SPEAKERS FOR THIS SESSION: Lance Knight, President & COO, ConnectALL, Andrew Fuqua, SVP of Products, ConnectALL, David Rubinstein, Editor-in-chief, SD Times
As we get closer to the beginning of the new year, we feel obliged to give you all a “state of value stream management” report. The value stream management space has been heating up faster than it is being defined. Amid the confusion, there has been a noticeable shift in what we believe to be the wrong direction. In pursuit of this hotness, over 20 small, mid-sized, and large companies now claim to provide VSM solutions, but are all of them helping with digital transformation goals, DevOps initiatives, or Agile transformation? Or have they simply jumped on the bandwagon and pitched their previously unrelated tool as the key to “doing” value stream management?
From analysts to influencers, VSM has been either misconstrued, ill defined or completely misunderstood. The real value of VSM is in realizing the “human” aspect of practicing lean principles. Most companies have partial offerings — some have integration capabilities, some have metrics capabilities, and some say AI and ML is the future. But, are companies like yours really benefiting from using VSM platforms like the way they claim?
The bitter truth is that most companies (including some big names) are only focused on one small part of the value stream — yet, they are lauded as leaders in the space — absolving them of having a half-baked offering. This incorrect perspective is hurting businesses that are unable to implement VSM as it is truly meant to be.
Join Lance Knight, President & COO of ConnectALL during this session as he attempts to cut through the noise and address the misconception that the “consortium of value stream management influencers” have created. It is critical that we do this because we actually seriously care about helping companies and employees be more efficient, less stressful, and ultimately bring predictability to their software delivery.
SPEAKERS FOR THIS SESSION: Lance Knight, President & COO @ ConnectALL; Sharath Bhaskara, VP of Technical Services @ ConnectALL; Dave Rubinstein, Editor-in-Chief of SD Times.
With DevOps pipelines having a myriad of tools and DevOps teams not having an integrated tool architecture, the need for observability and lean practices like value stream management is imperative. DevOps leaders need to map out the data from their pipelines for metrics in analytics that drive critical business decisions.
Observability in DevOps is the software tools and methodologies that help Dev and Ops teams to log, collect, correlate, and analyze massive amounts of performance data from a distributed application and glean real-time insights. And value stream management provides the ammunition to boost the impact of observability. In this short webinar, we will look at how value stream management uses observability to optimize and manage flow by creating access to insights for continuous improvement.
Irrespective of your company’s current financial position and performance, they need to sharpen their competitive edge by applying lean principles like value stream management to cost reduction — that is, the elimination of non-value-added activities or waste in the value stream processes.
By tackling wastes from an end-to-end business process, your company can improve the value of their products and services. They can:
Join Lance Knight, president and COO, ConnectALL and David Rubenstein, editor-in-chief, SD Times, in a 10-minute discussion, as they throw light on how VSM can be used for cost savings, higher efficiency, and avoid treating waste elimination as another one-off “tool” or quick fix.
SPEAKERS FOR THIS SESSION: ConnectALL’s Lance Knight, COO & President; Norman Miglietta, SVP Marketing; Dave Rubinstein, Editor-in-Chief of SD Times.
In the last one decade, there has been a 10-20% increase in the number of regulations in the U.S. alone across a range of industries. Organizations in industries such as medical/health, pharmaceutical, security, finance, automotive, aerospace, and defense are facing unique challenges pertaining to compliance and risk management, high volumes of data, and navigation of rapidly shifting requirements.
To tackle these, they have to maintain strict control over the development process, from testing to maintenance and release. Test management becomes an important function and the teams need visibility to make sure compliance requirements are met.
And this is where the value stream automation product of a value stream management platform comes into play. It enables software test management and QA teams to connect all the tools in the software development and delivery pipelines. It enables:
Want to quickly find out in this 5-10 minute microwebinar how all this is possible? Watch the video!
We as an industry cannot afford to ignore the dangers of siloed software delivery. The cost of a siloed workforce is staggering, resulting in project delays, declining software quality, and a disconnect from the original project intent. And with the widespread shift to remote work, these silos have become more entrenched than ever.
How can we begin to address the problem?
Join ConnectALL’s Lance Knight (President and COO) and Norman Miglietta (SVP of Marketing) as they sit down with David Rubinstein in the latest SD Times Microwebinar to discuss how automation with value stream management enables organizations to unify disparate teams in every stage of development.
They will discuss why automation is key for any organization struggling with siloed software delivery processes, and what benefits teams can expect from connecting their tools and closely managing the flow of work through the value stream.
Organizations not closely familiar with value stream management often may ask: “How does it fit with these other agile approaches we’ve been adopting?” “Why do I need VSM if I’m already implementing Agile?”
The answer: VSM, agile, or for that matter DevOps are not mutually exclusive. Principles of agile are baked into VSM, and VSM in many ways represents an extension of the short cycle/fast feedback approach championed in DevOps. Many organizations struggle to apply agile across silos, and others may struggle to determine ways to align agile workflows towards outcome-focused company goals. VSM does both — It enables agile at scale and at speed while focusing on the priorities that matter most. So, by adopting VSM, you are continuing along your agile digital transformation but with a broader look at all existing activities organization-wide, not just those directly involved with digital product creation/curation.
In this month’s microwebinar, we are joining you exclusively from the venue of Agile 2022 in Nashville, TN! David Rubinstein, SD Times editor-in-chief, Lance Knight, ConnectALL’s President & COO, and Andrew Fuqua, SVP of Product will discuss some of the key highlights they’ve seen from the conference and how those Agile concepts relate back to value stream management. Their insight will address how VSM supercharges agile and channels your software delivery towards a greater purpose.
When you zoom in on a value stream, you’ll discover what goes into creating a specific valuable element of a software. By streamlining or optimizing a value stream, you can develop recurring principles that can be used repeatedly for value creation. And this is where automating your value stream comes in. In this session, we will show you how automating your value stream improves the performance of your value stream. Automation would involve introducing feedback loops for the smallest action taken. You can bring in consistency by following certain principles repeatedly, making some activities predictable. You can execute many of these tasks at scale and converge the results into something digestible for the next step.
In this microwebinar, we will delve into different perspectives on locating bottlenecks, how they might be useful (or not), and the reason that only using your average cycle time to identify your bottlenecks is not enough to get the job done.
THIS IS NOW AVAILABLE ON DEMAND. In the last session, we highlighted the difference between value stream management and a value stream, and how you need to start seeing your value stream. In this session, we tell you how to start seeing your value stream and make meaningful connections. You need to understand what tools you use at every step, the people involved and the processes. Seeing your value stream helps you cut waste, make processes more efficient, align cross-functional teams and business goals, plan for future growth and do the right things.
Related Resource: What if there was a value stream mapping tool that focuses specifically on the tools & processes relevant to software development and delivery? Say hello to the Value Stream Designer – a complimentary tool that makes mapping value streams easy, interesting and fun. Download it today!
THIS IS NOW AVAILABLE ON DEMAND. Watch as we kick off our first five-minute ‘microwebinar’ series, with value stream management provider ConnectALL. SD Times editor-in-chief and VSMcon chairman David Rubinstein hosts ConnectALL president and COO Lance Knight as we answer the question, “What’s the difference between value stream management and a value stream?” and then take a few LIVE questions from listeners.
Related Resource: If you want to learn more about value streams and value stream management, check out this library of instructional videos!
Now, I got no fight with any man who does what he’s told, but when he don’t, the machine breaks down. And when the machine breaks down, we break down. And I ain’t gonna allow that in any of you. Not one. — Sgt Barnes, Platoon (1986)
In our world of software delivery, machine breakdowns include tools and systems not integrating and interoperating, people not communicating, and the resultant defects that occur in the application under test. And the reality is that we do face communication breakdowns that impact the productivity and quality of everything we create. We assume that only C-level executives worry about software quality or feel the pressure of time-to-market and time-to-value. And that’s not true!
Testing or quality assurance in software delivery is not easy for any enterprise. These teams need traceability and visibility into requirements as they are being created. The automated real-time flow of information across the software delivery value stream enables cross-functional understanding between teams that plan, build, and run the software.
Improving QA functionality by optimizing the flow in value streams will ensure that communication never stops flowing. Embracing tool integration will lead to dramatic improvements in an organization’s quality assurance and test management function. Integrating your best-of-breed test management tools with other tools will provide the QA team visibility into requirements, which results in higher quality test coverage.
In this webinar, we will look at six ways tool integration improves test management processes and QA, including:
Register today and find out what the rest are!
At ConnectALL, we have discussed ad nauseum what value stream management isn’t.
We’ve told you that it is NOT a tool, NOT a feature, and NOT a map. It isn’t a person, it isn’t a platform, and it isn’t a set of metrics. Agile? DevOps? Also not value stream management.
But what is less clear in our industry is a concrete definition of what value stream management actually is.
It’s time to draw our line in the sand. We push aside the squishiness that often accompanies this topic and plant our flag on what we believe is THE definitive answer to the question: What is value stream management?
Watch this webinar at your convenience as David Rubinstein leads this pivotal conversation with ConnectALL executives Lance Knight, and Andrew Fuqua. They cover the critical components of value stream management, and what you need to know about VSM in order to cut through all the noise.
Whether you’ve been working successfully on your continuous integration (CI) infrastructure for some time or are just starting to build it out, you have realized the power of CI and are enabling your teams to be successful by implementing, administering, and sharing this powerful tool with the masses.
Fast forward to 3:00 AM on a Sunday morning… your phone is ringing…and your CI solution is down. Now what?!
The number one reason this type of scenario happens is due to monolithic controllers. This whitepaper is designed to help you understand and identify red flags to prevent you from creating these monolithic controllers.
Among what you’ll learn:
Download this whitepaper so you don’t get caught on the long, scary “monolithic” road!
Security is inherently more expensive if organizations find vulnerabilities after deployment, rather than incorporated into the lifecycle via security assurance (SA). If security isn’t incorporated early and often, major consequences could happen, such as:
This whitepaper will show you how and where to seamlessly integrate security throughout the entire development lifecycle, without having to slow app development teams down.
How do you scale your testing to realize the full value of DevOps? In this session, Ethan Chung, Solutions Architect Manager at Keysight Technologies, will show how to expand testing coverage across complex applications with intelligent automation.
Watch now to learn the basics of automation right through to building sophisticated test cases that integrate with any DevOps pipeline.
Every software development team wants fast and stable releases but testing often slows everything down. Discover how intelligent test automation integrated with your CI/CD pipeline can accelerate every software delivery cycle.
In this brief, you will learn:
Keysight’s Eggplant intelligent test automation can interact with various layers of the testing environment. And by testing real user scenarios, Keysight’s Eggplant can validate data integrity across the entire application workflow.
In this brief demonstration, Kieran Leicester, Technical Consult at Keysight Technologies, will use Eggplant to look up a colleague, schedule a meet up convenient to them at a 4-star coffee shop, and warn his colleague of the impending weather.
Watch now to discover how test automation can validate every layer of the application stack, including databases, APIs, and the UI over a cup of joe.
AVAILABLE NOW
Hackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and calculated in the ways in which they deliver attacks upstream in the software supply chain. There are growing numbers of organized attackers whose sole focus is exploiting vulnerabilities in open source ecosystems, frequently by making their malware appear legitimate. What’s new is the intensity, volume, frequency, and severity of malicious attacks. The popularity of open source makes repositories the ideal watering hole attacks — poison the well and all who drink from it are impacted. Once malicious code gets into machines and build environments, it can end up in internal corporate networks and in the final product.
We must become ever more vigilant in our coding practices as we represent a clear red target with exponential cascading impacts. We need to be prepared for multiple permutations in the types of malicious targeting, whether on us as developers specifically, or upstream or downstream of us. Top that off with needing to still be aware of legacy software supply chain “exploits,” like Log4j where attackers prey on publicly disclosed open source vulnerabilities left unpatched in the wild. Your teams need to understand the changing landscape and help put developer-first security tools in place across an organization.
In the past, the CI/CD pipelines were simply a place to integrate code. Developers would write their code in GitHub, pass it through the pipeline, and then deploy it. However, with the emergence of shift left security and newer automation practices, the pipeline has become a much more critical piece of the software delivery lifecycle.
“The delivery of the software through the pipeline also has to be secure and compliant,” said Tim Johnson, Product Manager at DevOps solutions company CloudBees. “As well as what it is doing beyond just the simple CI aspect of it. So now you get into things like security and testing automation, software composition analysis, static analysis, dynamic analysis, and all other things that need to be done to get that software through.”
In this solutions guide, you will learn specifics about:
Download it today!
Defining a plan to improve developer security maturity is no easy task when you still have compliance requirements and release deadlines to meet. But it is a worthy one that will pay dividends in improved productivity and reduced risk.
In this guide, we explore the lessons learned from three real-life Secure Code Warrior customers so you can start to assemble a secure code training blueprint for your organization.
Discover:
