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In today’s fast-paced and ever-changing technological landscape, it’s crucial for organizations to be agile and efficient. To achieve this, optimizing flow in the software delivery value stream is key. And the answer is pattern thinking and automation patterns.

Welcome to a series of microwebinars that will unfold the importance of automating using pattern recognition; automation patterns that’ll accelerate DevOps and Agile; and a lot more.

Featured Speakers: Lance Knight, President & CEO @ ConnectALL & David Rubinstein, Editor-in-Chief @ SD Times & VSM Times

Part 1: An Intro to Pattern Thinking – AVAILABLE NOW!

May 16 @ 1PM ET | 10AM PT

Part 2: Value Stream Automation Patterns are the Gamechangers: Top Agile Automation Patterns to Maximize Efficiency

By identifying patterns, you can optimize your processes through automation and streamline your workflow for maximum efficiency. It will help you identify and remove bottlenecks, which slows down development cycles, accelerating your team’s software delivery pipeline while reducing errors and boosting efficiency. 

June 20 @ 1PM ET | 10AM PT

Part 3: Breaking Silos: Top Automation Patterns to Connect Business and Development Objectives 

Do you feel like there’s a significant gap between development and business objectives in your organization? In this webinar, you will discover how to align the right customer value with the right features and priorities, and learn how to use automation patterns to reduce the time it takes to design and deploy new features. We’ll explore how these patterns can increase productivity and contribute to achieving overall organizational goals.

July 18 @ 1PM ET | 10AM PT

Part 4: Top Automation Patterns to Accelerate DevOps

Automation goes beyond code and connected integrations to automate end user tasks. Learn how you can use these top Automation Patterns to speed up the process of DevOps, and how to automate everything from infrastructure and microservices to database development.

August 15 @ 1PM ET | 10AM PT

Part 5: How to Reduce Risk with Top Automation patterns for Governance, Compliance and Security

Do you want to reduce risk? Impose cost controls? Communicate aligned intent? This webinar explains how automation patterns can help you achieve these objectives. Get a gist of how to automate critical Governance, Compliance and Security operations.

September 19 @ 1PM ET | 10AM PT

Part 6: Transform Your Workflow: Top Automation Patterns for Project and Portfolio Management

Do you struggle to identify bottlenecks in your workflows or find ways to optimize your organization’s value stream? Are you constantly trying new solutions to streamline your workflow, increase productivity, and boost your bottom line? In this webinar, we’ll explore the top value stream automation patterns that can help navigate common challenges faced by PPM managers and how they can use automation patterns to simplify processes, eliminate waste, and improve efficiency.

The post SD Times Live! Microwebinar Series – Pattern Thinking & Value Stream Automation Patterns appeared first on SD Times.

However, just increasing investment in observability technology is not enough. To unlock the full potential of telemetry data, organizations must address growing data volume and complexity. Organizations must define winning strategies that can help them derive insights and get faster time to value while ensuring regulatory compliance. This can be challenging and overwhelming!

Don’t let these challenges hold you back! The on-demand video with Mezmo Sr. Director of Product Ashka Vakil, and Ventana Research VP & Research Director Matt Aslett provides a riveting look into their proven strategies for maximizing your observability investments. They discuss and share best practices and considerations to make for defining a streamlined strategy for your telemetry data.

Here is a sneak peek at some of the topics they addressed:

• Balancing greater insight with the cost of managing higher data volumes
• Better understanding of the business context
• Addressing data distribution and fragmentation
• And more!

Gain a better understanding of how to maximize the value of your telemetry data and improve observability across your organization. Watch the video!

The post Unlocking the Full Value of Telemetry Data: Overcoming Challenges and Streamlining Your Strategy appeared first on SD Times.

Episode 1: How Automated E2E Testing Creates a Safety Net for Innovation

Speaker: Dennis Nelson, Customer Education Lead @ mabl

As teams adopt DevOps practices and aim for automated pipelines, they need to expand the scope of testing that’s shifted left and aim for high test coverage: because any quality aspects that are not covered by test automation and require manual checking will become bottlenecks to faster deployments.

The post SD Times Live! Microwebinar Series – Testing appeared first on SD Times.

The post Zero Day doesn’t mean Zero hope – Fast detection / Fast remediation appeared first on SD Times.

It feels like the song is on repeat. Another week, another zero-day vulnerability is disclosed. Some are more potent than others. Log4j and Spring4Shell were on the catastrophic side. Enterprises are still grappling with the long tail of Log4j. The Department of Homeland Security Under Secretary Rob Silvers, the board’s chairman, recently proclaimed that Log4j “is not over. This was not a historic look back and now we’re in the clear,” Silvers said. “The board found that it is likely that organizations are going to be dealing with continued Log4j exposure for years to come, maybe a decade or longer.”

More recently, the Apache Commons Text CVE-2022-42889 was disclosed. See this blog for more detail.

At this rate, the situation almost feels hopeless.

The one thing all these zero days have in common is that Contrast Protect provided immediate hardening for applications. Full application context — from the inside, not at the perimeter — inoculates applications against recent zero-day attacks. Application Security (AppSec) teams are seen as heroes instead of as zeroes. Attend this webinar and get updated on zero-day vulnerabilities and how Contrast Protect adds critical application hardening to avoid potential disaster.

The post From Zero (Day) to Hero appeared first on SD Times.

The post Building and Deploying Python Code in Snowflake appeared first on SD Times.

• Topic 10 – “The Bitter Truth About the State of Value Stream Management”

SPEAKERS FOR THIS SESSION: Lance Knight, President & COO, ConnectALL, Andrew Fuqua, SVP of Products, ConnectALL, David Rubinstein, Editor-in-chief, SD Times

As we get closer to the beginning of the new year, we feel obliged to give you all a “state of value stream management” report. The value stream management space has been heating up faster than it is being defined. Amid the confusion, there has been a noticeable shift in what we believe to be the wrong direction. In pursuit of this hotness, over 20 small, mid-sized, and large companies now claim to provide VSM solutions, but are all of them helping with digital transformation goals, DevOps initiatives, or Agile transformation? Or have they simply jumped on the bandwagon and pitched their previously unrelated tool as the key to “doing” value stream management?

From analysts to influencers, VSM has been either misconstrued, ill defined or completely misunderstood. The real value of VSM is in realizing the “human” aspect of practicing lean principles. Most companies have partial offerings — some have integration capabilities, some have metrics capabilities, and some say AI and ML is the future. But, are companies like yours really benefiting from using VSM platforms like the way they claim?

The bitter truth is that most companies (including some big names) are only focused on one small part of the value stream — yet, they are lauded as leaders in the space — absolving them of having a half-baked offering. This incorrect perspective is hurting businesses that are unable to implement VSM as it is truly meant to be.

Join Lance Knight, President & COO of ConnectALL during this session as he attempts to cut through the noise and address the misconception that the “consortium of value stream management influencers” have created. It is critical that we do this because we actually seriously care about helping companies and employees be more efficient, less stressful, and ultimately bring predictability to their software delivery.

• Topic 9 – “Managing flow by using value stream management and observability”

SPEAKERS FOR THIS SESSION: Lance Knight, President & COO @ ConnectALL; Sharath Bhaskara, VP of Technical Services @ ConnectALL; Dave Rubinstein, Editor-in-Chief of SD Times.

With DevOps pipelines having a myriad of tools and DevOps teams not having an integrated tool architecture, the need for observability and lean practices like value stream management is imperative. DevOps leaders need to map out the data from their pipelines for metrics in analytics that drive critical business decisions.

Observability in DevOps is the software tools and methodologies that help Dev and Ops teams to log, collect, correlate, and analyze massive amounts of performance data from a distributed application and glean real-time insights. And value stream management provides the ammunition to boost the impact of observability. In this short webinar, we will look at how value stream management uses observability to optimize and manage flow by creating access to insights for continuous improvement.

• Using observability throughout the value stream, so in pre-production and across the DevOps toolchain, means fewer defects and more predictability in production
• Making the value stream visible and making value measurable
• Shortening MTTR means more time for innovation and more time to spend on adapting ways of working to optimize flow and more valuable outcomes delivered to customers

• Topic 8 – “How to Use Value Stream Management to Identify and Eliminate Non-value-added Activities and Control Costs”

Irrespective of your company’s current financial position and performance, they need to sharpen their competitive edge by applying lean principles like value stream management to cost reduction — that is, the elimination of non-value-added activities or waste in the value stream processes.

By tackling wastes from an end-to-end business process, your company can improve the value of their products and services. They can:

• Achieve significant cost reduction
• Reduce time-to-market
• Emerge stronger with a more competitive profile

Join Lance Knight, president and COO, ConnectALL and David Rubenstein, editor-in-chief, SD Times, in a 10-minute discussion, as they throw light on how VSM can be used for cost savings, higher efficiency, and avoid treating waste elimination as another one-off “tool” or quick fix.

• Topic 7 – “How Tool Integration and Automation Helps Ensure Compliance in Regulated Environments”

SPEAKERS FOR THIS SESSION: ConnectALL’s Lance Knight, COO & President; Norman Miglietta, SVP Marketing; Dave Rubinstein, Editor-in-Chief of SD Times.

In the last one decade, there has been a 10-20% increase in the number of regulations in the U.S. alone across a range of industries. Organizations in industries such as medical/health, pharmaceutical, security, finance, automotive, aerospace, and defense are facing unique challenges pertaining to compliance and risk management, high volumes of data, and navigation of rapidly shifting requirements.

To tackle these, they have to maintain strict control over the development process, from testing to maintenance and release. Test management becomes an important function and the teams need visibility to make sure compliance requirements are met.

And this is where the value stream automation product of a value stream management platform comes into play. It enables software test management and QA teams to connect all the tools in the software development and delivery pipelines. It enables:

• Synchronization for the removal of waste and improved collaboration
• Triggering for interoperability for increased productivity, cost reduction, and controlled flow of information
• Monitoring for amplification of feedback loops, implementation of governance, and capturing of data for key results
• Data collection for data-driven decisions, and regulation and compliance

Want to quickly find out in this 5-10 minute microwebinar how all this is possible? Watch the video!

• Topic 6 of 6 – “How Automating with VSM Unifies Disparate Teams”

We as an industry cannot afford to ignore the dangers of siloed software delivery. The cost of a siloed workforce is staggering, resulting in project delays, declining software quality, and a disconnect from the original project intent. And with the widespread shift to remote work, these silos have become more entrenched than ever.

How can we begin to address the problem?

Join ConnectALL’s Lance Knight (President and COO) and Norman Miglietta (SVP of Marketing) as they sit down with David Rubinstein in the latest SD Times Microwebinar to discuss how automation with value stream management enables organizations to unify disparate teams in every stage of development.

They will discuss why automation is key for any organization struggling with siloed software delivery processes, and what benefits teams can expect from connecting their tools and closely managing the flow of work through the value stream.

• Topic 5 of 6 – “The Misconception: Why do I Need VSM if I’m Already Implementing Agile?” 

• Topic 4 of 6 – “What is Automating Your Value Stream?”

When you zoom in on a value stream, you’ll discover what goes into creating a specific valuable element of a software. By streamlining or optimizing a value stream, you can develop recurring principles that can be used repeatedly for value creation. And this is where automating your value stream comes in. In this session, we will show you how automating your value stream improves the performance of your value stream. Automation would involve introducing feedback loops for the smallest action taken. You can bring in consistency by following certain principles repeatedly, making some activities predictable. You can execute many of these tasks at scale and converge the results into something digestible for the next step.

• Topic 3 of 6 – “The Surprising Reality About Bottlenecks”

In this microwebinar, we will delve into different perspectives on locating bottlenecks, how they might be useful (or not), and the reason that only using your average cycle time to identify your bottlenecks is not enough to get the job done.

• Topic 2 of 6 – “Make your value streams flow: How to start seeing your value stream”

THIS IS NOW AVAILABLE ON DEMAND. In the last session, we highlighted the difference between value stream management and a value stream, and how you need to start seeing your value stream. In this session, we tell you how to start seeing your value stream and make meaningful connections. You need to understand what tools you use at every step, the people involved and the processes. Seeing your value stream helps you cut waste, make processes more efficient, align cross-functional teams and business goals, plan for future growth and do the right things.

Related Resource: What if there was a value stream mapping tool that focuses specifically on the tools & processes relevant to software development and delivery? Say hello to the Value Stream Designer – a complimentary tool that makes mapping value streams easy, interesting and fun. Download it today!

• Topic 1 of 6 – “What’s the difference between value stream management and a value stream?”

THIS IS NOW AVAILABLE ON DEMAND. Watch as we kick off our first five-minute ‘microwebinar’ series, with value stream management provider ConnectALL. SD Times editor-in-chief and VSMcon chairman David Rubinstein hosts ConnectALL president and COO Lance Knight as we answer the question, “What’s the difference between value stream management and a value stream?” and then take a few LIVE questions from listeners.

Related Resource: If you want to learn more about value streams and value stream management, check out this library of instructional videos!

The post SD Times Live! microwebinar series – Value Stream Management appeared first on SD Times.

Now, I got no fight with any man who does what he’s told, but when he don’t, the machine breaks down. And when the machine breaks down, we break down. And I ain’t gonna allow that in any of you. Not one. — Sgt Barnes, Platoon (1986)

In our world of software delivery, machine breakdowns include tools and systems not integrating and interoperating, people not communicating, and the resultant defects that occur in the application under test. And the reality is that we do face communication breakdowns that impact the productivity and quality of everything we create. We assume that only C-level executives worry about software quality or feel the pressure of time-to-market and time-to-value. And that’s not true!

Testing or quality assurance in software delivery is not easy for any enterprise. These teams need traceability and visibility into requirements as they are being created. The automated real-time flow of information across the software delivery value stream enables cross-functional understanding between teams that plan, build, and run the software.

Improving QA functionality by optimizing the flow in value streams will ensure that communication never stops flowing. Embracing tool integration will lead to dramatic improvements in an organization’s quality assurance and test management function. Integrating your best-of-breed test management tools with other tools will provide the QA team visibility into requirements, which results in higher quality test coverage.

In this webinar, we will look at six ways tool integration improves test management processes and QA, including:

• Improved software quality and throughput by focusing on QA function
• Improved visibility and traceability of requirements to properly plan testing
• Improved change controls and management as teams can see more tickets and get timely status updates

Register today and find out what the rest are!

The post Bust This Myth: Software Quality is not Everyone’s Problem – Six Ways Tool Integration Dramatically Improves Test Management Processes and QA appeared first on SD Times.

At ConnectALL, we have discussed ad nauseum what value stream management isn’t.

We’ve told you that it is NOT a tool, NOT a feature, and NOT a map. It isn’t a person, it isn’t a platform, and it isn’t a set of metrics. Agile? DevOps? Also not value stream management.

But what is less clear in our industry is a concrete definition of what value stream management actually is.

It’s time to draw our line in the sand. We push aside the squishiness that often accompanies this topic and plant our flag on what we believe is THE definitive answer to the question: What is value stream management?

Watch this webinar at your convenience as David Rubinstein leads this pivotal conversation with ConnectALL executives Lance Knight, and Andrew Fuqua. They cover the critical components of value stream management, and what you need to know about VSM in order to cut through all the noise.

The post You’ve Heard What Value Stream Management Isn’t. Now Hear the Truth About What It Is. appeared first on SD Times.