps many traditional roles and processes will change, if you have successfully developed a culture of trust and collaboration you will be well positioned for these changes. You will need to update some of your tools and streamline processes, so your trusting, collaborative teams will be well positioned to lead this effort.
The third item is making sure you set achievable, measurable goals. These should be communicated throughout the organization to build support and further trust. It is of course wise to start small, demonstrate success and build upon that to bigger and better things.”
A guide to DevOps tools
CloudBees: CloudBees is the hub of enterprise Jenkins and DevOps, providing companies with smarter solutions for automating software development and delivery. CloudBees starts with Jenkins, the trusted and widely-adopted continuous delivery platform, and adds enterprise-grade security, scalability, manageability and expert-level support. The CloudBees Jenkins Platform is robust, and includes Continuous Delivery pipelines with features for the enterprise, as well as a private SaaS edition that eliminates costly Jenkins setup and administration time.
CollabNet: CollabNet offers enterprises and government organizations of all sizes the platform to accelerate development and delivery of quality software at speed, with its flagship product TeamForge. CollabNet is a pioneer in open-source, agile and collaborative solutions for large, distributed software environments. It provides innovative development tools at enterprise scale and agile consulting and training services. CollabNet services more than 10,000 customers, supporting 6 million users in more than 100 countries. It has been recognized for the past 12 years as a SD Times 100 industry innovator in the ALM & Dev Tools category.
HPE: Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Application Delivery Management (ADM) solutions help teams continuously deliver secure, high-quality business applications with exceptional user experiences across multiple technologies and form factors. HPE ADM solutions provide end-to-end visibility, continuous testing, performance engineering, and monitoring capabilities for application teams to enable them to deliver, test, monitor and continuously improve their business applications.
JetBrains: TeamCity is a Continuous Integration and Delivery server from JetBrains. It takes moments to set up, shows your build results on the fly, and works out of the box. TeamCity will make sure your software gets built, tested, and deployed. TeamCity integrates with all major development frameworks, version-control systems, issue trackers, IDEs, and cloud services, providing teams with an exceptional experience of a well-built intelligent tool. With a fully functional free version available, TeamCity is a great fit for teams of all sizes.
Neotys: Neotys is the leading innovator in Continuous Performance Validation for Web and mobile applications. Neotys load testing (NeoLoad) and performance-monitoring (NeoSense) products enable teams to produce faster applications, deliver new features and enhancements in less time, and simplify interactions across Dev, QA, Ops and business stakeholders. Neotys has helped more than 1,600 customers test, monitor and improve performance at every stage of the application development life cycle, from development to production, leveraging its automated and collaborative tooling.
Rogue Wave Software: Rogue Wave Software is the largest independent provider of cross-platform software development tools and embedded components in the world. Through decades of solving the most complex problems across financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, government, academia, and other industries, Rogue Wave tools, libraries, and services enable developers to write better code, faster. Product lines include Klocwork continuous static code analysis, OpenLogic open-source audit and support, CodeDynamics for dynamic analysis, and Zend Server enterprise PHP solutions.
XebiaLabs: XebiaLabs’ enterprise-scale Continuous Delivery and DevOps software provides companies with the visibility, automation and control they need to deliver software better, faster and with less risk. Global market leaders rely on XebiaLabs software to meet the increasing demand for accelerated and more reliable software releases.
Automic: Automic, a leader in business automation and DevOps, has solutions for increasing productivity, reducing time to market, and breaking down the silos of IT automation. Automic automates business processes, applications and infrastructure, regardless of complexity or location, on-premise or in the cloud. Automic’s united suite of business automation products, Automic V12, approaches DevOps from the operations side of software development, and helps enterprises increase operational agility without having to rip and replace its core business applications into the cloud. Also, Automic’s Application Release Automation product drives agility, speed and reliability required for businesses to stay competitive in the digital age.
Applause: Applause empowers companies to deliver great digital experiences to their users by providing digital experience testing services, usability feedback and research that go beyond the traditional QA lab. The company’s digital experience testing services span the entire digital experience life cycle and are performed in the wild—across every device, operating system, carrier, location and other criteria that their customers value—by the company’s global community of more than 250,000 professional testers in more than 200 countries and territories. Applause also provides a suite of complete digital quality offerings, including Usability, Research, Functional Test Automation and Beta Management, that helps the world’s biggest brands provide great digital experiences for their users.
CA BlazeMeter: Formerly BlazeMeter, the company was recently acquired by CA Technologies. The solution ensures faster delivery of applications by enabling DevOps teams to quickly and easily run performance tests on-premises, in the cloud or on virtual private cloud against any app, website or API at massive scale to validate performance at every stage of software delivery. The rapidly growing CA BlazeMeter community has more than 100,000 developers and includes prominent global brands such as Adobe, Atlassian, Gap, NBC Universal, Pfizer and Walmart as customers.
LogiGear: LogiGear provides a variety of testing solutions, including test automation and technical testing for software applications. With the no-coding and keyword-driven approach to test authoring in its TestArchitect products, users can rapidly create, maintain, reuse and share a large scale of automated tests for desktop, mobile and Web applications. Founded in 1994, LogiGear has completed software testing and development projects for prominent companies across a broad range of industries and technologies.
Microsoft: Microsoft provides a specialized tool set for development teams and testers that delivers an integrated end-to-end experience, starting with agile planning, through Continuous Integration, to Continuous Delivery on premises or in the cloud. Microsoft’s ALM tools decrease rework while increasing transparency into your application and the rate at which you can ship high-quality software. Components such as Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, Application Insights and Team Foundation Server align teams with the application life cycle, facilitating effective collaboration among development, test and operations. Microsoft empowers testers through its Lab Management, Release Management and Xamarin Test Cloud offerings, extending capabilities to virtualized lab environment management. Xamarin Test Cloud enables application test automation on thousands of real devices in the cloud. Together, the tools embrace change through test impact analysis, rich actionable bug filing, manual testing, exploratory testing, user acceptance testing, automated testing, and load testing. The central test hub facilitates better decision-making through greater visibility and end-to-end traceability.
Mobile Labs: Mobile Labs provides enterprise-grade mobile device clouds that improve efficiency and raise quality for agile-based, cross-platform mobile app and mobile web deployments. The company’s patented device cloud, deviceConnect, is available in both public and on-premise configurations. deviceConnect provides affordable, highly secure access to a large inventory of mobile devices across major mobile platforms to developers, test engineers, and customer support representatives, among others. At the heart of enterprise mobile app deployment, deviceConnect enables automated continuous quality integration, DevOps processes, automated testing, and manual app/web/device testing on managed devices. deviceConnect supports all major integrated app development environments (IDEs), such as Xcode, as well as automated app and web testing on real mobile devices using a wide variety of mobile UI test automation tools. deviceBridge, an extension to deviceConnect, serves as a “virtual USB cable” to checkout and debug cloud-based devices as if they are locally connected.
Orasi: Orasi is a leading provider of software testing services, utilizing test management, test automation, enterprise testing, Continuous Delivery, monitoring, and mobile testing technology. The company is laser-focused on helping customers deliver high-quality applications, no matter the type of application they’re working on and no matter the development methods or delivery processes they’ve adopted. In addition to its end-to-end software testing, Orasi provides professional services around testing, processes and practices, as well as software quality-assurance tools and solutions to support those practices.
Progress: Telerik Test Studio by Progress is a test automation solution that helps teams be more efficient in functional, API, performance and load testing, improving test coverage and reducing the number of bugs that slip into production. The company offers automation solutions for desktop, Web and mobile testing, which includes web, hybrid and native apps running on any device (Android or iOS). Tests can be authored in C# or VB.NET.
QASymphony: QASymphony offers a suite of software-testing tools purpose-built to help agile development teams improve speed, efficiency and collaboration. qTest Manager is a test-case-management solution that provides a better way for companies to centralize and manage test cases. qTest Manager is robust, easy to use, and integrates with popular agile development tools like JIRA. Additionally, QASymphony offers qTest eXplorer for teams doing exploratory testing. qTest eXplorer lets a tester record everything he is doing during the testing session and automatically creates detailed documentation of any software issues. QASymphony has more than 400 customers around the world, including Salesforce, Barclays, Samsung, Office Depot and Dell, and was named a “Cool Vendor in Application Development” by Gartner.
Sauce Labs: Sauce Labs provides the world’s largest cloud-based platform for automated testing of Web and mobile applications. Its award-winning service eliminates the time and expense of maintaining an in-house testing infrastructure, freeing development teams of any size to innovate and release better software, faster. Optimized for use in CI and CD environments, and built with an emphasis on security, reliability and scalability, users can run tests written in any language or framework using Selenium or Appium, both widely adopted open-source standards for automating browser and mobile application functionality. Videos, screenshots and HTML logs help pinpoint issues faster, while Sauce Connect allows users to securely test apps behind their firewall.
SOASTA: SOASTA is the leader in performance analytics. The SOASTA Digital Performance Management Platform enables digital business owners to gain unprecedented and end-to-end performance insights into their real user experiences on mobile and web devices, providing the intelligence needed to continuously measure, optimize and test in production, in real time and at scale.
Synopsys: Through its Software Integrity Platform, Synopsys provides a comprehensive suite of best-in-class software testing solutions for rapidly finding and fixing critical security vulnerabilities, quality defects, and compliance issues throughout the life cycle. Leveraging automation and integrations with popular development tools, Synopsys’ Software Integrity Platform empowers customers to innovate while driving down risk, costs, and time to market. Solutions include static analysis, software composition analysis, protocol fuzz testing, and interactive application security testing for Web apps.
TechExcel: The DevSuite DevOps solution empowers companies to integrate and optimize the relationship between customer support operations (IT service management) and development (application life-cycle management) without sacrificing the autonomy of either organization. Features include agile change management, two-way linking between operations and development, and out-of-the-box integrations for Continuous Integration and delivery. z
