–Rocket Software, a global technology leader that develops enterprise software for some of the world’s largest companies, today announced enhancements to its Open Source Solutions for z/OS, Rocket® Open AppDev for Z and Rocket® Support for Zowe—an open-source framework for z/OS from Open Mainframe Project—to further modernize mainframe DevOps, application development, and UNIX Systems Services (USS) administration while ensuring security and compliance.²

Organizations face a growing mainframe skills gap due to the attrition of IBM® zSystems experts and a low percentage of next-gen technology professionals who are inclined to learn esoteric mainframe languages and tools. To help, Rocket Software is arming today’s developers with familiar open-source solutions for z/OS that close the gap between modern application development and the mainframe. These modern capabilities make it easy for developers and admins alike to manage the mainframe similarly to how they work with other platforms.
Despite the benefits open source offers organizations, it is not immune to vulnerabilities, and organizations must adopt a security-first mindset and partner with industry-leading vendors to ensure that they can identify and fix vulnerabilities in time to mitigate security and compliance risks. Just a few months ago, Git announced two critical-level security vulnerabilities that left source code repositories susceptible to malicious code—underscoring the importance of having rapid-response vendor support.

“Open source is accelerating mainframe modernization and evolving mainframe DevOps, but it can also pose risks without vendor support as proved by Git’s recent security vulnerabilities,” said Phil Buckellew, President, Infrastructure Modernization at Rocket Software. “Rocket Software delivered patches to customers affected within three days, keeping our clients’ open-source environments secure and in compliance so they can continue focusing on their business rather than investing time and resources in patching tools.”
Rocket® Open AppDev for Z is an open-source DevOps solution providing services and support for over 20 open-source languages and tools—including Git®, Python®, cURL and Bash—that enable the mainframe to be another valuable platform in a DevOps infrastructure.³ This enables organizations to bring the accessibility of open source to the mainframe while ensuring the security and compliance of their applications and data. Rocket Software’s most recent major updates to Open AppDev for Z, among several others, include:

• PHP V8.1.1 version currency and new features
• Vim V9.0 version currency and new features introduced for the first time to z/OS
• OpenSSL V3.1.0 version currency and important security improvements with FIPS 140 compliance
• Make V4.4.1 version currency

• Rocket USS Process Manager (initially released in 2022) gives admins a familiar way to monitor processes running on UNIX®Systems Services, Zowe’s host operating system, similar to how they can monitor processes on other platforms.⁴
• Zowe File Manager makes it easy for admins to manage z/OS files similar to how they manage files on other platforms, whether they’re MVS datasets or USS files.
• Rocket® Terminal Emulator Web Edition now available in Rocket Support for Zowe simplifies access to host-based applications and data anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

Rocket Software is a proud founding contributor of Zowe, an open-source software framework for z/OS that has provided interoperability and scalability among products through the Open Mainframe Project since 2018. Rocket Software is also a Platinum member of the Open Mainframe Project.
“Zowe continues to innovate as a direct result of the contributions and passion of the global open source community,” said John Mertic, Executive Director of Open Mainframe Project. “When you add this commitment with leadership from members like Rocket Software, we believe the extensible nature of Zowe will offer an infinite number of pluggable products, processes, and services that are stable and secure.”
Click here to learn more about Rocket® Open AppDev for Z. Click here to learn more about Rocket® Support for Zowe

The post Rocket Software Strengthens Investments in Open-Source Solutions for z/OS, Underscoring Commitment to IBM zSystems Security, Compliance, and Innovation appeared first on SD Times.

A defining experience in SAFe is a regular, typically quarterly, planning and alignment event in which multiple Agile teams manage delivery objectives and dependencies. Called PI Planning (“PI” is short for Planning Interval), the event is key to the improved business outcomes for which SAFe is known. Rentouch’s flagship product, piplanning.io, is a SaaS solution designed to enable and improve this experience for organizations practicing SAFe in person and virtually. Piplanning.io is trusted by Global 2000 organizations and used in multiple industries including financial services, automotive, government, and telecommunications.

“By integrating the innovative piplanning.io software into our platform, we’ll be able to offer a truly immersive and collaborative experience for enterprises running PI Planning around the world,” said Chris James, CEO of Scaled Agile, Inc. “This acquisition aligns with our commitment to providing the most comprehensive and user-friendly experience in SAFe Studio.”

Piplanning.io has revolutionized the way teams collaborate and manage work in SAFe. With this acquisition, Scaled Agile, Inc. will be able to further enhance SAFe Studio, announced last month, by providing users with an intuitive and seamless way to plan iterations, manage risks, and visualize dependencies across teams in real time.

“We are thrilled to join the Scaled Agile family and contribute to the continued success and growth of SAFe,” said Silvan Krähenbühl, CEO of Rentouch. “Our combined expertise and technologies will deliver an unmatched experience for enterprises seeking to improve their PI Planning experiences.”

Over the coming months, Scaled Agile, Inc. will focus on the integration of piplanning.io into SAFe Studio. In the meantime, piplanning.io will continue to be available separately and will maintain its world-class product and support.

The post Scaled Agile, Inc. Enhances Cross-functional Team Planning in SAFe® Studio with Rentouch Acquisition appeared first on SD Times.

• Attend the half-day virtual event on Tuesday, May 16, 2023, and learn how enterprises optimize their testing practices to achieve software quality goals with QA and development leaders.
• Hear from the opening keynote guest speaker, Diego Lo Giudice, Forrester VP and Principal Analyst, as he shares his expertise on how AI is revolutionizing software testing.
• Learn how to automate end-to-end testing to deliver quality software at scale in minutes.

Parasoft, a global leader in software testing solutions, today announced the fourth annual virtual Automated Software Testing and Quality (ASTQ) Summit. This half-day virtual event will showcase QA and development organizations from various industries. They’ll share experiences and best practices on how to address software application challenges to achieve business goals.

Join the live virtual summit on Tuesday, May 16, 2023, at 11 a.m. EDT to gain insights from industry leaders in financial services and telecommunications.

Automated Software Testing and Quality Summit, May 16, 2023 – Tackle Software Quality Challenges With AI-Powered Test Automation.

• Build a solid testing strategy that leverages AI-powered test automation.
• Learn effective methods to automate and accelerate testing.
• Deliver robust applications that users will love.

This year’s summit will feature an opening keynote from guest speaker, Diego Lo Giudice, Forrester VP and Principal Analyst. Lo Giudice will share his research and insights on how AI is revolutionizing software testing.

Lo Giudice writes in The Forrester Wave: Continuous Automation Testing Platforms, Q4 2022 report, “Quality becomes paramount for all aspects of the software development lifecycle. Automation of the different types of testing, with functional at the core, becomes the norm. [Parasoft] has undisputed strengths in API testing made easy with AI and integrated with its service virtualization offering.”

Performance testing expert Scott Moore will speak on the importance of performance engineering to reduce cloud costs. The event will also feature industry leaders from financial services and telecommunications companies, including Banco de Crédito e Inversiones (BCI), Charter Communications, CIBC, and Northbridge Financial. Topics will cover how to:

• Successfully simulate test data and environments to enable continuous testing for multiple applications.
• Shift API testing left to achieve quality and release schedule targets.
• Benefit from performance engineering practices, including cost savings and improved system performance.

Software quality is still top of mind for executives who want to retain and expand customer satisfaction. The complicated landscape of Agile, CI/CD, and DevOps requires a solid testing strategy that leverages AI-powered test automation to deliver applications with confidence.

View the full agenda and register for the event today.

The post Parasoft to Hold the 4th Annual Automated Software Testing & Quality Summit on May 16, 2023 appeared first on SD Times.

More than six million developers use ngrok, but supporting production Kubernetes workloads requires different infrastructure and tooling. The ngrok Ingress Controller for Kubernetes packages the power and simplicity of the ngrok platform into the standard cloud-native APIs that developers and operations teams already integrate with.

“Other ingress controllers require operators to perform complex networking setup bespoke to each underlying environment,” said Alan Shreve, founder and CEO of ngrok. “ngrok, by contrast, delivers a plug-and-play experience to any Kubernetes cluster. It eliminates operational burden by leveraging ngrok’s global network to deliver ingress without requiring you to configure the underlying environment’s hardware and network.”

The ngrok Ingress Controller’s unique architecture protects applications and accelerates workloads. It pushes traffic ingestion and middleware behaviors like OAuth, mutual TLS and load balancing to ngrok’s global network, which blocks unauthenticated users and mitigates network attacks before they ever reach origin networks.

“The ngrok Kubernetes Ingress Controller provides a great alternative to the Consul API Gateway for providing ingress traffic into Consul service mesh, whether the mesh is powered by HashiCorp Cloud Platform or by servers on self-managed infrastructure,” said David Yu, senior product manager at HashiCorp. “We’re excited to see the capabilities they bring to Consul and the ecosystem as a whole.”

Visit the ngrok blog or connect with the ngrok team at KubeCon Europe 2023 at booth #S78 to learn more about the ngrok Kubernetes Ingress Controller.

The post ngrok Launches Kubernetes Ingress Controller appeared first on SD Times.

The Timesheets by Tempo integration for Jira Align automates timely reporting and analysis of development investments, so that leaders can understand how much time it takes and costs for teams to develop and maintain every product. With a deeper understanding of how time is invested, product teams can more accurately and efficiently plan, budget, and track their investments for current and future enhancements. Developer time is a valuable and fleeting resource, and a clear understanding of their capacity enables the better management of time, priorities, and business opportunities for the organization.

“We are pleased to provide our Jira Align customers with a seamless data connection to automatically calculate team time investments across their product portfolios,” said Kyle Foreman, Jira Align Product Manager at Atlassian. “Tempo is a top time tracking Ecosystem partner for Atlassian, so it was a straightforward decision to work with them on this integration for Jira Align and give leaders the insights they need to effectively plan.”

“We are proud of our continued innovations and integrations with Atlassian’s Jira and Jira Align solutions,” said Mark Lorion, CEO, Tempo Software. ”Until now, it has been difficult for leaders to accurately track the costs associated with the teams who build their products. Tempo provides the critical data needed to answer questions related to team spend and inform investment strategy.”

Timesheet’s integration updates time spend data in the Jira Align Portfolio Room based on time logged against Jira stories and multiplied by an hourly rate. Organizations that choose Tempo’s time tracking solution for Jira and Jira Align benefit from capabilities such as:

• Seamless and automated aggregation of team time logs based on Jira stories in order to save time, not spend it
• Ease of use and one-click time capture for Jira users powered by Timesheet’s integration with Jira and other tools across the product life cycle, such as calendars, Slack and popular IDEs JetBrains and VS Code
• More accurate financial reporting and analysis that informs investment planning and distribution across teams, programs, and portfolios

Additionally, Tempo has achieved Atlassian’s Cloud Fortified certification that meets enterprise-grade security, service reliability and performance standards. Tempo was also named 2021 Atlassian Partner of the Year for Enterprise App Services.

“We have supported our clients through countless successful Jira Align implementations and supported them on their agile maturity journey.” said Dan Teixiera, head of enterprise agility and tooling, Cprime. “We are thrilled Tempo now integrates with Jira Align, so we can bring industry-leading time and cost management data to our enterprise customers.”

Attendees of Atlassian’s Team ’23 user conference on April 18-20 will be able to see Tempo co-present two sessions about enterprise agility: ‘Scaling Agile with Cprime & Tempo’ and ‘From PPM to LPM with Jira, Jira Align, and Tempo.’

The post Integration Allows Product Leaders to Automatically Calculate Developer Investments Across Product Portfolios appeared first on SD Times.

The $3 million seed investment was led by Flybridge. Additional funding was provided by Brazil-based big_bets, Carya Ventures, the Pioneer Fund, Velocity Ventures, France-based Sharpstone Capital as well as Y Combinator. NuMind’s initial customers are developing custom models for medical coding, legal report review, user feedback analysis, and matching resumes with job postings for a recruitment firm.

“We are living a revolution thanks to large language models such as GPT-4, but tools to take advantage of them are not mature yet. Tackling applications such as content moderation or sentiment analysis still requires ML experts and an intense labeling effort,” explained Etienne Bernard, CEO, NuMind. “Our goal at NuMind is to make this revolution accessible to all, starting with language understanding. It’s a game changer in terms of speed and efficiency for all the companies needing this type of AI.”

The NLP models designed by NuMind’s first customers were developed dramatically faster than by using traditional methods–up to a factor of 10. At the end of the project, companies own their models.

“The NuMind founders recognized how LLMs could be leveraged as part of a platform to drive textual understanding in an easy-to-use, accessible manner so developers could speed the creation and deployment of NLP models,” said Chip Hazard, co-founder and general partner, Flybridge. “Now organizations can maximize the potential of NLP, building better applications and improving experiences.”

“Given the depth of this insight and the breadth of the market opportunity, we were thrilled to invest and help them realize this vision,” Hazard continued.

Interactive AI Development

NuMind’s Interactive AI Development paradigm is similar to how people are taught–with an interactive process of questions, answers and explanations–but doing this between a person and the machine. This type of learning is more natural and efficient, eliminates labeling large volumes of data, and allows much faster creation of personalized models.

“Up to now there were two ways to teach computers: either by programming or by giving them many examples. I see LLMs as the key to unlock this third way that we call Interactive AI Development,” said Bernard.

An all-in-one solution, NuMind offers:

• Reduction of labeling effort, thanks to LLMs
• Automatic machine learning to determine the best models automatically
• Active learning to only label the most important documents
• An intuitive labeling interface
• A live performance report to quickly identify the strengths and weaknesses of models as the project progresses
• Multilingual models to avoid any need for translation
• Full ownership of your models so you can put them in production however you want

NuMind was founded by two cousins, Etienne Bernard and Samuel Bernard. Etienne is an MIT postdoc, former head of ML at Wolfram Research, and the author of “Introduction to Machine Learning.” Samuel is the former CTO of Make.org, a platform that galvanizes citizens to propose solutions to public issues. The NuMind team of seasoned professionals is split between Paris and Boston. Early customers are based in Brazil, France, and the United States.

NuMind’s solution is available as a monthly subscription. For more information, visit www.numind.ai.

The post NuMind Launches NLP Tool Leveraging LLMs to Democratize Creation of Custom NLP Models appeared first on SD Times.

Developers are focused on quickly shipping new features and rely on automation to build, scan and deploy their code. When a problem, such as a security bug or policy violation, is found, Automated Fix PRs immediately kick-starts remediation by providing code-level fixes to common Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) issues found in Kubernetes manifests. Multiple IaC issues can be fixed with a single click, and all changes can be quickly reviewed and approved within GitHub. A recent Fairwinds analysis of IaC scans shows that Automated Fix PRs can remediate at least 42% of issues, automatically saving developers countless hours of effort and enabling teams to ship faster.

“Automated Fix PRs is a very direct way that we can help platform teams enable development to fix Kubernetes issues faster,” said Joe Pelletier, vice president of product at Fairwinds. “Developer self-service is critical to Kubernetes success. By suggesting the code-level fix that can be easily merged via GitHub, we are empowering developers to minimize misconfigurations while still innovating and shipping apps quickly. We continue to expand the scope of what Fairwinds Insights can fix as we learn from customers.”

Automated Fix PRs benefits platform engineering teams, developers, and security engineers by:

• Standardizing and enforcing policy: Platform teams can set standards and ensure they are followed more easily, enabling code to reach production faster.
• Saving time: Developers don’t have to manually address every configuration change. They can review and approve them in GitHub, resulting in significant time savings;
• Improving security and compliance: Risk is reduced with controls that find and fix issues without slowing down the business; and
• Reducing policy violations: With a focus on developer self-service, devs can adopt Kubernetes best practices faster, leading to fewer post-deployment policy violations.

Automated Fix PRs is the latest addition to Fairwinds Insights, which helps platform engineering teams make it easy for developers to build and deliver applications.

The post Fairwinds introduces automated fix pull requests to streamline remediation of Kubernetes misconfigurations appeared first on SD Times.

Download the QA Financial report, which draws from data provided by more than 20 financial institutions and the experiences of Bank of America and ING, to learn how service virtualization has been proven to save development time and increase software quality.

Parasoft’s service virtualization technology has delivered measurable results and ROI for financial organizations such as ING and Bank of America. The recent QA Financial report recognizes Parasoft as a leader in software testing for financial applications. The report on virtualization and quality engineering provides valuable insights for organizations looking to:

• Optimize their virtualization and quality engineering practices.
• Improve software quality, reliability, and reduce time-to-market.
• Collaborate and communicate between development, testing, and operations teams to achieve company goals.

“Using service virtualization, we increased control, reduced complexity, and managed costs for the testing environment while enabling effective change management,” said ING Mortgages Netherlands.

At QA Financial Forum Chicago, Northbridge Financial and WoodmenLife will participate in a panel session on April 4 at 12 p.m. CDT: “Deliver Software On Time & Under Budget With Service Virtualization.” Panelists include Pushpinder Malhotra, Senior QA Automation Manager at Northbridge Financial, and Danny Oslin, Senior Manager of Enterprise Automation Engineering atWoodmenLife. Kenny Austin, Chief Customer Officer at Parasoft is moderating. Malhotra will also be speaking in a presentation,”Containerization: The New Frontier in Automation at Northbridge Financial.”

“Our Forum events feature expert speakers from leading financial firms and some of the most exciting vendors of DevOps and software automation technologies. We’re delighted that Parasoft is one of our key sponsor partners for our 2023 conference schedule,” said Matthew Crabbe, CEO of QA Financial.

Parasoft’s leadership position in software testing solutions has been recognized by The Forrester Wave: Continuous Automation Testing Platforms, Q4 2022 report, naming Parasoft as a leader in continuous functional test automation. Download an excerpt of the report here.

Contact Parasoft to learn more about solutions for financial software testing and service virtualization. You can visit Parasoft at the QA Financial Forum in Chicago.

The post Financial institutions accelerate by 40% software time to market appeared first on SD Times.

Companies that join LaunchDarkly’s Technology Partner Program will receive exclusive benefits such as early access to LaunchDarkly’s technology, marketing support to increase awareness and adoption of the integration, and enablement resources. Additionally, there are three tiers within the program that partners can move between depending on customer adoption, which in turn enables partners to be upgraded within their tier and to unlock additional benefits.

The Technology Partner Program is available to those companies that seek to build an integration into LaunchDarkly’s product. More details about requirements to join and benefits of the program can be found on the company’s partner integrations page.“As the feature management category pioneer and leader, LaunchDarkly is helping more than 4,000 customers globally to inject feature flagging into how they release software and in conjunction we are working with an impressive list of technology partners that have integrated our feature management technology,” said John Kodumal, Co-Founder and CTO at LaunchDarkly. “As every company is becoming a software company and software launches are essential, we are looking forward to growing the LaunchDarkly ecosystem with additional companies that have identified the power of feature management as a growth opportunity.”

LaunchDarkly’s feature management technology takes the risk out of today’s rapid pace of digital innovation for developers and product teams, and empowers them to not only experiment with both front-end features and back-end optimizations; but also target capabilities to a subset of users or regions, and even revert back to the previous flagged should a launch go awry. According to LaunchDarkly’s 2022 State of Feature Management report, feature management technology has become a must-have with 69% of software and IT professionals noting that it is a must-have, mission critical and/or high priority and 98% believe that feature management saves their company money and delivers a strong return on investment.

Already consisting of nearly 50 leading technology partners such as AWS, Atlassian and Datadog, LaunchDarkly’s Technology Partner Program helps partners integrate with its feature management software to meet this demand.

“ngrok’s mission is to empower developers to get their apps online faster, and we believe it’s important to make it easy for them to work with the tools they love,” said Anders Hinrichsen, VP of Business Development and Partnerships at ngrok. “Our partnership with LaunchDarkly is a no-brainer, they provide users with robust feature flagging capabilities, enabling them to securely ship code with greater confidence and efficiency. We look forward to expanding our joint product offerings for developers everywhere.”

Companies interested in becoming a member of the Technology Partner Program and building an integration with LaunchDarkly should visit https://launchdarkly.com/partners/ or email techpartners at launchdarkly.com.

The post LaunchDarkly establishes technology partner program to answer the demand for feature management technology appeared first on SD Times.

“Developers are taking on more responsibilities for how their apps run and perform in production while OTel is becoming the telemetry standard for gathering product data about those apps,” said Anthony Bryce, VP of Product Management at SmartBear. “Today, BugSnag provides developers visibility into their end users’ experiences of their app, whether it’s unforeseen errors, crashes, or performance issues. With the addition of Aspecto, we are extending these capabilities to provide a broader, developer-focused, OTel-compliant observability platform. This means developers can both identify production issues and rapidly troubleshoot to resolve those issues.”

With this acquisition, SmartBear will provide development teams with extended end-to-end visibility across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Developers can use Aspecto’s OpenTelemetry-based observability platform to visualize complex traces, optimize performance, deliver greater collaboration with APIs, better explore microservices, and improve the testing and analysis of staging and production infrastructures. The visibility will enable developers to build competitive apps with the confidence to deploy faster and more often.

“We see many organizations looking to drive their own observability projects to avoid costly and proprietary commercial solutions,” said Eran Grabiner, CEO of Aspecto. “Aspecto helps them scale OTel infrastructure in a secure, cost-effective manner. Integrating the rich developer-focused production issue identification solutions from SmartBear with Aspecto’s leading diagnostic capabilities offers a combination that will help development teams deliver even greater quality software.”

SmartBear is making it easier for its customers to take advantage of Aspecto’s solutions by integrating it with BugSnag. It enables application development teams to use BugSnag to drill down, in context, any application error, crash, or performance issue into the relevant trace. The results will help developers visualize, diagnose, and resolve application issues more efficiently.

The post SmartBear Acquires OpenTelemetry Pioneer Aspecto to Give Developers Greater Application Visibility appeared first on SD Times.