The post <span class="sdt-premium">premium</span> SD Times May 2023 appeared first on SD Times.

The post <span class="sdt-premium">premium</span> SD Times April 2023 appeared first on SD Times.

Functional tests, performance tests and UI tests, among others, can reveal if an application isn’t behaving or performing as expected. But on their own, they can’t tell you if your user is having a great experience. And as we know, a poor experience can lead to losing customers and revenue, as well as  damage your company’s reputation.

To ensure a good user experience, organizations need to understand their products, they need to know their markets and they need to have empathy for their users. Once that’s established, according to Gevorg Hovsepyan, head of product at test automation platform mabl, you need to make sure your testing strategy aligns with that.

“You need to have a good pulse on what your customers are experiencing, and the quality of that,” Hovsepyan said. “Because ultimately, your goal is to deliver a great customer experience. It’s not just to make sure your API endpoint provides the right JSON structure.” 

With changes in the markets and the need to have everything digital drive faster delivery and better experiences, you need to do UI testing to understand the performance, you need to understand the accessibility, and you need to appreciate the impact on the organization’s business and revenue if those things aren’t addressed, he said.

“For example,” Hovsepyan explained, “if you’re an airline and plan to offer discounted fares on a particular date, your website needs to be able to handle that surge in traffic.  If your website doesn’t perform to enable 10,000 people to buy those tickets, or 1,000 people to buy those tickets, then your bottom line takes a direct hit. Your CFOs and your executives will look at that and ask what happened, and those would-be customers are less likely to book another trip with you.” 

This has led to a shift in mindset to determine where – and how – you test the experience of your customer. It has become increasingly important for the entire organization to contribute to  quality.

Hovsepyan said mabl believes everyone in the organization should be able to participate in building high-quality software, and approaches testing  from a low-code perspective that enables product managers, business teams and engineers who wouldn’t always participate in quality to be able to quickly create tests or reports that are important to them.

Mabl sees quality engineering as a strategic practice that integrates testing into development pipelines to improve the customer experience and business outcomes. Similarly to DevOps, quality engineering seeks to bring teams from across the software development organization together to establish a shared understanding of quality and how everyone can contribute to it. 

Hovsepyan said that low-code test automation enables everyone to participate in testing and contribute to quality engineering, even if they don’t have a lot of coding experience.

“At mabl, we believe that quality is a combination of multiple things from functional to non-functional. So our solution is a modern SaaS cloud platform that unifies all testing capabilities.” Beyond functional testing, mabl has added visual testing, PDF testing, accessibility testing and performance reporting, bringing different testing capabilities into a single unified quality engineering platform that enables users to assess quality, he explained.

Taking steps toward quality engineering

Hovsepyan said first and foremost, organizations should start with a strategic mindset and seek to understand the state of your business, what your business is trying to accomplish, and how quality-related issues might contribute to your business performance – positively or negatively. “If you don’t do that,” he said, “selling your ideas down the road is going to get increasingly harder.”

Once you understand the state of the business, he advised doing a self-assessment to determine the state of quality within your company. “This doesn’t necessarily include understanding the quality of your technology,” he pointed out. “It’s also understanding your org structure, and the skill sets you have in your team. How do you see your plans developing? How can you broaden quality contributions so that testing matches the needs of your customers in the long-term?” 

Finally, he said, assess the maturity of your testing capabilities. Is the team mostly doing manual testing, or is some automation involved? Do you have scripts and infrastructure in place? Then, he concluded, look for modern technologies that are coming to market to help accelerate the journey toward quality engineering.

Content provided by SD Times and mabl

The post Quality assurance assures great user experiences appeared first on SD Times.

Sounds like what companies do when reaching out to customers about new rollouts, right? Well, it is, when you consider your development team as being customers of the platform.

“Treat your developers, treat your DevOps teams, as your own internal customer and interview them,” urged Bill Manning, Solution Engineering Manager at JFrog, which offers a Software Supply Chain platform to speed the secure delivery of new applications and features. Once you’ve listened to the developers, Manning went on, you can roll their feedback into defining your platform engineering approach, which helps organizations find ways to be more efficient, and to create more value by streamlining development. 

The reason platform engineering is becoming increasingly important is that over time the process of designing and delivering software has become more complex, requiring a number of different tools and customizations, according to Sean Pratt, product marketing manager at JFrog. “When that happens,” he said, “You lack repeatable processes that can be tracked and measured over time.” 

Standardization and intelligent consolidation of tool sets, which can reduce the time, effort and cost needed to manage the sprawl many organizations face, is but one of the core tenets of platform engineering that JFrog talks about. ​​Among the others are reduction of cognitive load, reduction of repetitive tasks through automation, reusable components and tools, repeatable processes, and the idea of developer self-service.

Organizations using DevOps practices have seen the benefits of bringing developers and operations together, to get new features released faster through the implementation of smaller cycles, microservices, GitOps and the cloud. The downside? Coders have now found themselves smack-dab in the middle of operations. 

“The complexity [of software] has increased, and even though the tool sets in a way were supposed to simplify, they’ve actually increased it,” Manning said. “A lot of developers are suffering from cognitive overload, saying, ‘Look, I’m a coder. I signed up to build stuff.’ Now they have to go in and figure out how they are going to deploy [and] what is going to be running inside the container. These are things a lot of developers didn’t sign up for.”

Platform engineering has grown out of the need to address the burden organizations have placed on their development teams. By shifting left more practices with which developers are unfamiliar, there’s more responsibility on today’s developers to do more than just design elegant applications.

This all takes a toll on developers. Automating things like Terraform to provision infrastructure, or Helm charts for Kubernetes, for example, frees up developers to do what they do best – innovate and create new features at the pace the business needs to achieve. A developer would rather get a notification that a particular task is done rather than having to dive in and do it manually. 

While platform engineering can help standardize on tools, organizations still want to offer developers flexibility. “In a microservice world, for example, certain teams might need to use certain tools to get their job done. One might need to use Java with Jenkins for one project, while another team uses Rust with JFrog Pipelines to execute another project,” Pratt said. “So there’s a need for a solution that can bring all those pieces together under one umbrella, which is something JFrog does to help put consistent processes and practices in place across teams.” 

To be sure, a mentality shift is required for successful platform engineering.  “You know what, maybe we don’t need 25 tools. Maybe we can get away with five. And we might have to make some compromises, but that’s okay. Because the thing is, it’s actually beneficial in the long term.” Regardless of how many tools you settle on, Manning had a final piece of advice, “Think about how you bring them all together; that’s where universal and integrated platforms can help connect the disparate tools you need.”  

Content provided by SD Times and JFrog.

The post Platform engineering brings consistency to tools, processes under one umbrella appeared first on SD Times.

The post <span class="sdt-premium">premium</span> SD Times March 2023 appeared first on SD Times.

The post <span class="sdt-premium">premium</span> SD Times February 2023 appeared first on SD Times.

Join Atlassian on Feb. 9 for a live (in Berlin, Germany) and virtual event called Unleash, at which the company’s customers will describe how they achieved greater efficiency and faster time to software delivery.

According the Megan Cook, head of product, Agile and DevOps, at Atlassian, the event will “flip typical conference formatting on its head” by showcasing those customers that have “optimized their workflow with innovative toolchain solutions, and collaborated from discovery to delivery to build some of the most successful brands and businesses in the world.”

Attendees at Unleash will have the opportunity to engage with Atlassian product leaders such as Cook; Joff Redfern, Atlassian chief product officer; and Justine Davis, head of marketing, Agile and DevOps. In the keynote, they will highlight software development best practices, announce a new Atlassian product, and share the first look at new feature innovations across Jira Software, Jira Work Management, Atlas, and Compass.

That keynote, titled “Level up to multiplayer mode,” will describe how Atlassian connects every member of software teams, with new ways to track insights and ideas in the discovery phase, tighten security during the delivery phase, and manage projects more efficiently using a few “cheat codes” added to Jira Software. “It’s time to level up and enter a new era of multiplayer, multi-phase software development,” Cook said.

“This event really puts customers at the center,” Cook told SD Times. “Not only will we showcase some amazing customer stories in the keynote, but they’ll also present their unique use cases and Atlassian stories throughout the event. Attendees will be the first to learn about the new product we’re launching at the event, and will engage with Atlassian product and company leaders on the event floor. It’s not your average tech conference.”

Unleash will also feature an exhibit hall where Atlassian customers will showcase their workflows and toolchains. Virtual attendees will be able to watch the demos on demand.

The day will conclude with the finale of the first-ever “Devs Unleashed” hackathon, with the finalists showing their projects to a celebrity panel and $93,500 in cash prizes at stake. Registration for the hackathon remains open until Jan. 15.

There is no charge to attend Unleash.

The post Atlassian to ‘Unleash’ Agile, DevOps best practices at new event appeared first on SD Times.

The post <span class="sdt-premium">premium</span> SD Times January 2023 appeared first on SD Times.

What will 2023 bring? These industry experts share their thoughts.

Nick Durkin, Field CTO, Harness

Measuring developer effectiveness in 2023

In 2023, we will see a major shift in how businesses measure the effectiveness of developers’ work. I believe that companies will start analyzing developer activities and outputs, similar to how sales teams are evaluated, and that an element of gamification may come into play as well. With businesses now able to access critical tools that measure employee performance across departments, developer teams will be able to showcase the invaluable work they are doing, and how they are achieving those outcomes. I think this will be a positive shift in the way businesses run their tasks and teams because it will advocate for the most critical facets of the company, like engineering and development. 

Rob Zuber, CTO, CircleCI 

Software teams that embrace failure in 2023 will come out on top

My biggest piece of advice for other leaders is to create a culture that embraces failures. The richest information about how an organization can be improved comes when things go wrong. For software engineering teams especially, having a blameless culture builds the trust teams need to solve problems quickly and avoids time wasted worrying about the perceptions of others. 

Alexander Lovell, Head of Product, Fivetran

Data teams: Put up or shut up

2023 will be put up or shut up time for data teams. Companies have maintained investment in IT despite wide variance in the quality of returns. With widespread confusion in the economy, it is time for data teams to shine by providing actionable insight because executive intuition is less reliable when markets are in flux. The best data teams will grow and become more central in importance. Data teams that do not generate actionable insight will see increased budget pressure.

Tal Lev-Ami, CTO and co-founder, Cloudinary

The adoption of new video and image codecs

Developers must choose wisely when it comes to image formats–the wrong format could allow immersive experiences to sink a site’s load time and reliability. JPG is no longer king– major improvements have been made to compress assets more effectively while offering more features that will optimize the web experience. WebP adoption has grown since 2019 and is on track to overtake PNG as the second most frequently used format. JPEG XL is roughly 60% more efficient than JPEG. In March 2022, the JPEG XL specification was published as an ISO standard.

Steve Wood, SVP of Product, Platform, Slack 

Low code as we know it is dead. 

As the nature of low-code apps continues to evolve, the lines between the consumer (what we think of as the user) and the producer (typically the builder) will become increasingly blurred, and the actual “building” of an app will increasingly merge with the “using” of an app. With that, as we enter 2023, we’re seeing a more focused phase of low-code apps – one that’s template, solution, and outcome driven. In the year ahead, we’ll see the next phase of low code become hyper-focused on identifying actual business use cases and giving users the tools to act on them by simply using these apps and without having to build at all. Low-code platforms will have to know, or be able to predict, what the most common use cases are and provide customers with a ready-made solution. 

Haoyuan Li, Founder and CEO, Alluxio

More large-scale analytics and AI workloads will be containerized

In the cloud-native era, Kubernetes has become the de facto standard, with a variety of commercial platforms available on the market. Organizations are increasingly deploying large-scale analytics and AI workloads in containerized environments. While containers provide many benefits, the transition to containers is very complex. As a result, in 2023 the main bottleneck to container adoption will be the shortage of talent with the necessary skill set for tools like Kubernetes.

Gabriel Aguiar Noury, Robotics Product Manager, Canonical

The rise of social robots

In 2023, social robots will be back. Late in 2022, we saw companies like Sony unveiling robots like Poiq. This set the stage for a new wave of social robots. Powered by natural language generation models like GPT-3, robots can create new dialogue systems. This will improve the robot’s interactivity with humans, allowing robots to answer any question. Social robots will also build narratives and rich personalities, making interaction with users more meaningful. GPT-3 also powers Dall-E, an image generator. But, this is not only about the novelty effect. Dall-E will keep pushing research to help robots define their behaviour based on their surroundings. As image detection and context generation merge, robotics scene awareness and social intelligence will take a new leap. By generating a detailed textual description of an image, robots will soon be able to understand the room they are in or what people are doing. This is another step towards real autonomy. 

Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience, SIOS Technology

Site Reliability Engineering Increases Need for High Availability for Critical Applications

With large organizations now managing many hundreds of servers and cloud VMs, all requiring increased availability, means that incorporating HA into Site Reliability Engineering principles will become a standard part of DevOps projects. Using SRE, DevOps teams will standardize on HA tools that are capable of decreasing complexity, increase availability and reliability, and automate application aware failovers.  The vendors who have products that support multiple OS versions, clouds, applications, and databases will be baked into vendor best practices.

Chris Gladwin, CEO, and Co-founder of Ocient

Hyperscale Will Become Mainstream

Data-intensive businesses are moving beyond big data into the realm of hyperscale data, which is exponentially greater. And that requires a reevaluation of data infrastructure. In 2023, data warehouse vendors will develop new ways to build and expand systems and services.

It’s not just the overall volume of data that technologists must plan for, but also the burgeoning data sets and workloads to be processed. Some leading-edge IT organizations are now working with data sets that comprise billions and trillions of records. In 2023, we could even see data sets of a quadrillion rows in data-intensive industries such as adtech, telecommunications, and geospatial. 

Amit Erental, Sr. Manager, Business Lines Strategy, Cloudinary

Accessible content will become priority number one 

As consumer behaviors shift to rely more on visually-rich media, brands need to be confident they are making all of their media, images and video, no matter the platform, accessible. As evidenced in Cloudinary’s 2022 State of Visual Media report, in 2023 we’ll see more progression and focus by brands to make content accessible to all. This will include built-in accessibility for video enabling people of various auditory, movement, sight, and cognitive abilities to understand, enjoy and absorb content as well as a rise in subtitles, sign language, and lighting/brightness alternatives throughout websites and apps to help visual impairment challenges. The increase in web accessibility will ensure brands reach and value a wide variety of consumers. 

Rukmini Reddy, SVP of Engineering, Platform, Slack

DevOps teams will need to get creative 

As we head into 2023, which is increasingly likely to be defined by the effects of an economic downturn, DevOps teams will need to get creative and do more with less. There will be a focus on maximizing the ROI of professional developers, who are some of the most expensive assets for businesses. It will be imperative to ensure the developer experience is as seamless as possible, minimizing the amount of time spent switching between multiple, disparate – and sometimes inefficient – tools. With focus shifting to developer productivity, I expect tightening purse strings to act as a catalyst for teams to adopt more efficient practices when it comes to developing and shipping code. We’ll see more reliance on tools like software development kits and pre-baked code that can be reused and repurposed to slash cycle times and deliver secure, impactful code as quickly as possible.

Brian Anderson, CEO, Nacelle

Headless commerce becomes the go-to

After years of gaining traction among early adopters, in the coming years, headless will truly become the norm. According to a Salesforce Commerce Cloud survey, 80% of all online merchants are either already – or plan to be – headless over the next two years. Headless commerce offers a competitive advantage to those who embrace it. Specifically, merchants who are headless see increases in conversion rates, average order values, engineering productivity, and website change velocity. When one competitor in a vertical goes headless, a technology adoption race occurs as others scramble to upgrade and keep pace. 

Headless implementation in isolation will be deemed foolish so in 2023, top merchants will look at headless within the context of their broader company vision and technology strategy.

Sune Engsig, VP of Product Development at Leapwork 

Test automation has struggled to capture a user interface element – a button, an input field, or a cell in a complicated table – and find it again later even when things change. It’s why UI test automation is often referred to as ‘fragile.’ 2023 will get closer to training ML to predict what to use as reference points and how to build recipes to find any type of UI elements, based on content and structure.

Prateek Kapadia, Chief Technology Officer at Flytxt

An emergence of low-code CX 

The past few years have highlighted the need for enterprises to pivot to meet the ever-shifting landscape of customer needs efficiently. Next year, we’ll see an increase in user-friendly, low-code processes and systems to create a seamless customer experience across a myriad of touchpoints and systems. Vendors will embrace Industry-standard APIs to allow enterprises to integrate their CX ecosystem connecting internal and external systems painlessly. 

Dean Hager, CEO, Jamf

Education technology can help students beyond remote learning.

Historically, some teachers viewed technology as disruptive in the classroom. During the pandemic, technology was needed to keep classes in session. As it turns out, the need to deploy technology that supports distance learning has had an impact that will change the classroom forever. Many technology-resisting teachers now realize that technology doesn’t disrupt the classroom. If deployed effectively, it enhances both teaching and learning. Giving students tablets that are enrolled in a learning solution enables active and personalized learning without needing to wait for 1:1 time with a teacher. Governments in many countries across the world are now supporting the rollout of technology in schools to create education equity and help teachers scale.

Danny Sandwell, Senior Solutions Strategist, Quest

New data sovereignty laws will spur businesses to make data more visible and interoperable 

We expect to see businesses take a more proactive role in creating their own data governance policies amid the current wave of regulatory action. The current global patchwork of data sovereignty and privacy laws has made it more complicated than ever for businesses to create consistent policies on data sharing, integration and compliance. This will continue to have a significant impact on organizations’ ability to maximize the use of data across their IT infrastructure, unless they put together clear plans for data integration and governance. In 2023, the passing of more data sovereignty and sharing laws will spur businesses to invest in getting visibility into their data and creating clear plans for sharing and integration across their IT landscape. 

Zohar Bronfman, co-founder and CEO of Pecan AI

Customer retention will be the primary focus for business leaders in 2023

They will double down on their efforts to engage their customer base more deeply. Whether they’re seeking to increase retention, grow their share of wallet, or win back customers, leaders know that these customers are their greatest asset, especially during challenging economic times. And, importantly, they already have all the customer data they need to help understand and predict what they’re likely to do, fueling their ability to personalize offers and outreach. That knowledge of future customer behavior will drive successful retention strategies next year.

Esko Hannula, Sr. VP of Product Management at Copado

DevOps backlash

After years of DevOps fever, criticism towards DevOps is going to grow, for two different reasons. First, many businesses fail to reap the benefits because they have just implemented tools without changing their working practices. Second, many corporations have, and will continue to, reduce IT operations personnel assuming that Ops would somehow happen by itself in DevOps. Nevertheless, DevOps will continue to deliver success and gain popularity among those that implement it right and, despite temporary hiccups, the crowd of successful DevOps adopters keeps growing.

Ian van Reenen, CTO, 1E

Continued investments in DEX

The conversation around remote work will remain relevant heading into 2023, and as a result, we’ll see more organizations prioritize efforts to drive an optimal end-user experience. Maintaining in-office collaboration and productivity within a distributed workforce requires a frictionless digital employee experience (DEX). As such, we’ll see continued investment in DEX strategies as leaders reevaluate how to approach hybrid work as it becomes an everyday reality for their organizations.

The post 2023 predictions for software development appeared first on SD Times.

The post <span class="sdt-premium">premium</span> SD Times December 2022 appeared first on SD Times.