Navigating the endless ALM river

Agile development and DevOps are fueling the evolution of application life-cycle management (ALM) as delivery cycles continue to shrink. While the original promise of end-to-end visibility and traceability is still important, today’s ALM is more about continuous processes. Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) reflect that and the changes that are happening in the industry generally, as do many open-source and commercial tools.

“Agile is about being able to respond to changing conditions, changes in the market, and changes in requirements,” said Tye Davis, agile leader for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). “There are many varieties of agile frameworks out there, but they all have the purpose of providing an integrated approach to ALM by increasing collaboration amongst stakeholders.”

With agile and ALM in general, people want to be able to collaborate with teams, according to Jason Hammon, director of product management at TechExcel. They want to have easy-to-use, streamlined user interfaces that don’t require too much interaction, and they don’t want to be bogged down by process.

“The largest improvements have been in Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, where you can automate a release pipeline to target on-premise, cloud or mobile; continually view build and release health; and apply a fully automated or approval-gated workflow,” said Sam Guckenheimer, partner product manager at Microsoft. (Microsoft now has 300 extensions in its Marketplace that work with both TFS and VSTS.)

(Related: How the Rugged DevOps movement started)

VSTS, the SaaS equivalent of TFS, has become popular among small teams, although dozens of enterprise customers have moved from TFS to VSTS in the last year, including Microsoft and 60,000 of its engineers, Guckenheimer said. VSTS shares the same codebase as TFS, which makes the move from TFS to VSTS easier. Because VSTS is a SaaS product, updates are available in three weeks versus quarterly for TFS, and Microsoft manages all the infrastructure. Security is enforced through Azure Active Directory.

“With the next big release of TFS, [large organizations] may consider upgrading their internal systems infrastructure, and they might think of upgrading to the cloud itself,” said Jay Esguerra, practice manager at consulting firm Technossus. “Why worry about the infrastructure cost and the price tag that may come with the resources that may have to manage it? In the cloud, it’s already there; you’ve just got to subscribe.”

Both TFS and VSTS include tools that make deployment easier. The burning question is, as more software becomes a cloud service, and as more shops embrace mobile-first strategies, why not just develop in the cloud?

“It’s hard to overestimate the impact of cloud and mobile,” said Guckenheimer. “Every enterprise going digital wants to be multi-channel—in other words, [able to] reach customers on any device anywhere. That means you need to work with cloud-first, mobile first. We’ve seen exponential growth in both areas, and the combination of DevOps with cloud and mobile is changing the landscape faster than anything I’ve ever seen in my 30 years in the industry.”

DevOps matures
More organizations are embracing DevOps, but the practice still isn’t considered “mature” since only a minority of companies have mastered it. One symptom of its immaturity is that “DevOps” lacks a common definition, so teams are implementing it differently. In addition, there are differences of opinion about whether DevOps has become part of ALM or whether ALM has been superseded by DevOps. Regardless, ALM, DevOps and agile tend to go hand-in-hand.

“I talk to end users who say they’re doing a DevOps transformation, and what you find is all they’re doing is some automation in the infrastructure. That’s it,” said Diego Lo Giudice, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. “Some others have added separate initiatives to compare it to agile transformation, so the first thing I tell them is you need to get these transformations linked up as one, because you can’t do DevOps without agile, and you can’t do agile without DevOps.”

However, TechExcel’s Hammon disagrees, saying it is unfair to tie the two together. While DevOps definitely adds an important part to agile by connecting IT and operations with development, many organizations have successfully implemented agile without DevOps, he explained. It depends on the organization and the type of development methodology that will make sense for them. “If you are making medical devices where traceability is essential and things have to be allotted and in compliance, a more traditional approach might be better,” he said. “If you are delivering an online game that you may have to update every day, there may be a lot more benefits to agile.”

Regardless of the development approach, Hammon says DevOps is a great idea if the organization has the culture and tools to do it. “It will streamline what you are delivering and the feedback loop back to developers,” he said.

HPE’s Davis says organizations that choose an agile and DevOps approach should treat them as separate disciplines. “DevOps relies on automated deployment and tools to support continuous delivery/deployment. Agile teams have the option to use tools, but can practice agile without,” he said.

One indication of an organization’s DevOps capabilities is the speed at which it can deploy software into production. PayPal has accelerated its releases from one per month to 50 per day as a result of DevOps and other adjustments.

Years ago, the company had a monolithic codebase and organized its software teams differently. As part of a major transformation, PayPal split its teams into smaller teams of eight to 10 people. Simultaneously, it broke its codebase apart to support the orientation of teams. PayPal also invested in cloud capabilities and built a PaaS layer, so developers doing Continuous Integration can choose a test environment and the number of nodes required in production.

“You push one button and all of that gets provisioned pretty much in real time,” said Jigar Desai, vice president of cloud and platforms at PayPal. “What you get in an hour or so is a complete pipeline where your code can go from a build environment to test to production all the way without needing anyone else, in a self-service manner. Because we provided self-service tools to our developers, it’s the developer’s responsibility to make sure that the release of the code is actually good.”

Not all organizations are using ALM to enable their DevOps capabilities, however. For example, Intelligent Software Solutions (ISS) stitched together a DevOps pipeline of tools instead, according to CTO Wes Caldwell.

“It’s more of an agile/DevOps approach to developing, building, compiling, testing and releases,” he said. “[DevOps] has really given us synergy with our IT team to be part of the process versus throwing it over the wall.”

TechExcel’s Hammon sees companies adopting more of a hybrid approach where they keep some elements of waterfall from a stability standpoint, but adopt some elements of agile. For instance, they adopt burnout reports and the concept of a backlog. “It is an evolution of agile where companies want to have more traceability in it, but a little more structure to it,” he said. “Delivering more often and delivering more quickly has become really important. Everyone wants to take a look at agile to see how it can help them meet those demands.”

Challenges remain
Some software teams have yet to adopt agile practices, let alone DevOps practices or even ALM solutions. The shifts require technological and cultural changes, both of which can serve as barriers to adoption.

According to HPE’s Davis, no matter what flavor of agile an organization chooses, it will expose accountability, trust, respect and work ethic. “Given that agile deals directly with speed, poor quality will be quickly exposed if teams have a lack of quality practices,” he said.

In order to prepare an organization’s culture to make the move to agile, TechExcel’s Hammon says they have to be realistic about what can be accomplished, and trust the feedback they get from developers. Agile is about empowering developers to a certain degree, so an organization has to be respectful of the timelines agile provides, and not add things in the middle of a sprint or constantly change things, he explained.

“We’re seeing cutting-edge startups and large companies that have embraced DevOps, and it’s working well,” said Alex Robbio, president and cofounder of software development company Belatrix Software. “Everyone else is trying to catch up [because] it’s a significant change in how to integrate the operations side with the development cycle. Operations people were not strong in their development skills. Developers were not traditionally good at thinking about operations and runtime, so bridging that gap has to make it easy.”

Davis also believes that since agile has a broad definition and many ways to implement it, the sheer amount of choices can be confusing and challenging. “If an organization isn’t able to define how they apply agile, there will be confusion among employees as each individual or team will be looking to apply their own agile methodologies that doesn’t scale to the others,” he said.

Hammon adds that if organizations try to be too agile initially, they will lose the grasp of their timeline and release structure, and feel a loss of control over the overall process.

Microsoft has endeavored to improve the effectiveness of agile and DevOps practices by expanding agile work-management capabilities, improving Git workflows, and making Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery more repeatable.

“DevOps is the union of people, processes and products to enable Continuous Delivery of value to end users,” said Microsoft’s Guckenheimer. “Of course this includes the practices of agile work management, version control, automated testing [and] delivery, and monitoring with telemetry. The big difference is that DevOps optimizes for speed, favors experimentation (or hypothesis-driven development), and uses data to inform next actions. You can fail fast when hypotheses are diminished and double-down when hypotheses are supported.”

Experimentation is something PayPal and other organizations are taking advantage of because they can figure out what works, what doesn’t and why, from a user’s point of view—fast.

“We’ve had situations where we’ve talked about a particular feature for three or four hours,” said Satty Bhens, digital partner at McKinsey & Company. “Today, a developer can code that in half the time, put it out on the web and get an answer of what customers do. Now you can code instead of debating decisions.”

Meanwhile, the amount of tools in the tool chain continues to increase as technologies, processes and practices change. ALM has included requirements, workflow management, test management and test automation for some time, although with the rise of DevOps, additional necessary capabilities include release and deployment automation, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery.

“ALM had six or seven tools, but the Continuous Delivery chain of tools is like 17 different technologies that somehow overlap,” said Forrester’s Lo Giudice. “That doesn’t mean everybody buys 17 tools, but some of them include pieces of the subsequent stacks. There are seven to eight testing tools needed now in addition to what we had in the past. We want to automate more, so we have more unit testing tools, functional test automation tools, performance testing automation tools, and integration testing tools that are also contributing to automation.”

Culture is probably the biggest hurdle, because like agile, DevOps requires a complete shift in the way organizations are structured and the roles they have.

“When we had a bug reported four to five years ago, you would say it would be in the next release, and we had a release every quarter, which was fine,” said Daniel Jebaraj, vice president at component provider Syncfusion. “Now we are endeavoring to fix bugs within 48 hours. You’re participating in this whole cycle of customer feedback to the implementer or team that owns the product and then all the other participants in that ecosystem that are stakeholders, including external vendors, have to participate and provide the support that’s needed.”

Automation is necessary to shrink release times and improve software quality, which tends to be easier to accept when automation is negatively impacting someone’s job.

“When you first talk to people, they’re afraid of all this automation because they want control, and the control they have is around people and organizations,” said McKinsey’s Bhens. “What DevOps means is you letting go of that. Going from paper and e-mails flowing between organizations to clicks of a button [to get] things to go from dev to staging to QA to production is incredibly scary, but eventually you have more data, more reliability, and more confidence. That takes time and a leap of faith.”

The challenge with automation is developers sometimes think they can automate everything, and it is all going to be perfect. The reality is automation requires planning and a higher level of sophistication from testers to implement initially. In addition, it is susceptible to issues that manual testing may not be, so test scripts can’t just be developed at the last minute and be expected to work, according to TechExcel’s Hammon. If teams can find a good mix between manual and automated tests, they won’t be vulnerable to testing issues down the road, he explained.

“You have shorter timelines as you are making deliveries quicker. That puts more pressure on QA and makes it much more difficult to regress the software and really provide adequate coverage. Automation is very important tool to help you reach your goals,” he said.

Microservices and containers matter
Software building blocks continue to shrink while more software, hardware, and business capabilities are reinvented as cloud services. Some software organizations are trying to speed up value to customers by adopting a microservices architecture.

“Microservices architecture is really the foundation of the DevOps premise,” said Haluk Saker, a senior associate in Booz Allen Hamilton’s Strategic Innovation Group. “You can’t deliver all the benefits of DevOps with a monolithic architecture. You need microservices, the most modular architecture available. If you don’t have that, you have difficulties achieving these practices.”

Implementing microservices can be difficult because it’s complex, so software teams need to plan well, design well, and make sure the loose coupling of the module is done well. There is also an issue of ownership. At Booz Allen Hamilton, “autonomous teams” are responsible for building a module and operating it in production. Saker said that’s the only way to achieve the ultimate benefits of DevOps.

Meanwhile, Atlassian has broken down some of its monolithic applications into independent microservices. Now, the company thinks about ALM as a series of microservices that form the end application.

“What Dev and Ops have done is what companies are having to do because products built with atoms are being built with bits,” said Sean Regan, head of growth for Bitbucket and JIRA at Atlassian. “If your product is a service or software, you have to start thinking [like] a DevOps person. You’re not thinking about Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, or Continuous Deployment, but how to make rapid decisions with better collaboration.”

ISS adopted a container-centric approach to agile and DevOps because of the flexibility it provides. Using containers, the company is modularizing its code, independently testing and revising modules as necessary, and ensuring the modules work together in a loosely coupled fashion.

“In DevOps, you’re trying to quickly modify code, get it built, componentized, and deployed within a matter of minutes,” said ISS’ Caldwell. “We’re optimizing how we iterate on new versions of our products, and then we deliver that end product with more features, better testing, etc. to our end customers.”

Aziz Gilani, a partner at venture capitalist firm Mercury Fund, considers containerization the ultimate goal for organizations that want tiny, containerized services that hold everything in one place.

“Bleeding-edge companies will get there before anyone else,” he said. “They’ll use Docker or a free solution that Amazon or Google put out to get people to switch over to their cloud services. That’s fine for small and leading-edge companies, but I think there’s going to be a different emphasis by larger enterprises. Some companies care about release automation. The people who don’t care about it are going to jump into microservices and containerization first.”

A word about security
Ever-faster software delivery cycles can negatively impact security, particularly when smaller pieces of software are being procured from multiple sources. According to TechExcel’s Hammon, security, quality and meeting requirements all get harder if you are trying to deliver faster.

Because of this, traceability becomes much more important in addition to making sure high-level requirements happen at the beginning and end of each agile cycle. “You have to be able to look at what you want to accomplish and then whether or not you did accomplish it. Not only did development accomplish their piece, but did everyone [else],” he said.

Microsoft is now promoting “Rugged DevOps,” a pipeline that allows software teams to move faster without compromising security. It is accomplishing this in part with help from four partners: Checkmarx, Fortify, Veracode and WhiteSource. As of this writing, all four support VSTS. (WhiteSource also offers a solution for TFS.)

“The idea is that you want to secure the pipeline so that you can move fast and not break things,” said Microsoft’s Guckenheimer. “For example, you can reuse open-source software and not be plagued by unknown vulnerabilities. You can [also] have a trusted feed that acts as a single source of truth for the team to consume components.”

One risk of moving to DevOps (or agile for that matter) is repeating security mistakes that were made when traditional software practices were the norm. “SecDevOps [shifts] security to the left of the development cycle, allowing for security best practices such as image scanning, access controls, and other policy-based controls to be integrated at the beginning and throughout the development life cycle,” said Shahar Man, vice president of R&D for Aqua Security (a container security platform provider). In a container context, the security is built in and planned from the start.

Meanwhile, the growing complexity of the software landscape can be challenging from a security point of view. The explosion of libraries, APIs, microservices, mobile endpoints, and web services complicates security practices, and may even make them untenable.

“There are a zillion things to manage and keep track of in the process of moving apps to the cloud and operating them,” said Jeff Williams, CTO and cofounder of application security company Contrast Security. “Who is making sure that everything you thought was being enforced by security is actually protected? The core of the problem is we’ve spent several decades building up the list of things that we need assurance in. Now, when we move to the cloud, that list changes pretty dramatically. So it’s going to take a while for our security people, processes and technology to catch up.”

According to HPE’s Davis, security is similar to the test/QA cycle, but organizations often making the mistake of treating the security cycle different and waiting until the end of the QA cycle to perform security testing. In order to successfully deliver software on a faster cadence while ensuring security, security should be integrated and embedded from the beginning of front-end planning, coding, and testing. This will help catch security issues earlier in a more agile way, he explained.

Machine learning and AI will probably help, and most of the people interviewed for this article anticipate that machine intelligence will transform software development as we know it—well beyond looking for outliers for security or testing purposes. More automation is coming, as are more analytics. People, processes and tools will have to adapt.

Are you successfully implementing agile?
There is no outline on how to implement agile within your organization. Small, medium and large enterprises all incorporate agile in different ways, shapes and forms. There are, however, some telltale signs to figuring out if you are on the right path.

“Successful agile implementation often has many similar characteristics, although maybe not all may be applicable in every organization. Cross-functional teams, empowered team members, shared accountability, leadership and trust all play to a successful agile culture change. Delivering on a regular cadence, high-quality product, early feedback and adaptation from end users are positive signs that your organization are successfully implementing agile,” said HPE’s Davis.

“One of the key benefits of DevOps is that when the development team and the operations (implementation) team are connected, they can both respond to issues more efficiently and effectively. In silo’d environments, the development team may not get immediate feedback regarding the deployments, whether they are at internal or external customers. DevOps is particularly useful for agile teams because they are working in shorter timelines, with much more frequent deliveries, so being well connected is even more important. That being said, teams can benefit from DevOps regardless of what methodology they use.”

Also important: Was the code successfully delivered in the sprint, and are your developers happy? Hammon explains that developers need to feel empowered to ensure they are able to meet the work they are assigned to for each sprint. Also, all teams should be benefiting from agile. “You have to ensure everyone still feels like they can meet their goals and things are getting done in a better way than they were before,” he said.

“DevOps and agile complement one another to deploy working functionality into production faster. DevOps enables realization of the benefits of faster delivery of functionality achieved through agile. The most productive way to understand the relationship of agile and DevOps is not as an intersection, but as a progression of capability. So you’re not necessarily having separate conversations. DevOps and agile are more practices, and CD is a goal that can be achieved by practicing agile/DevOps or either.”

What is the difference between agile and DevOps, and why do they often go hand in hand? According to Hammon, “One of the key benefits of DevOps is that when the development team and the operations (implementation) team are connected, they can both respond to issues more efficiently and effectively. In silo’d environments, the development team may not get immediate feedback regarding the deployments, whether they are at internal or external customers. DevOps is particularly useful for agile teams because they are working in shorter timelines, with much more frequent deliveries, so being well connected is even more important. That being said, teams can benefit from DevOps regardless of what methodology they use.”

HPE’s Davis adds: “DevOps and agile complement one another to deploy working functionality into production faster. DevOps enables realization of the benefits of faster delivery of functionality achieved through agile. The most productive way to understand the relationship of agile and DevOps is not as an intersection, but as a progression of capability. So you’re not necessarily having separate conversations. DevOps and agile are more practices, and CD is a goal that can be achieved by practicing agile/DevOps or either.”

Tools for navigating the ALM river
Atlassian: Teams use Atlassian tools to work and collaborate throughout the software development life cycle: JIRA for tracking issues and planning work; Confluence for collaborating on requirements; HipChat for chat; Bitbucket for collaborating on code; Stash for code collaboration and Git repository management; and Bamboo for Continuous Integration and Delivery.

BlazeMeter: BlazeMeter ensures delivery of high-performance software by enabling DevOps teams to quickly and easily run open-source-based performance tests against any mobile app, website or API at massive scale to validate performance at every stage of software delivery. The rapidly growing 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. Founded in 2011, the company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and Research & Development in Tel Aviv.

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. Its new DevOps Lifecycle Manager helps teams deliver high-quality applications faster and provides the ability to see across tool chains, events and automated actions. 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.

HPE ALM Software: HPE ALM Octane is its flagship modern platform for life-cycle and quality management to deliver innovative applications with quality at scale. HPE ALM Octane is designed specifically to help customers manage and accelerate their software development life cycle, and supports DevOps, agile and traditional waterfall methodologies. The end-user experience of HPE ALM Octane is designed from the ground up to be simple, responsive, and serve the platforms and form factors that practitioners use: browsers, tablets or mobile devices.

IBM: IBM provides an enterprise ALM solution optimized for cloud, on-premises and hybrid delivery. IBM Bluemix Continuous Delivery is an open, extensible cloud-hosted service with scalable DevOps tool chains; configurable delivery pipelines to build, test and deploy with minimal human intervention; a web IDE; and insights to help prevent risky changes from being released. Bridging cloud and on-premises applications and supporting the Scaled Agile Framework, IBM Collaborative Lifecycle Management, integrated with software and API testing solutions and IBM UrbanCode application release automation, helps teams collaborate, manage code, run standups, plan sprints, and track work. IBM also offers IBM Bluemix Garage Method.

Inflectra: SpiraTeam is an integrated ALM suite that provides everything you need to manage your software projects from inception to release and beyond. With more than 5,000 customers in 100 countries using SpiraTeam, it’s the most powerful yet easy-to-use tool on the market. It includes features for managing your requirements, testing and development activities all hosted either in SpiraTeam’s secure cloud environment or available for customers to install on-premise.

JetBrains: JetBrains offers tools for both individual developers and teams. TeamCity provides Continuous Integration and Deployment, while YouTrack provides agile project and bug management, and Upsource facilitates code review and repository browsing. Tools for individual developers include IDEs for the most popular programming languages on the market, as well as .NET tools for boosting one’s productivity, profiling apps and more. Altogether, JetBrains offerings cover most of the needs of software development houses moving toward a fully integrated solution.

Kovair: Kovair Software is focused in the domain of integrated application development and life-cycle management tools. Kovair provides multiple solutions to the software and IT markets such as Kovair ALM Studio for totally integrated ALM implementations; Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform for third-party integrations with 70+ best-of-breed tools; Kovair QuickSync for migrating legacy data between tools when companies change or retire one of them; and the One Click DevOps solution using the Kovair platform with multiple tools integrations and a built-in workflow capability with pipeline management.

Polarion: Polarion ALM is a unifying collaboration and management platform for software and multi-system development projects. Providing end-to-end traceability and transparency from requirements to design to production, Polarion’s flexible architecture and licensing model enables companies to deploy just what they need, where they need it, on-premise or in the cloud.

Micro Focus: For 40 years, Micro Focus has been helping organizations innovate faster by building enterprise-level software and tools that leverage existing IT investments, enterprise applications and emerging technologies to address complex, rapidly evolving business requirements while protecting corporate information at all times. Products such as Caliber, StarTeam, AccuRev and Silk make up a comprehensive ALM suite that provide precision, control and validation across the software development life cycle, and are unique in their ability to integrate with each other—and with existing third-party tools—at an asset level.

Microsoft: Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), Microsoft’s cloud-hosted DevOps service for teams to share code, track work, and ship software for any language and any platform, all in a single package. It’s everything you need to run your agile teams, Kanban boards, sprint planning tools, version control with Git, implementing Continuous Integration/Delivery pipelines with hosted automated builds and deployments with release management, manual and automated testing tools and more. It connects to IDEs such as Eclipse, IntelliJ and Visual Studio, and code editors like Visual Studio Code. It works with other tools across your software life cycle via extensions, so you can create your perfect development environment.

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.

Rommana ALM: Rommana ALM is a fully integrated set of tools and methodologies that provides full traceability among requirements, user stories, scenarios, test cases, issue reports, use cases, timelines, change requests, estimates and resources; one common repository for all project artifacts and documentation; and full collaboration for all team members around the globe 24×7.

Seapine: Seapine Software’s integrated hybrid-agile ALM suite enables product development and IT organizations to ensure the consistent release of high-quality products, while providing traceability, reporting and compliance. Featuring TestTrack for requirements, issue and test management; Surround SCM for configuration management; and QA Wizard Pro for automated functional testing and load testing, Seapine’s tools provide a single source of truth for project development artifacts, statuses and quality to reduce risks inherent in complex product development.

Serena Software: Serena (now part of Micro Focus) provides secure, collaborative and process-based solutions in support of the entire DevOps tool chain. Dimensions RM improves the definition, management and reuse of requirements, increasing visibility and collaboration across stakeholders; Dimensions CM simplifies collaborative parallel development, improving team velocity, agility and assuring release readiness; and Deployment Automation enables deployment pipeline automation, reducing cycle time and supporting rapid delivery. Release Control manages application artifacts through the entire DevOps life cycle. And, in conjunction with Micro Focus, Serena offers rich development IDEs through Enterprise Developer, incomparable source-code analysis and impact analysis in Enterprise Analyzer, and advanced automated testing through the Silk Quality Suite.

Sparx Systems: Sparx Systems’ flagship product, Enterprise Architect, provides full life-cycle modeling for real-time and embedded development, software and systems engineering, and business and IT systems. Based on UML and related specifications, Enterprise Architect is a comprehensive team-based modeling environment that helps organizations analyze, design and construct reliable, well-understood systems.

TechExcel: DevSuite is TechExcel’s complete ALM suite. It automates and streamlines requirements, development and QA processes for faster, more frequent release of high-quality products. Whether agile, traditional or hybrid, DevSuite ensures the most current requirements are built and tested. DevSuite enables full bidirectional requirements traceability from product design through development, testing, bug fixing and release. Businesses can completely customize development environments to increase the speed and efficiency of their teams, including custom workflows and rules, personalized page layouts, tailored workspaces with defined access control, specification reports for instant project status, and more.

Christina Cardoza contributed to this story.