An Enterprise Cloud Development (ECD) Blueprint with TeamForge

An Implementation Checklist

Table of Contents

Overview ....................................................................................................................................... 3

Step 1 – Embrace Cloud ................................................................................................................ 4

Step 2 – Implement Community Architecture .............................................................................. 6

Step 3 – Codify Development Processes ....................................................................................... 7

Step 4 – Orchestrate and Automate DevOps .............................................................................. 10

Step 5 – Leverage the Hybrid Cloud ............................................................................................ 13

Summary ..................................................................................................................................... 16

Overview

As agile software development practices, DevOps processes, and cloud computing continue to take hold within the Information Technology (IT) industry, many organizations are extending the efficiency, flexibility and collaborative benefits of developing and deploying their software directly in their private cloud to include the hybrid integration of external cloud computing resources. These agile, DevOps and hybrid cloud IT practices are quickly taking hold and are not passing trends. The cost reduction, improved time to market, and improved agility benefits of individual teams developing using these three techniques in combination are opening the eyes of the executives.

But even as workgroups realize localized gains, these organizations are realizing that costs and quality issues are actually increasing across the enterprise as the long term effect of this shadow IT takes effect. In combination with the array of product platforms such as mobile, web, server and others, the use of multi-cloud target platforms is causing an increase in incompatible development and deployment processes, decreased enterprise application integration, increased lifecycle support risks, and governance issues. New development approaches, technologies and resiliencies must be re-evaluated for the enterprise

• to understand and implement realistic spans of control to manage hybrid cloud development an d deployment • while still empowering the individual workgroups to work with the “right reusable set” of agile and mixed processes to

meet their project objectives

Led by CollabNet and its business partners and clients, we have developed an approach do to just this – it’s called Enterprise Cloud Development (ECD). ECD is an emerging IT category that represents the ongoing maturity of cloud development practices. It provides organizations a secure and compliant path to manage development and deployment in a hybrid cloud environment, and enables them to embrace the benefits of the cloud at their own pace.

Achieving the large gains of Enterprise Cloud Development has its challenges, and requires a deliberate, well-conceived and well-executed blueprint. The CollabNet ECD Implementation Checklist outlined in this document provides the basis for such a blueprint. The checklist is provided in the form of 5 steps with an approach that delivers incremental value and prepares you for the next step in the process. Implemented correctly, this blueprint has been found by organizations to increase time to market 10–70%, increase developer productivity up to 40%, and reduce IT budgets by up to 20%.

This checklist provides a technical guide on your journey to Enterprise Cloud Development. The steps described in this guide have been distilled from our direct experience working with scores of industry leading enterprises on hundreds of large scale development projects. These steps have proven to be the essential elements of an Enterprise Cloud Strategy and will also apply to any advanced Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) strategy.

Continuous Delivery & Deployment

Dev OPs

Agile, DevOps and Cloud Development are taking hold

The 5 Steps of Enterprise Cloud Development.

Step 1 – Embrace Cloud

The first iteration on a path to Enterprise Cloud Development is to gain control of the valuable software assets that various teams across the enterprise are building and maintaining. This is done by consolidating those fractured and disparate teams and assets by creating a centralized cloud containing common platform services that can be securely accessed across the enterprise. Paramount to this centralized cloud service is the ability to enable individuals and teams to plug in and collaborate around code, other software lifecycle artifacts and people either through a centralized web service or directly within the context of their own favorite point tools:

Centralize access and visibility

Plug-in and collaborate – code, issues, people

Centralize Access for Development & Deployment The cloud promises increased efficiencies and flexibility, when it comes to developing and deploying software, and managing the myriad of assets, variations and supporting activities that the development process entails.

If not managed carefully, however, the cloud can also increase the risk of governance and security violations, increase costs, and result in a fragmented, difficult-to-manage landscape of assets and tools.

When embracing the cloud (whether public or private), safeguard central control over your lifecycle assets, process and tools.

Deploy TeamForge in a public cloud (with CloudForge) or a private cloud, managed by CollabNet, within your or your partner’s data center. Or deploy a stand-alone instance, on Linux, Windows or VMware.

Securely Manage Your Code Make capturing, protecting and managing your IP assets a top priority. Where is your code right now? Is it secure and is it consistently and automatically backed up? Can it be securely accessed by those employees that need it anytime, anywhere, and with any device? Ensure that all of your geographically distributed code repositories, whether they be Subversion, Git or other systems such as CVS, Perforce or ClearCase, can be centrally managed and securely accessed. Code must be easily accessible, yet secure, and governed by back-up and availability policies. If WLAN network performance is an issue, consider features like Subversion Replication for maximum performance and availability.

Centrally manage, govern and federate and search all your SCM servers and repositories in the enterprise. Ensure fast code access and high availability over WAN networks using Subversion replication.

Manage All Software Assets In addition to ‘formal’ development artifacts (like code, issues and builds) pay attention to the management of your ‘informal’ assets as well, such as architectural blueprints, discussions and the people associated with them. Every asset should be versioned, indexed and associated with its relevant items to establish traceability. That way, when team members search for specific software assets, they can easily find the things associated with them – including requests, activities and individuals. Managing your development assets and establishing traceability helps align your business and development more closely- a core underpinning of Agile development.

Search and discover artifacts, code, discussion and documents, within and across projects. All while ensuring role-based access control for privacy and security.

Leverage Your Point and Legacy Tools An ALM platform must incorporate a wide variety of rigorous and constantly changing requirements. Ensure that your platform allows you to embed and synchronize your favorite point tools, whether they are proprietary or open-source. You should also be able to snap-in tools installed on a separate server or hosted in a private or public cloud. With this flexibility, your platform must still be able to ensure at all times, that you maintain central orchestration and traceability across your application delivery processes.

With CollabNet Connect, agility and governance is no longer an either/or proposition. Choose from best-in-class CollabNet tools, or integrate with your tools of choice, open- or closed source.

Enforce Access Control, Enterprise-Wide Govern access by your internal and external teams across all projects by setting role types. Role-based access control (RBAC) greatly simplifies the on- and off-boarding of project members and contractors, and automates the process of managing entire groups of projects and developers. This eliminates manual errors, enforces access compliance and increases developer productivity.

Manage role-based access control (RBAC) at scale, with a menu driven administration console, groupings and automated role inheritance. Authenticate automatically with LDAP systems, Active Directory (AD), PKI and CAC.

Step 2 – Implement Community Architecture

Centralizing and consolidating IT software assets allows the enterprise to take the next step toward enterprise cloud development – the implementation of a robust coding community architecture that promotes collaboration and sharing across enterprise teams. A correctly implemented community architecture will greatly foster organizational alignment, collaboration, and reuse by organizing your business and product strategy, technology lines, and enterprise architecture into collaborative and hierarchical categories, groups, and projects – with access governed by a rich set of roles and permissions. A standardized community architecture that maps to your business and your organization will greatly simplify the navigation, discovery and collaboration of your organizational IT assets by your user community:

Map business / enterprise architecture (project hierarchies, workspaces, artifacts, roles)

Be social

Organize Your Software Projects

Foster organizational alignment, collaboration, and reuse by organizing your business, technology and enterprise architecture into collaborative and hierarchical categories, groups, and projects. Then standardize community structures across your organization, thereby simplifying the navigation and management of large, complex user communities.

Map your business, technology and enterprise architecture into collaborative and hierarchical categories, groups, and projects.

Fast-track Project Launches

Fast-track and simplify the initiation of new projects by using standardized templates. These templates will help to codify your corporate development processes - such as Scrum or Kanban, ease the on-boarding of project members with automatic role inheritance. Use of templates also accelerates the learning curve for new project members, by synthesizing large amounts of project data into instantly recognizable standard formats.

TeamForge lets you fast-track project and product launches. New projects are instantiated within seconds, with template-driven collaborative development workspaces.

Securely On- and Off-Board Project Members

Manage security at scale.

Ensure that you can efficiently and securely manage all your users and projects.

Whether there be several, hundreds or thousands of users, you must be able to on- and off-board them quickly and securely.

Manage and assign users individually, or automate management of entire groups and communities of users.

Gain Transparency and Traceability

Any asset and artifact should be easily and quickly accessible.

Search engines must deliver requested results in seconds, while adhering to corporate security and permissions policies.

Make certain that these search results include the context of the artifacts and users associated with it, so you can trace back at any point in the application development and deployment lifecycle to all related items including items such as wiki entries or code commits.

Let users easily perform keyword searches across particular workspaces or the entire site to find work items that can be leveraged to speed up productivity, then drill down to any level of detail, like code.

Step 3 – Codify Development Processes

Development processes vary widely within an organization due to the different requirements for developing towards an increasing diverse set of mobile, web, server and other platforms. As a result, enterprises often find themselves in a position where development processes and practices vary widely across the enterprise. Left to their own devices, individual teams will make tactical implementation decisions that optimize around the needs of that specific project. A combination of 1) easy-to-acquire and isolated open source and agile point tools, 2) disconnected and incompatible groupware tools, 3) expensive and limited legacy systems, and 4) source code contributions from internal, external and open source communities, has led to:

Divergent, brittle and expensive-to-maintain development tools and processes

Lack of effective collaboration and leverage across teams

Limited visibility and implementation of common processes

Limited control of Intellectual Property (IP)

With the first two steps in the ECD framework done, enterprises must now work to codify the reusable “right set” of development and continuous integration processes across their organizations. This set of processes must allow the individual workgroups to work with their preferred agile and mixed processes to meet their project and platform objectives, while at the same time be constrained enough to improve the overall IP sharing objectives, visibility and governance, and reporting requirements of the enterprise. In other words they must help organizations to:

Support agile and mixed processes

Codify data definitions, tool integrations, and workflows Gain end-to-end visibility and traceability

Conduct Iterative Planning

Industry development methodologies evolve and change over time. Quite likely you are using a variety of methodologies in-house today.

Drive toward standardization, without impeding flexibility, through the ability to codify any methodology, including Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, or anything in-between.

Utilize hierarchical folders, releases, and flexible nomenclature to codify any planning methodology, including Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, or anything in-between.

Manage Task Allocations and Estimations

Task boards are a powerful and visual tool, for helping teams manage and organize their work.

They allow teams to assign tasks to individual team members and track status at a glance.

Ensure that your platform supports graphical task boards that are seamlessly integrated into the artifacts repository.

Leverage task boards to support allocations and prioritization of tasks.

Ensure Access from Your Desktops or Mobile Devices

Ensure that IDEs, such as Eclipse and Visual Studio for instance, integrate seamlessly into your development landscape.

Your developers should be able to access and update code and artifacts, efficiently and in real-time.

With the increasing use of mobile devices, it is becoming more critical that artifacts and key metrics can be accessed from these types of devices.

Access all software lifecycle assets and tools from within Eclipse or Visual Studio.

Collaborate and Re-Use Project Assets

To drive asset reuse, ensure that developers can discover and share information easily.

Searches must include associated lifecycle assets including code, builds and file releases, artifacts, documents and discussions.

Also, search results should let you trace back to the originating requests, such as requirements and projects.

Search and discover lifecycle assets across projects and systems.

Commit, Build and Test Frequently Ensure that developers get clear visibility into requested code changes, directly from within their IDE’s (such as Eclipse).

They should understand the history of a work item, including all code changes, builds and tests.

When applying code fixes, developers should be able to commit directly to the code repository while following standardized processes, for example - standard procedures for capturing and updating artifact ID’s.

Review change requests, update code and commit changes from within your IDE.

Ensure Traceability

Traceability and associated governance rules should be automated whenever possible.

For example, upon code commit, the provisioning of an artifact ID should not only be mandatory, but should also be provisioned automatically by the system.

Artifact ID’s are associated automatically. That ensures traceability and enables code re-use.

Automate Workflows and Notifications

If a build fails, it’s critical for the developer to be informed right away.

They should receive automated notifications via email or alerts directly within their IDE.

In the event of build failure, the system should assist in the root cause analysis, for example by pinpointing log files and responsible servers.

By integrating deeply with build tools such as Jenkins, TeamForge greatly simplifies the investigation of build issues, by pinpointing log files and responsible servers.

Manage File Releases Once all unit tests succeed, the deployment-ready binary files should be made available in a central file release management system, supporting versioning and common access security standards.

The TeamForge file release management system hosts versioned files, protected by role based access control.

Step 4 – Orchestrate and Automate DevOps

The goals of development teams and IT operations are often at odds. Development is primarily concerned with building and deploying new features and applications as rapidly as possible. Their objective is change. IT operations is concerned with stability. Change injects risk and often introduces instability. Agile techniques have exacerbated this disconnect by increasing the frequency and automation of iterations as well as the variety of application delivery methods. This has led to:

Poor visibility and collaboration across development and deployment processes

Manual and error prone hand-offs among internal teams and across partners

Lack of business agility with disconnected business owners, development teams, and users

DevOps seeks to address this issue. DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods and practices for automation, collaboration and integration between development teams and IT operations. In effect, it bridges the gap between Development and IT Operations, and allows organizations to:

Automate Continuous Delivery and DevOps

Collaborate enterprise wide

Govern Test and Release Procedures

Managing release processes corporate-wide drives standardization and transparency and increases software quality.

Release processes should be centrally defined from requirement gathering to code, build, test and deployment.

Process changes then should be collaboratively defined and reviewed by stakeholders across IT Ops and development.

At that time, you also may want to define target deployment clouds for build, test and production.

Define, review and implement release processes centrally for the enterprise.

Automate Builds through Integration Tests

Unit tests and builds should be run automatically, using your favorite build tool, such as Jenkins.

Once builds and unit tests complete, you may want to trigger additional tests like functional tests, integration or performance tests.

TeamForge centrally manages and governs your delivery processes.

Automate File Release Management

There should always be a single, trusted source of files for hand-off to IT operations or development.

A file release management system should keep track of all release versions, and let you tie back each file release to the underlying code and requirements, and the people who were involved with the changes.

TeamForge lets you automate file release management, and enables full traceability from file releases back to code and artifacts.

Drive IT Standardization

IT operations commonly want to improve service availability and reduce costs by driving standardization and reducing one-off support for systems and configurations.

There should be a common virtual workspace for IT operations and development teams to jointly discuss and agree upon corporate standards.

For example, project wikis that contain common definitions and standard procedures, an inventory of approved server images, and recommended server configurations and tuning parameters.

The project wiki contains common definitions and standard procedures, an inventory of approved server images, and recommended server configurations and tuning parameters. Updates are communicated automatically to stakeholders.

Deploy Production Copy Environments

By automating testing in production simulated environments, you help enforce production-ready software quality.

Developers should be able to select profiles from an IT operations approved library, and provision test servers accordingly.

The Lab Management system lets you instantly provision production-like test servers, based on IT operations approved profile templates.

Deploy Run Cloud

Once the file releases are ready for production deployment, workflows or IT staff should be able to load the software directly on run servers, whether they are located on-premise or in the cloud.

Alternatively, you may also opt to tie in third party release management tools into your ALM infrastructure.

TeamForge with Lab Management lets you deploy file releases into production run clouds, based on builds stored in the project build library.

Let IT Ops Roll Back Releases

If issues are discovered in production, there needs to be processes in place to quickly and efficiently roll back to earlier file releases. IT operations should be able to select an earlier build release, and deploy via a new instance of the run cloud.

IT Ops can select earlier, stable builds from the project build library of Lab Management for deployment into the run cloud.

Ensure Run-Time Collaboration & Feedback

IT operations and development often need to collaborate quickly, for instance for ‘hot defect, enhancement or standardization requests.

In case of critical security vulnerability, IT operations may decide to file a new incident directly, for development to take action.

Artifacts can be filed and reviewed by IT operations, from their preferred environment such as Microsoft Outlook.

Step 5 – Leverage the Hybrid Cloud

The array and flexibility of public IaaS and PaaS offerings are enabling organizations to integrate the right cloud based on the cost objectives and compute power required to meet the stakeholder needs of each stage of the application development lifecycle process, as well as to meet the needs of the diverse technology and platform target objectives of their projects. But cost and quality issues are actually increasing across the enterprise as the long term effect of this public cloud shadow IT takes effect, even as workgroups realize localized gains. The use of multi public cloud target platforms is also causing an increase in incompatible hybrid processes, decreased enterprise application integration and governance risk issues across the organization.

The final step in the ECD process is to integrate new development approaches, technologies and resiliencies into the enterprise to provide an improved enterprise-wide span of control to manage hybrid cloud development and deployment. This step must safely and securely:

Extend DevOps to the hybrid cloud

Integrate / Govern 3rd party services

Secure Cloud Storage

With multiple distributed sites and code servers, maintaining a local backup and disaster recovery strategy can be costly and error-prone.

Cloud storage in combination with techniques such as thin provisioning can drive significant efficiencies while improving data security.

As part of an enterprise cloud strategy, consider cloud backup for critical assets such as code repositories.

Subversion Edge lets you backup code to the cloud, securely and efficiently.

Prepare the Cloud Strategy The first step when preparing your cloud strategy is to define an inventory of physical servers, and public and private clouds.

Profiles should be provisioned based on approved templates and configurations, as provided by IT operations.

The goals is for developers, build and test managers and IT staff alike, to be able to instantly and cost-effectively provision new cloud servers, based on approved templates.

Lab Management lets you define an inventory of physical servers, and public and private clouds.

Run in the Cloud

To accelerate build and test cycles and reduce cost, increasingly companies are choosing to provision servers elastically, within the development workflow.

Ensure that your ALM platform lets you easily plug in your preferred tools, such as Jenkins, and lets you execute build and test activities in the clouds you choose.

Ensure that your ALM platform you easily plug in your preferred tool, such as Jenkins, and have it execute build and test activities in the clouds you chose.

Manage and Broker Clouds

As you dynamically tap into clouds for build, test and release, ensure that cloud access can be managed and monitored within the context of projects and teams.

To do this, you’ll need to understand cloud access from both a technical (metrics such as host resources or storage consumption) and business perspective (metrics such as usage and cost).

This will help to reduce IT risk, establish an economical model for better decisions, and implement scenarios for cross-charging.

With Lab Management, you gain deep visibility into server metrics, such as host resources or storage consumption.

Analyze & Optimize Cloud Consumption While the cloud can help driving significant efficiencies and capital savings, it’s critical to also understand its impact on operational budgets.

Especially as you extend your corporate-wide use of multiple public and private clouds, ensure that you can monitor, compare, and report & analyze the cost impact (and savings) or cloud utilization.

Lab Management provides deep visibility into business metrics, such as usage and cost.

© 2012 CollabNet, Inc., All rights reserved. CollabNet is a in the US and other countries. All other trademarks, brand names, or product names belong to their respective holders.

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About CollabNet CollabNet is a leading provider of Enterprise Cloud Development and Agile ALM products and services for software-driven organizations. With more than 10,000 global customers, the company provides a suite of platforms and services to address three major trends disrupting the software industry: Agile, DevOps and hybrid cloud development. Its CloudForge™ development-Platform-as-a-Service (dPaaS) enables cloud development through a flexible platform that is team friendly, enterprise ready and integrated to support leading third party tools. The CollabNet TeamForge® ALM, ScrumWorks® Pro project management and SubversionEdge source code management platforms can be deployed separately or together, in the cloud or on-premise. CollabNet complements its technical offerings with industry leading consulting and training services for Agile and cloud development transformations. Many CollabNet customers improve productivity by as much as 70 percent, while reducing costs by 80 percent. For more information, please visit (www.collab.net).

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Summary

As discussed in this document, the gains of Enterprise Cloud Development require a deliberate, well-conceived and well-executed blueprint. The CollabNet ECD Implementation Checklist outlined in this document provides the basis for such a blueprint. The steps described in this guide have been distilled from CollabNet’s experience over the last decade working with scores of industry leading enterprises on hundreds of large scale development projects across a wide range of industry segments. These steps have proven to be the essential elements of an Enterprise Cloud Strategy and are flexible enough to meet the needs of the diverse Application Lifecycle Management development processes, favorite point tools, and application frameworks and cloud targets required by the broad needs of the enterprise.

At the same time the CollabNet blueprint is flexible, easy to onboard, and scales from individual workgroups to the a worldwide collaborating organization. It provides organizations with a secure and compliant path to manage development and deployment in a hybrid cloud environment, and enables them to embrace the benefits of the cloud at their own pace. Implemented correctly, this blueprint has been documented by organizations to increase time to market 10–70%, increase developer productivity up to 40%, and reduce IT budgets by up to 20%.

About the Authors

Lothar Schubert leads product marketing for CollabNet's core products, including TeamForge and Subversion Edge. Lothar has 15+ years experience designing, building and marketing enterprise products. Prior to joining CollabNet, Lothar held senior positions at Precise and SAP, where he was driving product marketing for SAP's development and integration platform, SAP NetWeaver. Lothar holds masters degrees in business (MBA, UCLA) and Physics / Computer Sciences.

Bill Portelli is CEO and cofounder of CollabNet. His background includes 30 years of experience in engineering, business, and overall executive management. Since starting CollabNet, Bill and his team have led the Company to the industry leadership position in providing enterprise solutions for collaborative and distributed agile software development in the cloud, including the building of the first front end platform for the industry shift to hybrid cloud development and deployment. Involved with open source and on-demand provisioning since the late '90s, Bill conceived of and led CollabNet's efforts to extend the best practices of open source software development and SaaS provisioning models into a codified set of agile tools, software development processes, and community best practices to enable industry-changing cost and productivity gains for commercial organizations around the globe. In recognition of his accomplishments as a leader in global software development, Bill was honored at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with the Technology Pioneer Award in 2010.

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