Just three weeks ago, CA World 2016 was held in Las Vegas. When I think about the grandeur of that show, it is impressive to realize all that had to seamlessly come together in order to make the event a success. To deliver a fantastic “attendee” experience, CA, its partners, the sponsors, Mandalay Bay, the technology, the expo employees, and many other pieces of the puzzle had to work together to make the entire experience delightful. They had to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. And what we experienced was impressive.
In a very similar manner, many of you must partner with the many “pieces” of your businesses counterparts in your software delivery lifecycle in order to deliver a grand experience to your application users. Every part along the path that the application touches must work. From mobile to mainframe, from dev to test to ops, from systems of record to systems of digital engagement, from legacy servers to microservices, to public or private clouds… everything must work seamlessly.
While the above seems daunting, CA’s Continuous Delivery business unit is laser focused on helping your teams deliver flawlessly. Period. That’s what we do… from planning to production, and everything in between. Our intent is to help you create and deliver an end-to-end Continuous Delivery ecosystem. An integration powerhouse between CA tools, 3rd party technology, and open source options.
This Continuous Delivery Ecosystem was one of the key highlights of CA World, and it was one of the most popular topics on the show floor and on the stage.
The End-to-End Continuous Delivery Ecosystem
Jeff Scheaffer, SVP and GM of the Continuous Delivery business at CA, kicked things off in a big way in his keynote address (see the video recording here or below). Beth Johnson from SunTrust Bank also shared the stage with Jeff to talk about their CD transformation and the results they've seen thus far.
Jeff spoke about this integration strategy through this illustration below.
Starting right from the business requirements, you can use CA Agile Central to import requirements into CA Agile Requirements Designer (ARD), where test cases are automatically defined to ensure the maximum test coverage with the minimum number of test cases. The test cases are then exported back into CA Agile Central, and updated with test results as the release progresses. ARD can also work with HP ALM, Atlassian Jira and others to capture test cases and user stories. CA Release Automation CDE works with Jenkins to capture the build and track everything back to that build. It works with ARD to understand, based on the requirements of the build, the fewest number of tests that need to be run for full code coverage. Without this capability, a full testing suite would include hundreds, if not thousands of tests. RA CDE then communicates with Service Virtualization to launch the virtual services needed to run the planned tests. Then works with Test Data Manager to pre-load test environments with the appropriate data. CA Application Test is then triggered to run the required tests. Depending on the results that Application Test provides Agile Central (and predefined quality thresholds), RA CDE then triggers the deployment to staging and/or production.
“What about BlazeMeter? You guys just acquired them, how do they fit into this story? And what if I use open source tools like Git, JMeter, or Selenium, what then?” Ah, all good questions. All of which were answered in the live show floor demo done at CA World. “But I didn’t go to CA World, how can I see this demo?”
Glad you asked.
All these integrations and much more can be seen in this recorded video on YouTube
Continuous Delivery in Practice at GM Financial
Recently, I had the chance to interview GM Financial on our Continuous Delivery 101 podcast (episode 6 on this iTunes link). I was fascinated to hear their story as they started their Continuous Delivery journey about 18 months ago. They are fully committed to improve delivery times and software quality by driving CD adoption within their company. Working with Dev, QA, and Ops, they have collaborated to improve their software factory. Their story is a best practice you don’t want to miss. You can also listen to the GM Financial story in this YouTube clip, or see their slides they presented at CA World.
The Time to Act Is Now
No matter where you are in your Continuous Delivery journey, we can help orchestrate and optimize your software factory to deliver a flawless application user experience. You might have a product or two from CA, but the time is now to look at where you want to get to, and how you can get there. I urge you to have a discussion with your CA representative about how we can help you on your path to Continuous Delivery greatness.