Friday, March 06, 2015

Showing Value Early and Often Boosts Software Testing Success at Pomeroy

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how a managed service provider uses HP tools to improve software quality and to speed modernization across application testing and development.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner
Once again, we're focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, as well as better business results.

This time, we're coming to you from the recent HP Discover 2014 Conference in Las Vegas. We're here to learn from IT and business leaders alike how big data, cloud, and converged infrastructure implementations are supporting their goals.
Seven best practices
for business-ready applications
Our next innovation case study interview explores how Pomeroy, a Global IT managed services provider, improves quality for their applications testing, development and customization. By working with a partner, TurnKey Solutions, Pomeroy improves their overall process for development and thereby achieves far better IT and business outcomes.

In order to learn more about how they're improving app testing proficiency, please welcome Mary Cathell, Quality Assurance Analyst at Pomeroy in Hebron, Kentucky. Welcome, Mary.

Mary Cathell: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Gardner: We're also here with Daniel Gannon, President and CEO at TurnKey Solutions in Denver. Welcome.

Daniel Gannon: Dana, thanks for having me.

Gardner: Tell us about Pomeroy and then how improved development has boosted software benefits internally, as well as for your end-user customers across your managed-service provider (MSP) offerings.

Cathell: We're a premier provider of IT managed services. We do end user, network, data center, and everything in between. We’re hands on all over the place. We have a global footprint. Quality is absolutely imperative. We have big client companies like Nestle, Goodyear, and Bayer. These are companies that have a certain amount of respect in the business world. They depend upon quality in their products, and we need to deliver quality in our products to them.

Gardner: And you're the sole quality assurance analyst. So you have a big job.

Cathell: I do.

Gardner: What did you find when you got there, and what was the steady state before you started to make some improvements?

Making improvements

Cathell: This was November of 2012. They gave me an opportunity to bring something new that they were unfamiliar with and to teach, which I love to do. They purchased Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), everyone had their own piece of the process from our sales to logistics, and they were all using different applications to do this process.

Cathell
It was a paradigm shift to take one system and bring us together as one company using one product. There was a lot of struggle through that, and they struggled through testing this, because they had no testing background. I was brought in to bring it to steady state.

After we went live, we got to steady state. Now it was like, "Let's not reinvent the wheel. Let's do this right. Let's begin scripting."

Testing is terrible. It's tedious. No one has the time to do it. No one has the patience to do it. So they either don’t do it or they throw buckshot at it. They do ad-hoc testing, or they just let errors come in and out, and they fix them on the back end, which is client facing.

Does Goodyear want to see a real-estate problem on an invoice? No, they don't, and we lose credibility. Goodyear is talking to their clients. They have friends. Their CEO is talking to another company's CEO. Now, you’ve got a word-of-mouth situation off of one mistake. You can't have that.

Gardner: What were some of the hurdles that you needed to overcome to become more automated, to take advantage of technology, to modernize the quality assurance processes? Then, we'll talk about how TurnKey works in that regard. But let's talk about what you had to overcome first?
We can function better now in just our regular business process, not even testing, but what we do for our customer.

Cathell: I had to show the value. Value is everything, because people ask, "Why do we need to do this? This is so much work. What value is that going to bring to me?"

Again, it lets your processes work with the business function as an oiled machine, because you're not separate anymore. You’re not siloed. You need to work together. It's cross-functional. It taught us our data.

Now there's an understanding that this works. We can function better now in just our regular business process, not even testing, but what we do for our customer. That’s value for our internal customers, which ends up being absolute value to our external customers.

Gardner: The solution you went for included HP Quality Center, but you wanted to take that a step further, and that's where TurnKey comes in

Due diligence

Cathell: I talked to several other companies. You need to. You need to do the due diligence. TurnKey did a wonderful thing. They provided something that no one else was doing.

We didn’t have the bandwidth, the talent internally, to script automation. It's very difficult and it's a very long process, but, they have an accelerator that you can just drag and drop from out-of-the-box Oracle and make changes, as you need to, for their customizations and your personalization.
Seven best practices
for business-ready applications
They also had cFactory, so that when your system changes -- and it will, because your business grows, your process changes -- it tells you the differences. You just click on a form, and it brings back what's there, shows you the comparison on what's changed, and asks if you would like to keep those changes. You don’t have to update your entire test case suite. It does it for you. It takes out that tedious mess of trying to keep updated.

Gardner: Daniel, is this what a lot of your clients go through, and what is it that you're bringing to the table in addition to HP Quality Center that gets their attention and makes this more powerful?

Gannon: Yeah, her story resonates. It’s very, very common for people to have those same issues. If you look at the new style of IT, it's really about two things, the two Vs, volume and velocity. You have a lot more data -- big data -- and it comes at you much faster. The whole notion of agility in business is a real driver, and these are the things that HP is addressing.

Gannon
From the perspective of how we deal with test automation, that’s what our products are designed to do. They enable people to do that quickly, easily, and manage it in a way that doesn't require armies of people, a lot of labor, to make that happen.

If you think about a standard environment like Mary’s at Pomeroy, the typical way people would address that is with a lot of people, a lot of hands, and a lot of manual effort. We think that intelligent software can replace that and help you do things more intelligently, much more quickly, and most importantly, at much, much lower cost.

Gardner: Mary, you've been at this for going on a couple of years. When you do intelligent software well, when you pick your partners well, what sort of results do you get? What’s been the change there?

Cathell: There is a paradigm shift, because now, when they, specifically our sales department, see the tool run, they're wowed. They're working with me to champion the tool to other parts of the business. That's ultimately the biggest reward -- to see people get it and then champion it.

Gardner: Has this translated into your constituents, your users, coming back to you for more customization because they trust this so that they're more interested in working with software, rather than resisting it?

Difficult to automate

Cathell: We absolutely did have that change, again specifically with sales, which is the most difficult process to automate, because it can go in so many different ways. So they're on board. They're leading my fight that we need to do this. This is where this company needs to go. This is where technology is going.

Gardner: And when you bring this mentality of better software quality and giving them the means to do it that’s not too arduous, doesn't that then also extend back into your fuller application development processes? How far back are you going through development and change? Is there a DevOps opportunity here for you to bring this into operations and start to sew this together better?

Cathell: That could happen in the future. Our requirements phase is a lot better, because now they're seeing scenarios with expected results -- pass/fails. Now, when we build something new, they go back and look at what they've written for our test scenarios and say, "Oh, our requirements need to be unambiguous. We need to be more detailed."

I do that liaison work where I speak geek for the developer, and the English for the business. We marry them together, and that creates now new quality products.
At the same time, we provide a common set of tools to provide test automation across the entire portfolio of applications within a company

Gardner: Daniel, Pomeroy uses this to a significant degree with Oracle EBS, but how about some of your other customers? What other applications, activities, and/or products has this been applied to? Do you have any metrics of success across some instances of what people get for this?

Gannon: We find that customers leverage the HP platform as the best-in-class platform for test automation across the broadest portfolio of applications in the industry, which is really powerful. What TurnKey Solutions brings to the table is specialization in conjunction with that platform. Our partnership reaches back well over a decade, where we have developed these solutions together.

We find that people use mission-critical applications, enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications like Oracle EBS, SAP, PeopleSoft and others that run the business. And our solutions address the unique problems of those applications. At the same time, we provide a common set of tools to provide test automation across the entire portfolio of applications within a company.

Many companies will have 600, 700, or thousands of applications that require the same level of due diligence and technology. That's what this kind of combination of technologies provides.

Gardner:  Mary, now that you’ve done this now with some hindsight -- not just from your current job but in previous jobs -- do you have any words of wisdom for other organizations that know that they've got quality issues? They don't always necessarily know how to go about it, but probably think that they would rather have an intelligent, modern approach. Do you have any words of wisdom that you can give them as they get started?

Break it down

Cathell: Absolutely. Everybody wants to look at the big picture -- and you should look at the big picture -- but you need to break it down. Do that in agile form. Make those into iterations. Start small and build up. So if you want to go from the smallest process that you have and keep building upon it, you're going to see more results than trying to tackle this huge elephant in the room that's just unattainable.

Gardner:  A lot of times with new initiatives, it’s important to establish a victory early to show some returns. How did you do that and how would you suggest others do that in order to keep the ball rolling?

Cathell: Get people excited. Get them onboard. Make sure that they're involved in the decision making and let them know what your plans are. Communication is absolute key, and then you have your champions.

Gardner: Daniel, we're here at HP Discover. This is where they open the kimono in many ways in their software and testing and application lifecycle management, businesses. As a long time HP partner, what are you hoping to see. What interests you? Any thoughts about the show in general?
Big data is both problem and opportunity. The problem is it’s big data. How do you cull and create intelligence from this mass of data.

Gannon: What's exciting is that HP addresses IT problems in general. There's no specificity necessarily. What companies really grapple with is how to put together a portfolio of solutions that addresses entire IT needs, rather than simple, specific, smoke stack kinds of solutions. That’s what’s really exciting. HP brings it all together, really delivers, and then values the customers. That’s what I think is really compelling.

Gardner: Okay, how about the emphasis on big data -- recognizing that applications are more now aligned with data and that analysis is becoming perhaps a requirement for more organizations in more instances? How do you see application customization and big data coming together?

Gannon: For me, big data is both problem and opportunity. The problem is it’s big data. How do you cull and create intelligence from this mass of data. That's where the magic lies. Those people who can tease actionable information from these massive data stores have the ability to act upon that.

There are a number of HP solutions that enable you to do just that. That will propel businesses forward to their next level, because you can use that information -- not just data, but information -- to make business decisions that enable customers going forward.

Gardner: Very good. I'm afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We have been learning about how Pomeroy, a Global IT Managed Services Provider in Kentucky has been improving on their quality of application’s development and has found more modernization and intelligence through the combination of HP Quality Center and TurnKey Solutions.

So, a big thank you to our guests. We’ve been talking with Mary Cathell, the Quality Assurance Analyst at Pomeroy in Hebron, Kentucky. Thank you so much. 
Seven best practices
for business-ready applications
Cathell: Thank you, Dana. It was an honor.

Gardner: And also a big thank you to Daniel Gannon, President and CEO of TurnKey Solutions. Thanks.

Gannon: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: And I shouldn't forget to thank our audience as well for joining us for this special new style of IT discussion coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2014 Conference in Las Vegas.

I’m Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how a managed service provider uses HP tools to improve software quality and to speed modernization across application testing and development. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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      Thursday, March 05, 2015

      Kony Visualizer Puts Mobile Apps Features Control in Hands of Those Closest to the Business Processes

      A BriefingsDirect interview on creating dynamic and engaging user interfaces for mobile apps with drag-and-drop ease.

      Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Kony, Inc.

      Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect interview, coming to you from the Kony World 2015 Conference in Orlando.

      Gardner
      I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of penetrating discussions on the latest in enterprise mobility. We're here to explore advancements in mobile applications design and deployment technologies across the full spectrum of edge devices and operating environments.

      For our next innovation interview, we welcome Ed Gross, Kony Vice President of Product Management. Ed is focused on the Kony Visualizer Product, including requirements prototyping, development oversight, release planning, and lifecycle management.

      Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Ed.

      Ed Gross: Thanks, Dana. Glad to be here. It's an exciting event that we're having here at Kony World. We're in the process of educating our customers on our latest releases in our product portfolio. One that I'm most excited about is the 2.0 release of our Visualizer product, which brings a number of next-generation capabilities with it.

      Visualizer is a tool by which you can create engaging and dynamic user experiences on all platforms for mobility, including tablet and desktop as well. What it does is present an opportunity for designers to take back control of the development process of both designing applications and creating rich next-generation user experiences.

      Gross
      If you look at how applications are designed typically, it's a very rigid process of creating wireframes and mockups and then throwing those materials over the wall to developers. Designers today, prior to the Visualizer, didn't really have a suite of tools that they could  use to create these applications directly using the technology.

      Right now, designers create sort of mockups and proxies of that design to hand over to a developer to implement. We thought it would be great if designers had a tool by which they can directly create that user experience in the native and Web channels using the underlying Kony framework.

      With Visualizer you can go in with this what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) environment. It’s actually called WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mobilize). It’s a term that we coined because it’s a unique approach and something we believe to be a new paradigm in designing applications.

      What I can do as a designer is just drag and drop widgets onto my forms. I can create dynamic interactions that really showcase the native capabilities that we have with Visualizer. I can then take that design and publish the actual app to the Kony cloud. Then,  using an app on my phone or tablet, I can then download that design directly, look at all the native interactions, review them, and get a feel for the actual application without having to write any code.

      This is a true native experience, not some sort of web-based proxy, mockup, or set of wireframes. I'm actually creating the app product itself within Visualizer with this WYSIWYG canvas.

      Native capabilities

      We provide access to all the native capabilities. For example, I can use a cover flow widget, a page widget, a calendar, or a camera. I get access to all those rich native capabilities, using what we call actions, without having to go down and write code for all these different platforms.

      Fundamentally, what this also represents is a collaboration opportunity with business and IT. If I'm a designer working under the marketing arm of an organization or I'm a designer or a developer in the IT organization, by using what we call app preview, I can take this design, publish it to the Kony cloud, and bring it into the shell application that you could download from any of the app stores.

      Then, I can review and  write notes on this design. I can send those notes back to the cloud. Ultimately, the Visualizer user can see those comments that I've left across the entire application. They can act upon them and iterate through that design process by republishing that app back to the cloud so that the business user or the developer, the designer, whoever is actually reviewing this application, can annotate on it.

      The fundamental principle here is that you are not just creating a set of assets to hand over to a developer. You’re actually creating the app itself. What’s really fundamental is that we're essentially giving all of the power and all of the control back to the designer, so that the designer can finalize this application and then simply hand it over to the developer using Kony Studio.

      The developer can take it from there without having to rewrite any of the front end of the application. The developer doesn't need to be concerned with creating all of the user experience components by writing code or creating views. They focus on what they do best, which is hooking that application into back-end services and systems, such as SAP, Siebel, or any enterprise service bus connectors.
      What we saw before Visualizer was that most development projects had very large numbers of defects associated with the user experience.

      If you want to integrate with a Web service like an XML, SOAP, or JSON service, you do all that in the studio. You don’t worry about writing all the front-end code. You make it production ready, you wire it, and you do the fundamental business logic of the application and the integration with other products.

      Because what the designer has given you is already complete, and so it cuts down all those cycles. It also cuts down on defects. What we saw before Visualizer was that most development projects had very large numbers of defects associated with the user experience.

      What I mean when I say is that if today you take an application that was developed using other technology and you break down all the defects according to what category they belong in, such as, integration defects or user experience defects, or performance defects, we find that 70 percent to 80 percent of the defects categorically are associated with poor implementation of the user experience.

      In that typical waterfall process that I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of gaps We hand those assets over to a developer, and the developer has to make a lot of assumptions in that process. They have to fill in a lot of the holes that the designer may have left, because the designer is not going to make sure that they design and spec out every single tiny component of that application.

      What winds up happening is that a developer somewhere in that lifecycle will make assumptions and implement something in a way that doesn't satisfy the requirements of the business. So you have to go through that whole process of designing and developing over and over again.

      Rapid iteration

      With Visualizer, you have the capability to quickly iterate. You publish that app design, you get feedback from the business, as I had mentioned earlier, and even during the development process, reiterate through that design process. That integration between Visualizer and our studio project is completely bidirectional.

      At any point in that development process, you can transfer that application design back in Visualizer, make any adjustments, and then reimport it back into Studio. So your product suite is very well-integrated. At Kony, it’s something that we believe is a true differentiator.

      Our core focus is mobility. So we ensure that the developer and designer experience is world class by tightly integrating the entire design and development process and making sure that those two processes are as close as possible to what we call the metal, the underlying channel, and that they can occur in parallel streams. You no longer have to go through sort of a tradition paper-based design process to move forward with implementing your app design.

      Gardner: What is specifically new or some of the highlights in Visualizer 2.0 as well as Framework 6.0?

      Gross: Historically at Kony, we have supported a broad swath of devices. From 2008, look at all Symbian devices, BlackBerry devices, all the way up through iOS, Android, Mobile Web, and even Desktop Web, Windows, etc. What we did is look at our layout model where we had previously recognized that we're going to push forward to the next generation of application design.
      It's focusing on those devices, those smartphones, that can provide that next-generation level of experience that we’ve become used to.

      By doing so we introduce the different paradigm to layout your application using what we call flex layout that’s supported on the next generation of what we call Hero devices. It's focusing on those devices, those smartphones, that can provide that next-generation level of experience that we’ve become used to.

      If you look at Android, iOS, and Windows devices, that’s our core focus as well as Web and Mobile Web. We really up-leveled the entire experience so you can design very engaging experiences using flex layout. We've also introduced a number of capabilities around animation, so that you can get those advanced animation and dynamic interactions that you become used to in consumer grade applications with Kony.

      We've also introduced a suite of APIs around this as well. The developer can create very dynamic experiences, or the designer in Visualizer can create these wonderful experiences using what we call Action Editor to access all of those animation components and a bunch of native components, such as the ability to advanced device level actions like invoke a camera or map widget or send an SMS or an e-mail, all without having to write code.

      Gardner: A recurring theme here and in the industry at large is the need for speed, closing the gap between the demand for mobile apps and what the IT organization and the developer core can produce. Is there anything about Visualizer and Framework that helps the DevOps process along. Perhaps it's being able to target a cloud or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) type of affair, where you can get that into production rapidly. How does what you brought to the market now help in terms of speed?

      Reducing time

      Gross: There are number of things. The first principle here is that we're significantly and seriously reducing the time it takes to get from design to development through this process. We're seeing a 15x or higher improvement in the time it takes to develop the front-end of an application, which is significant, and we believe in that very much. That's probably the most important thing.

      There are tools underneath the hood that support that, including the app preview that I’d mentioned that lets you get on the device native without having to go through any of the development cycles. So it’s a drastic improvement.

      There's also, a huge reduction in the amount of errors in the process. It also increases your capability to iterate. That is really core. You can create multiple designs and use those designs to socialize your idea, your business process, or what impact that will have on your users upfront.
      The first principle here is that we're significantly and seriously reducing the time it takes to get from design to development through this process.

      So I don't have to go through an entire waterfall process to discover that my user experience may not be right and may not be an effective use of my information architecture, for example. I'm able to do all that up front. And all this is supported with the underlying cloud infrastructure at Kony. When I publish my app preview, or if I publish this to a developer, it’s all supported within our cloud infrastructure.

      To get down to brass tacks, I as a designer can publish my project to the Kony cloud and share it with a developer, what we call our functional previews of that application. That app preview that I’d mentioned is all supported with the underlying cloud platform.

      Then, when you look at Studio, our Studio product is highly integrated with our MobileFabric solution, and we’re working in our next release to increase that integration even more. You can invoke our mobile cloud services from our development environment. We're going to be working to merge that entire Studio environment with our Visualizer design components, drastically improving the design and design or develop an integration experience.

      Gardner: And to tie this into some of the other news and announcements here at Kony World, this is targeted at many of your partners and independent software vendors (ISVs), new ones that were brought in and the burgeoning cloud of supporters. Is this also what you expected, for ISVs to use to create those ready-to-deploy apps like Kony Sales, or are these for custom apps, or all of the above?

      Custom app support

      Gross: All of the above. Visualizer, if you look at the lowest level, is really built to support custom app design and development. That’s the traditional core of the Kony technology, the Kony platform stack. We're introducing a new product, Kony Modeler, this month, and that product is actually built on the foundation of Visualizer and our underlying developer framework.

      When you design a Visualizer, you're essentially designing either custom applications or our model-driven business applications such as Kony Sales. The configuration of those applications inside of Modeler as a business analyst or business user does is also built on the Visualizer stack. So everything you do is highly visual, and this speaks to the user-centered development methodology that we see now.

      User experience-driven applications are the future, and we recognize that at Kony. We put the user experience first, not the data model, not writing other kinds of models. We really focus on driving user expectations, increased performance for B2E applications, increased productivity, and it all relates back to user experience.

      Gardner: Before we close out, I just wanted to hammer down a little bit on that ISV community and why they would look to Kony. It seems to me that they're focused on the logic and understanding their industries and businesses.
      We put the user experience first, not the data model, not writing other kinds of models. We really focus on driving user expectations.

      They don't want to have to rewrite code. They don’t want to be in the platform business. What is it that reduces the risk for an ISV who considers the Kony approach? Perhaps it’s in terms of the number of end-point devices, the ability to write once, run everywhere, the quality and speed issues you brought up. Give me a bit more insight as to why an ISV should think about Kony when going to mobile markets?

      Gross: Well there are a number of things that I'll recap. The first one is that you’re greatly reducing the time it takes to get from design to the end product, which is key. Number two, you're able to reduce man-hours in the development process of the front-end experience.

      I'd also like to reiterate that, because of our fundamental underlying JavaScript platform, you're able to write once for all these different channels. A fourth point that I'd like to bring up on top of these is our service-level agreement (SLA), which is unique in the industry.

      At Kony, we have a unique SLA that says that within 30 days of a new operating system release, we will provide support within the Kony platform. Nobody else does that. We guarantee that support across our ISV channels and our direct customers, so that they don’t have to worry about revving up to the next version of the given channel. We really take care of that. We mask our customers from that, so that they can focus on innovation.

      Gardner: Well great. I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We have been learning about how advancements in mobile applications, design and deployment technologies are bringing new productivity benefits across the growing spectrum of edge devices and operating environments, and we’ve seen how quality, speed, and value are rapidly increasing, thanks to the Kony mobility platform and the new tools like Visualizer 2.0.

      So a big thank you to our guest. We’ve been joined by Ed Gross, Kony Vice President of Product Management. Thank you, Ed.

      Gross: Thank you, Dana.

      Gardner: And a big thank you too to our audience for joining this special series coming to you directly from the recent Kony World 2015 Conference in Orlando.

      I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Kony-sponsored BriefingsDirect enterprise mobility discussions. Thanks again for listening, and do come back next time.

      Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Kony, Inc.

      A BriefingsDirect interview on creating dynamic and engaging user interfaces for mobile apps with drag-and-drop ease. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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