Weekly Top 10: The DevOps Toolchain

This week’s top news covers all the necessary tools and practices to successfully adopt DevOps and Continuous Delivery in your organization. As we have been told time and again, changing your team’s culture and organizational structure is key to kick starting a smooth and successful shift towards DevOps. Equally important is having the right tools to implement these practices. Continue reading to learn what tools DevOps and Continuous Delivery experts suggest you use.
As always, stay tuned to all the news coming from @ElectricCloud on DevOps and Continuous Delivery throughout the week and retweet/favorite to get your favorite pieces featured in our weekly recap!

1Digital Transformation Requires Total Organizational Commitment

By @ron_miller | Published on @TechCrunch
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/31/digital-transformation-requires-total-organizational-commitment/
By now you’ve surely heard that moving forward, every company will be a software company, and that shift is happening now as companies large and small scramble to transform into digitally-driven organizations. Wherever you turn, businesses are facing tremendous disruptive pressure. What’s interesting is that the theory about how firms should be dealing with this massive change is itself in flux, transforming if you will, as organizations come to grips with the idea that the most basic ways they do business are being called into question.

"#Digital Transformation Requires Total Organizational Commitment": https://t.co/hCejExDUTv @TechCrunch @ron_miller pic.twitter.com/VbiDKP3KWK

— CloudBees (@electriccloud) February 3, 2016

2Diversify Your DevOps Tools List for Best Results

By @clivel_98 | Published on @TechTarget http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/tip/Diversify-your-DevOps-tools-list-for-best-results
Most organizations would appreciate a faster response from those in charge of the IT platform. Although IT is critical to enterprise operations, it can be far more of a business constraint than an enabler. Waterfall approaches to business-critical application development provide an answer that is too late to solve the problem. DevOps is a methodology that aims for greater speed of response. Developers push code into the operations infrastructure more quickly, enabling IT to respond to problems and opportunities as they happen.

Great piece on "a diversified DevOps toolchain" by @Quocirca https://t.co/70KrZcBlIG

— Sam Fell (@samueldfell) February 3, 2016

3The Most Powerful Force in DevOps Is Changing Your Company’s Culture

By Alexandra Weber Morales | Published on @sdtimes http://sdtimes.com/powerful-force-devops-changing-companys-culture/
Achieving DevOps—a continuous, collaborative product delivery cycle that incorporates software development and IT operations equally—is an elusive goal for many enterprises. Even after agile software development practices have revolutionized teams, the fundamental motivational mismatch between developers and sysadmins often persists. Development is feature-driven. Operations is stability-driven.

The most powerful force in #DevOps is changing your company’s culture https://t.co/yKbtK338K8 @sdtimes

— DOES Summit (@DOESsummit) February 1, 2016

4Using ARA to Achieve Higher Quality Software Releases

By @anders_wallgren | Published on @ITProPortal http://www.itproportal.com/2016/01/26/using-ara-to-achieve-higher-quality-software-releases/
Application Release Automation, or ARA, is the process of packaging and deploying applications (or updates to applications) in an automated, repeatable and consistent way. In today’s market landscape software has become a major differentiator for many businesses, across all industries and verticals. In a world of apps, Internet of Things and customers’ expectations to be always connected, – just about every company is now becoming a software company. Software development is now critical to the success of your product, and its delivery process needs to be fine-tuned and streamlined to ensure that you get quality software in the hands of your end users as quickly as possible.

Using #ARA to achieve higher quality #software releases by @anders_wallgren https://t.co/DN2siVSCOG @ITProPortal pic.twitter.com/ODrIW8QESa

— CloudBees (@electriccloud) February 1, 2016

5Are You Ready for Your DevOps Transformation?

By Michael Schmidt | Published on @devopsdotcom
http://devops.com/2016/01/28/ready-devops-transformation/
You’re done with missed release deadlines, long release cycles and risky releases. If your objectives are continuous application delivery to achieve fast feedback loops and reduced waste, DevOps practices provide the means to reach them. DevOps is all about agile transformation, which reaches beyond agile development into production to achieve continuous delivery. DevOps practices provide help for the necessary next step after agile development to leverage the full potential of agile and avoid massive post-delivery changes through the development teams, but before they are ready to go into production.

Are You Ready for Your #DevOps Transformation? https://t.co/FZiTzihOym @devopsdotcom #enterprise pic.twitter.com/8pS3IIkFK2

— CloudBees (@electriccloud) February 1, 2016

6Continuous Delivery: Getting Code Where It Needs to Go

By @MulliganSDTimes | Published by @sdtimes http://sdtimes.com/continuous-delivery-getting-code-where-it-needs-to-go/4/
CloudBees is a leader in enterprise Continuous Delivery and DevOps automation, helping organizations deliver better software faster by automating and accelerating build, test and deployment processes at scale. Industry leaders like Cisco, E-Trade, Gap, GE, Qualcomm and SpaceX use CloudBees’s solutions to boost software productivity. The CloudBees Flow DevOps Automation Platform provides end-to-end control and visibility across shared resources and tool chains, allowing teams to release software faster and more predictably.

Continuous Delivery: Getting code where it needs to go https://t.co/ciFYNGpPUN @sdtimes pic.twitter.com/GBevSToYWr

— CloudBees (@electriccloud) February 1, 2016

7Does DevOps Need Enhanced Security?

By @RaviNamboori1 | Published on @DZone https://dzone.com/articles/does-devops-needs-enhanced-security-1
DevOps is one of the most happening things for technological development in recent years. A large majority of the global CIO’s and IT managers are embracing DevOps as one of the most influential technological innovations, significantly transforming the software development cycle. Technically DevOps is neither a product nor market, but it is a powerful method that leverages the best new technologies and automation tools to radically transform the software development process on the whole. Technology managers says DevOps is an innovative idea for running IT more streamlined.

Does #DevOps Need Enhanced #Security ? https://t.co/0sMh2tHCUq @DZone @RaviNamboori1

— CloudBees (@electriccloud) February 2, 2016

86 Common Test Automation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

By @mheusser | Published on @TechBeaconCom http://techbeacon.com/software-test-automation-6-common-mistakes-how-avoid
After nearly 20 years of experience in software testing, I've seen a great deal of test tooling, and more than a few failures. Short-term success is common. It's not that hard to write a little code to exercise a system. The problem comes 6 to 12 months later, when a test run takes hours, the test environment and results get flaky, and the programmers change the expected behavior of the system, transforming the nature of the tool from test automation to change detection. Success in test automation is less about getting it right and more about avoiding mistakes. With that in mind, here are a few of the recurring ("deadly") mistakes I've seen over the years. You know you've made a mistake when you...

6 Common #Test #Automation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them: https://t.co/9YP00dYJbW @TechBeaconCom @mheusser pic.twitter.com/9UudrqZW18

— CloudBees (@electriccloud) February 2, 2016

9WSJ CIO Network: CIOs Name Strategic Priorities

By @steven_norton | Published on @CIOJournal
http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2016/02/02/wsj-cio-network-cios-name-strategic-priorities/?mod=WSJBlog
Chief information officers attending The Wall Street Journal CIO Network conference broke up into five task forces to discuss issues ranging from cybersecurity to digital transformation. Here’s a rundown of CIOs’ priorities. Full results will be published in the WSJ later this month.

WSJ CIO Network: CIOs Name Strategic Priorities - The CIO Report - WSJ https://t.co/zrOLBzBWuw

— CIO Journal (@CIOJournal) February 3, 2016

10How to Minimize Technical Debt and Reverse Grind

By Chelsea Bosworth | Published on @dzone https://dzone.com/articles/how-to-minimize-technical-debt-and-reverse-grind
We see it every day – developers make quick fixes to an application and then they’re on to something new. The development lifecycle is getting increasingly shorter and business goals can often determine product launch deadlines over the quality of the application. In fact, DZone surveyed developers and found that 72 of respondents have had to release software with less testing than they thought was necessary. Tough deadlines and quick patches can quickly become mountains of disorganized code. Two DevOps concepts come into play here, technical debt and reverse grind—both of which can be avoided with the proper tools and mindsets.

How to Minimize Technical Debt and Reverse Grind https://t.co/fORIa7gaHC @dzone

— Anders Wallgren (@anders_wallgren) February 1, 2016