DevOps: BPMLinks Approach

White Paper

Introduction

Businesses are under tremendous pressure to create new value for their customers with an increasing proportion of business innovation delivered through software, yet they are �nding that traditional approaches to software development and delivery are not su�cient. Manual processes are error prone, break down, create waste, and delay response to business need. Technology by itself does not o�er competitive advantage; however, delivery of technology-based innovation can be a competitive di�erentiator and, when sustained over time, a core competency.

Sustained Innovation means continuously developing new ideas into innovative software, which in turn continuously improves the value delivered to users. We believe one signi�cant means for achieving this sustained innovation is DevOps.

BPMLinks believes one signi�cant means for achieving this sustained innovation is DevOps-a contraction of “development and operations,” the two teams that form the core of an organization’s technology department. In its conventional sense, DevOps refers to a closer collaboration of these two teams, and the integration of associated processes and tooling.

But from BPMLinks viewpoint, DevOps is the blending of tasks performed by a company's application development and systems operations teams. DevOps promotes better communication between development and operations as more elements of operations become programmable. In its most narrow interpretation, DevOps describes the part of an organization’s information technology (IT) team that creates and maintains infrastructure. The term may also be used to describe a team of software engineers who strategically look at the entire software delivery chain, overseeing shared services and championing the use of new development tools and best practices.

By adopting EnCIME Solution Accelerator, organizations can unlock new business opportunities to address their development and delivery needs.

Challenges and Existing Problems

The concerns we hear from our customers are “How do

we release on-time?”, “How can we have a stable software

release?” or “How can we address the problems before

end users get impacted?” Our solution to our customer is

adopting BPMLinks DevOps solution. The majority of IT

professionals or customers are not aware of DevOps or

just have a partial understanding of the big picture.

At BPMLinks, we see DevOps as a business driven software

delivery approach, an approach that takes a new or

enhanced business idea from design to development to

testing and all the way to production, providing business

value to customers in an e�cient manner.

Here are some of the existing problems in IT industry.

• Building and maintaining servers which is time consuming and unproductive

• No environment management - Differences in development and production environments

• Slow deployments – Costly error prone manual process and e�orts

• No shared ownership - Lack of feedback and proper metric leads

Collaborative Development

Our Solution

Software development is an intense collaborative

process where success depends on the ability to

create, share and integrate information at a very

rapid pace. With globalization comes a growing

need to foster highly productive software

development teams that can operate successfully

in this global market. Distance creates an

additional challenge to development processes,

as fewer opportunities exist for rich interaction

and direct communication occurs less frequently.

Virtual team collaboration is the collaboration of

teams that are not located in the same physical

location. These teams could be either on-site,

near-shore, o�shore or a combination of the

three types. Whether dealing with teams

collaborating in the same location or virtual

teams across multiple locations, collaboration is

key to a successful DevOps transformation.

BPMLinks Approach

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration is a technique that

continually merges source code updates from all

developers on a team into a shared mainline. This

continual merging prevents a developer's local copy

of a software project from drifting too far a�eld as

new code is added by others, avoiding catastrophic

merge con�icts. In practice, CI involves a centralized

server that continually pulls in all new source code

changes as developers commit them and builds the

software application from scratch, notifying the

team of any failures in the process. If a failure is seen,

the development team is expected to refocus and

�x the build before making any additional code

changes. While this may seem disruptive, in practice

it focuses the development team on a singular

stability metric: a working automated build

of the software.

Continuous Testing

During the continuous testing phase where nightly and

weekend regression runs are automated for trunk and

release branches it is testing that does the job of �nding

problems before the software release. During the

development process the verdicts trends from testing

are a primary measurement of progress. During the

release deployment phase more testing veri�es the

release packages are ready for release. What DevOps

really does is bring testing into the mainstream of

development processes, and avoids the problems

created by having “big-bang” testing left to the end

of the cycle, such as release delays, and quality issues.

Adopting EnCIME Solution Accelerator

By adopting EnCIME Solution Accelerator, organizations

can unlock new business opportunities to address their

development and delivery needs that includes:

• Configurable application deployment settings (product, version, environments, schedules)

• Creates deployment ZIP file with required rules and associated data

• Performs pre-deployment validation, validating rules status etc.

• Creates deployment files which include zip files, con�guration �les, scripts & data instances

• Stores deployment files in a source-safe such as TFS / GIT

BPMLinks Approach

• Deploys based on the deployment schedule (imports ZIP and associated files) into the target environment

• Performs deployment validation by verifying logs, running application speci�c test scripts, checking performance

• Provides dashboard with deployment statistics and application performance post deployment

BUILD

DEV

TEST

PRODUCTPACKAGE

Target Environments

Product / Version

Deployment Schedule

Validation ScriptsCo�gure

Zip file

DB Scripts

Data Instances

Deployment Validation

Deployment Snapshots

Clipboard Size Analysis

Pre-�ight

Alerts / Logs Analysis

Notification and Reporting

AutomatedVeri�cation

AutomatedDeployment

RepeatableFramework

ApprovalCapability

Sys Test UAT PROD

EnCIME

Conclusion

Traditional approaches to software development and

delivery are no longer reliable. Manual processes are error

prone, break down, and create waste and delayed response.

Businesses cannot a�ord to focus on cost while neglecting

speed of delivery and they cannot choose speed over

managing risk.

EnCIME Solution Accelerator o�ers a powerful solution to

these challenges which reduces time to customer feedback,

increase quality, reduce risk and cost, and unify process,

culture and tools across the end-to- end lifecycle including

the adoption path to Steer, Develop/Test, Deploy and

Operate.

Benefits of EnCIME Solution Accelerator

BPMLinks Approach

Delivering a di�erentiated and engaging customer experience that can build customer loyalty and increase market share by continuously obtaining and responding to customer feedback

Obtaining fast-mover advantage to capture markets with quicker time to value based on software-based innovation, with improved predictability and success

Increasing the capacity to innovate by reducing waste and rework in order to shift resources to higher value activities

Eliminating activities that are not necessary for learning what customers want, which emphasizes fast, continuous iterations and customer insight with a feedback loop

Eliminating wait times and delays caused by manual processes and reliance on tribal knowledge

Enabling knowledge workers, business analysts, developers, testers, and other domain experts to focus on creative activities (rather than procedural activities) that help to sustain innovation

Optimizing risk management using steering with meaningful delivery analytics that illuminate validated learning by reducing uncertainty in ways that can be measured

BPMLinks, LLC.1700 North Dixie Highway, Suite# 151, Boca Raton, FL 33432.

Mobile: #919-888-4848 Fax: #919-287 2223 Email: info@bpmlinks.com