Forrester Analyst Kurt Bittner on the Inevitability of DevOps

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on what’s making DevOps such a hot topic and steps that organizations are taking to make it successful.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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

Gardner

Our next thought leadership discussion explores the building interest in DevOps -- of making the development, test, and ongoing improvement in software creation a coordinated, lean, and proficient process for enterprises.

We're here with a prominent IT industry analyst from Forrester Research to explore why DevOps is such a hot topic, and to identify steps that successful organizations are taking to make advanced applications development a major force for business success.

Please join me in welcoming Kurt Bittner, Principal Analyst, Application Development and Delivery at Forrester Research. Welcome, Kurt.

Kurt Bittner: Thanks, Dana. Great to be here.

Gardner: Let’s start by looking at the building interest in DevOps. What’s driving that?

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Bittner: It’s essentially the end-user or client organizations as they face increasing pressure from competition and increasing expectations from customers to delivering functionality faster.

I was at a dinner the other night, and there were half a dozen or so large banks there. They were all saying, to my surprise, that they didn’t feel like they were competing with one another, but that they felt like they were competing with companies like Apple, Google, PayPal, and increasingly startup companies. Square is a good example, too.

They're getting into the payment mechanism, and that’s siphoning our business from the banks. The banks are beginning to see drops in their own bottom lines because of the competition from ... software companies. You see companies like Uber having a big impact on traditional taxi companies and transportation.

Increasing competition

So it’s essentially increasing competition, driven by increasing customer expectations. We're all part of that as consumers where we've gravitating toward our mobile smartphones. We're increasingly interacting with companies through mobile devices.

Bittner

Delivering new functionality through mobile experiences, through cloud experiences, through the web, through various kinds of payment mechanisms -- all of these things contribute to the need to deliver services much faster.

Startup companies get this and they're already adopting these techniques in large numbers. What we're finding is that traditional companies are increasingly saying, "We have to do this. This a competitive threat to us." Like Blockbuster Video, they may cease to exist if they don’t.

Gardner: Companies like Apple or Uber probably define themselves as being technology companies. That’s what they do. Software is a huge part of what makes them a successful company. It defines them. What is it that DevOps brings to the table for them and others?

Bittner: DevOps optimizes the software delivery pipeline, all the steps that you have to go through between when you have an idea and when a customer starts benefiting from that idea. In the traditional delivery processes, you have lots of hand-offs, lots of stops and starts. You have relatively inefficient processes, and it can take months -- and sometimes years -- to go from idea to having somebody get a benefit.

With DevOps, we're reducing the size of the things you're delivering, so you can deliver more frequently. Then, you can eliminate hand-offs and inefficiencies in the delivery process, so that you can deliver it as fast as possible with higher quality.

Gardner: And what was broken? What needs to be fixed? Wasn’t Agile suppose to fix this?

Bittner: Agile is part of the solution, but many Agile teams find that they'd like to be more agile. They're held back by lack of testing environments. They're held back by lack of testing automation. They're held back by lack of deployment automation. They, themselves, have lots of barriers.

So, Agile is part of the solution in the sense of involving the business more on a day-to-day basis in the project decision-making. It also provides the ability to break a problem down into smaller increments, and at least demonstrate in smaller increments, but it doesn’t actually deliver into production in smaller increments.

Other capabilities

You need to have other capabilities to do that. One illustration of how DevOps helps to accelerate Agile came in talking to a large manufacturing organization that was making the transition to Agile.

They had a problem in that they weren't able to get to development or test environments for months. IT operations processes had been set up in a very siloed way. Development and testing environments got low priority when other things were going on.

So, as much as the team wanted to work in an Agile way, they couldn’t get a rapid test environment. In effect, they were completely stopped from any forward progress. There's only so much you can do on a developer workstation.

These DevOps practices benefit Agile as well, by enabling Agile to really fully realize the promise that it’s had.

These DevOps practices benefit Agile as well, enabling Agile to really fully realize the promise that it’s had.

Gardner: Is there a change in philosophy, too, Kurt, where software is released before it's really cooked and let the environment, the real world, be their test bed, their simulation if you will? And then they do rapid iterations? Are we going to begin seeing that now, as DevOps gains ground in established traditional enterprises?

Bittner: You're right. There is a tendency toward getting functionality out there, seeing what the market says about it, and then improving. That works in certain areas. For example, Google has an internal motto that says if you're not somewhat embarrassed by your first release, you didn’t move fast enough.

But we also have to realize that we have software in our automobiles and in our aircraft, and you don’t want to put something out there into those environments that’s basically not functional.

I separate the measures of quality from measures of aesthetic qualities. The software that gets delivered early has to be high-quality. It can’t be buggy. It has to work and satisfy a certain set of needs. But there's a wide variety of variability on whether people will like it or not or whether people will use it or not.

So when organizations are delivering quickly and getting feedback from the market, they're really getting feedback on things like usability and aesthetics and not necessarily on some critical business-processing capability. Or let’s say the software in your anti-lock braking system (ABS) system in your car. You don’t want that to fail, but you might be very interested in how the climate-control system works.

That may be subject to wide variations. To get better fuel efficiency, you may be willing to sacrifice something in the air conditioner to provide better efficiency. So, it’s largely driving feedback on non-safety-critical features. That's where most organizations are focused. 

More feedback

Gardner: You mentioned feedback. That seems to be a core aspect of DevOps, more feedback between operations, the real world, the use of software, and the development  and test process. How do we compress that feedback loop -- not only for user experience, but also data coming out of an embedded system, for example -- so that we can improve? Let’s address feedback and compressing the feedback-loop.

Bittner: If you think about what traditional application releases do, they tend to bundle a lot of different features into a single release. If you think about this from a statistical perspective, that means you have a lot of independent variables. You can’t tell when something improves. You can’t tell why it improved, because you have so many variables in there.

In the feedback loop with DevOps, you want to make the increment of releases as small as possible, basically one thing at a time, and then measure the result from that, so you know that your results improve because of that one single feature.

The other thing is that we start to shift toward a more outcome-oriented software release. You're not releasing features, but you're doing things that will change a customer’s outcome. If it doesn’t change a customer’s outcome, the customer doesn’t really care.

You optimize the delivery cycle, removing waste and hand-offs to make that as fast as possible with a high degrees of automation.

So by having the increment of a release be one outcome at a time, and then measuring the result from that, you get the capabilities out there as quickly as possible. Then you can tell whether you actually improved because of what you just did. If you didn’t improve, then you stop doing that and do something else.

Gardner: Is that what you mean by continuous delivery, these iterative small parts, rather than the whole big dump every six to 12 months?

Bittner: That’s a big part of it. Continuous delivery is also, more precisely, a process by which you make small changes. You optimize the delivery cycle, removing waste and hand-offs to make that as fast as possible with a high degrees of automation, so that you can get out there and get the feedback as quickly as possible.

So, it’s a combination. It needs not just fast delivery, but a number of techniques that are used to improve that delivery.

Gardner: Folks listening and reading this might very well like the idea of DevOps: "I'd like to do DevOps; where do I buy it?" DevOps, though, isn't really a product, a box, or a download. It’s a way of thinking in a methodological approach. How people go about implementing DevOps? Where do you start?

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Bittner: You’re right. It's more of a philosophy than a product. It’s not even really a product category, but a bunch of different products, and processes, and to some degree, a philosophy behind that. When we talk to organizations that implemented this successfully, there are a couple of patterns.

First of all, you don't implement DevOps across an entire organization all at once. It tends to happen product by product, team by team. It happens first in the applications that are very customer-facing, because that's where the most pressure is right now. That’s where the biggest benefit is. So on the team-by-team basis, first of all you have to have some executive mandate to make a change. Somebody has to feel like this is important enough to the company.

While developers, engineers, and IT Ops people can be passionate about this, it typically requires executive leadership to get this to happen, because these changes cut across traditional organizational silos. Without some executive sponsorship, these initiatives tend not to go very far.

There's too much wait time when people are assigned to multiple projects or multiple applications.

The first step – and this is sort of very mundane area -- tends to be changing the way that environments are provisioned. That includes getting environments provisioned on-demand, using techniques like infrastructure-as-code to automatically generate environments based on configuration settings so that you can have an environment anytime you need it. That removes a lot of friction and a lot of delays.

The second thing that tends to be implemented are techniques like continuous integration and then, after that, test automation, based on APIs. There's a shift to APIs on an integrated architecture for the applications, and then usually deployment automation comes after that. Once you have environments provisioned in code that you can put into those environments, you need a way to move that code between environments.

As you make those changes, you start to run into organizational barriers, silos in the organization, that prevent effectively working together. There's too much wait-time when people are assigned to multiple projects or multiple applications.

There's a shift in team structure to become more product-oriented with dedicated resources to a product, so that you can release, and do release after release most effectively. That tends to break the organization silos down and start shifting to a more product-centric organization and away from a functionally oriented organization.

All of those changes together typically take years, but it usually starts with some sort of executive mandate, then environment provisioning, and so on.

Management capability

Gardner: It sounds, too, that it's important to have better management capabilities across these silos -- with metrics, dashboards, validating efforts, of being able to measure discretely what's going on, and then reinforce the good and discard the bad.

Are there any particular existing ways of doing that? I'm thinking about the long-term application lifecycle management (ALM) marketplace. Does that lend itself to DevOps? Should we start from scratch and create a new management layer, if you will, across the whole continuum of software design, test, and delivery?

Bittner: It’s a little bit of both. DevOps is really an outgrowth of ALM, and all of the aspects of ALM are there. You need to be able to manage the work, track the work, and to determine what work got done. In addition to that, you’re adding automation in the areas that I was just describing; environment provisioning, continuous integration, test automation, and deployment automation.

There's another component that becomes really important, because out of those applications, you want to start gathering customer experience data. So things like operational and application analytics are important to start measuring the customer experience.

You don’t find one DevOps suite from one company that provides everything.

Combining all of those into a single view, single dashboard is evolving now. The ALM tools are evolving in that direction, and there are ways of visualizing that. But right now it tends to be a multi-vendor ecosystem. You don’t find one DevOps suite from one company that provides everything.

But the good news is that the same thing that’s been happening in the rest of the industry around services and interoperability has happened in applications. We have a high degree of interoperability between tools from different vendors today that allows you to customize this delivery pipeline to give you the DevOps capability.

Gardner: It seems that, in some ways, the prominence of hybrid cloud models, mobile, and mobile-first thinking, when it comes to development, are accelerants to DevOps. If you have that multiple cloud goal, you're going to want to standardize on your production environment. Hence, also the interest in containers these days. And, of course, mobile-first forces you to think about user experience, small iterations apps, rather than applications. Do you see an acceleration from these other trends reinforcing DevOps?

Bittner: It’s both reinforcing it and, to some degree, causing it, because it's mobile that’s triggered this explosion and the need for DevOps -- the need for faster delivery. To a large degree, the mobile application is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Very few mobile applications stand alone. They all have very rich services running behind them. They have systems of record providing the data. Virtually every mobile application is really a composite application with some parts in the cloud and some parts in traditional data centers.

The development across all of those different code lines and the coordination of releases across all those different code lines really requires the DevOps approach to be able to do that successfully.

Demand and complexity

So it's both demand created by higher customer expectations from mobile customers, but also the complexity of delivering these applications in a really rapid way across all those different platforms. You made an interesting point about cloud and containers being both drivers for demand and also enablers, but they're also changing the nature of the work.

As containers and microservices become more prevalent -- we’re seeing growth in those areas -- it's increasing the complexity of application delivery. It simplifies the deployment, but it increases the complexity. Now, instead of having to coordinate dozens of moving parts, you have to coordinate hundreds and, we think, in the future, thousands of moving parts. That's well beyond what somebody can do with spreadsheets and manual management techniques.

The other thing is that cloud simplifies environment provisioning tremendously and it provides this great elastic infrastructure for deploying applications. But it also simplifies it by standardizing environments, making it all software configurable. It's a tremendous benefit to delivering applications faster and it gives you much more flexibility than traditional data-center applications. There's definitely movement toward those kind of applications, especially for DevOps.

Cloud simplifies environment provisioning tremendously and it provides this great elastic infrastructure for deploying applications.

Gardner: When I heard you mention the complexity, it certainly sounds like automating and moving away from manual processes, standardizing processes across your development test-to-deploy continuum, would be really important steps to take.

Bittner: Absolutely. I would say more than important. It’s absolutely essential that, without automation and that data-driven visibility into what's happening in the applications, there's almost no way to deliver these applications at speed. We find that many organizations are releasing quarterly now, not necessarily the same app every quarter, but they have a quarterly release cycle. At quarterly rates of speed, through seat of the pants and sort of brute force, you can manage to get that release out. It’s pretty painful, but you can survive.

If you turn up the clock rate faster than that and try to get down to monthly, those manual processes completely fall apart. We have organizations today that want to be delivering at weekly and daily intervals, especially in SaaS-based environments or cloud-based environments. Those kinds of delivery speeds are inconceivable with any kind of manual processes. As organizations move away from quarterly releases to faster releases, they have to adopt these techniques.

Gardner: Listening to you Kurt, it sounds like DevOps isn't another buzzword or another flashy marketing term. It really sounds inevitable, if you're going to succeed in software.

Bittner: It is inevitable, and over the next five years, what we’ll see is that the word itself will probably fade, because it will simply become the way that organizations work.

Gardner: I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been exploring the popularity of DevOps for making sure that development, test, deployment and ongoing improvement in software creation are coordinated, lean, and proficient process. We've heard from a prominent industry analyst at Forrester Research about what’s making DevOps such a hot topic and steps that organizations are taking to make it successful.

Please join me in thanking Kurt Bittner, Principal Analyst Applications Development and Delivery at Forrester Research.

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And a big thank you also to our audience as well for joining us for this DevOps thought leadership discussion. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HPE-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on what’s making DevOps such a hot topic and steps that organizations are taking to make it successful. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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Agile on Fire: IT Enters the New Era of 'Continuous' Everything

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on the concept of continuous processes around development and deployment of applications.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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

Gardner

Our next DevOps Thought Leadership Discussion explores the concept of continuous processes around the development and deployment of applications and systems. Put the word continuous in front of many things and we help define DevOps: continuous delivery, continuous testing, continuous assessment, and there is more.

To help better understand the continuous nature of DevOps, we're joined by two guests, James Governor, Founder and Principal Analyst at RedMonk, and Ashish Kuthiala, Senior Director of Marketing and Strategy for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) DevOps. Welcome to you both.

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Ashish Kuthiala: Hi, glad to be here, Dana.

Gardner: Ashish, we hear a lot about feedback loops in DevOps between production and development, test and production. Why is the word "continuous" now cropping up so much? What do we need to do differently in IT in order to compress those feedback loops and make them impactful?

Kuthiala: Gone are the days where you would see the next version 2.0 coming out in six months and 2.1 coming out three months after that.

Kuthiala

If you use some of the modern applications today, you never see Facebook 2.0 is coming out tomorrow or Google 3.1 is being released. They are continuously and always making improvements from the back-end onto the platforms of the users -- without the users even realizing that they're getting improvements, a better user experience, etc.

In order to achieve that, you have to continuously be building those new innovations into your product. And, of course, as soon as you change something you need to test it and roll it all the way into production.

In fact, we joke a lot about how if everything is continuous, why don’t we drop the word continuous and just call it planning, testing, or development, like we do today, and just say that you continuously do this. But we tend to keep using this word "continuous" before everything.

I think a lot of it is to drive home the point across the IT teams and organizations that you can no longer do this in chunks of three, six, or nine months -- but you always have to keep doing this.

Governor: How do you do the continuous assessment of your continuous marketing?

Continuous assessment

Kuthiala: We joke about the continuous marketing of everything. The continuous assessment term, despite my objections to the word continuous all the time, is a term that we've been talking about at HPE.

The idea here is that for most software development teams and production teams, when they start to collaborate well, take the user experience, the bugs, and what’s not working on the production end at the users’ hands -- where the software is being used -- and feed those bugs and the user experience back to the development teams.

When companies actually get to that stage, it’s a significant improvement. It’s not the support teams telling you that five users were screaming at us today about this feature or that feature. It’s the idea that you start to have this feedback directly from the users’ hands.

We should stretch this assessment piece a little further. Why assess the application or the software when it’s at the hands of the end users? The developer, the enterprise architects, and the planners design an application and they know best how it should function.

Whether it’s monitoring tools or it’s the health and availability of the application, start to shift left, as we call it. I'd like James to comment more about this, because he knows a lot about the development space. The developer knows his code best; let him experience what the user is starting to experience.

Governor: My favorite example of this is that, as an analyst, you're always looking for those nice metaphors and ways to talk about the world -- one notion of quality I was very taken with was when I was reading about the history if ship-building and the roles and responsibilities involved in building a ship.

Governor

One of the things they found was that if you have a team doing the riveting separate from doing the quality assurance (QA) on the riveting, the results are not as good. Someone will happily just go along -- rivet, rivet, rivet, rivet -- and not really care if they're doing a great job, because somebody else is going to have to worry about the quality.

As they moved forward with this, they realized that you needed to have the person doing the riveting also doing the QA. That’s a powerful notion of how things have changed.

Certainly the notion of shifting left and doing more testing earlier in the process, whether that be in terms of integration, load testing, whatever, all the testing needs to happen up front and it needs to be something that the developers are doing.

The new suite of tools we have makes it easier for developers to have better experiences around that, and we should take advantage.

Lean manufacturing

One of the other things about continuous is that we're making reference to manufacturing modes and models. Lean manufacturing is something that led to fewer defects, apart from one catastrophic example to the contrary. And we're looking at that and asking how we can learn from that.

So lean manufacturing ties into lean startups, which ties into lean and continuous assessment.

What’s interesting is that now we're beginning to see some interplay between the two and paying that forward. If you look at GM, they just announced a team explicitly looking at Twitter to find user complaints very, very early in the process, rather than waiting until you had 10,000 people that were affected before you did the recall.

Last year was the worst year ever for recalls in American car manufacturing, which is interesting, because if we have continuous improvement and everything, why did that happen? They're actually using social tooling to try to identify early, so that they can recall 100 cars or 1,000 cars, rather than 50,000.

It’s that monitoring really early in the process, testing early in the process, and most importantly, garnering user feedback early in the process. If GM can improve and we can improve, yes.

Gardner: I remember in the late '80s, when the Japanese car makers were really kicking the pants out of Detroit, that we started to hear a lot about simultaneous engineering. You wouldn’t just design something, but you designed for its manufacturability at the same time. So it’s a similar concept.

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But going back to the software process, Ashish, we see a level of functionality in software that needs to be rigorous with security and performance, but we're also seeing more and more the need for that user experience for features and functions that we can’t even guess at, that we need to put into place in the field and see what happens.

How does an enterprise get to that point, where they can so rapidly do software that they're willing to take a chance and put something out to the users, perhaps a mobile app, and learn from its actual behavior? We can get the data, but we have to change our processes before we can utilize it. 

Kuthiala: Absolutely. Let me be a little provocative here, but I think it’s a well-known fact that the era of the three-year, forward-looking roadmaps is gone. It’s good to have a vision of where you're headed, but what feature, function and which month will you release so that the users will find it useful? I think that’s just gone, with this concept of the minimum viable product (MVP) that more startups take off with and try to build a product and fund themselves as they gain success.

It’s an approach even that bigger enterprises need to take. You don't know what the end users’ tastes are.

I change my taste on the applications I use and the user experience I get, the features and functionality. I'm always looking at different products, and I switch my mind quite often. But if I like something and they're always delivering the right user experience for me, I stick with them.

Capture the experience

The way for an enterprise to figure out what to build next is to capture this experience, whether it’s through social media channels or engineering your codes so that you can figure out what the user behavior actually is.

The days of business planners and developers sitting in cubicles and thinking this is the coolest thing I'm going to invent and roll out is not going to work anymore. You definitely need that for innovation, but you need to test that fairly quickly.

Also gone are the days of rolling back something when something doesn’t work. If something doesn’t work, if you can deliver software really quickly at the hands of end users, you just roll forward. You don’t roll back anymore.

It could be a feature that’s buggy. So go and fix it, because you can fix it in two days or two hours, versus the three- to six-month cycle. If you release a feature and you see that most users -- 80 percent of the users -- don’t even bother about it, turn it off, and introduce the new feature that you were thinking about.

This assessment from the development, testing, and production that you're always doing starts to benefit you. When you're standing up for that daily sprint and wondering what are the three features I'm going to work on as a team, whether it’s the two things that your CEO told you you have to absolutely do it, because "I think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread," or it’s the developer saying, "I think we should build this feature," or some use case is coming out of the business analyst or enterprise architects.

We have wonderful new platforms that enable us to store a lot more data than we could before at a reasonable cost.

Now you have data. You have data across all these teams. You can start to make smarter decisions and you can choose what to build and not build. To me, that's the value of continuous assessment. You can invest your $100 for that day in the two things you want to do. None of us has unlimited budgets.

Gardner: For organizations that grok this, that say, "I want continuous delivery. I want continuous assessment," what do we need to put in place to actually execute on it to make it happen?

Governor: We've spoken a lot about cultural change, and that’s going to be important. One of the things, frankly, that is an underpinning, if we're talking about data and being data-driven, is just that we have wonderful new platforms that enable us to store a lot more data than we could before at a reasonable cost.

There were many business problems that were stymied by the fact that you would have to spend the GDP of a country in order to do the kind of processing that you wanted to, in order to truly understand how something was working. If we're going to model the experiences, if we are going to collect all this data, some of the thinking about what's infrastructure for that so that you can analyze the data is going to be super important. There's no point talking in being data-driven if you don’t have architecture for delivering on that.

Gardner: Ashish, how about loosely integrated capabilities across these domains, tests, build, requirements, configuration management, and deployment? It seems that HPE is really at the center of a number of these technologies. Is there a new layer or level of integration that can help accelerate this continuous assessment capability?

Rich portfolio

Kuthiala: You're right. We have a very rich portfolio across the entire software development cycle. You've heard about our Big Data Platform. What can it really do, if you think about it? James just referred to this. It’s cheaper and easier to store data with the new technologies, whether it’s structured, unstructured, video, social, etc., and you can start to make sense out of it when you put it all together.

There is a lot of rich data in the planning and testing process, and all the different lifecycles. A simple example is a technology that we've worked on internally, where when you start to deliver software faster and you change one line of code and you want this to go out. You really can’t afford to do the 20,000 tests that you think you need to do, because you're not sure what's going to happen.

We've actually had data scientists working internally in our labs, studying the patterns, looking at the data, and testing concepts such as intelligent testing. If I change this one line of code, even before I check it in, what parts of the code is it really affecting, what functionality? If you are doing this intelligently, does it affect all the regions of the world, the demographics? What feature function does it affect?

We've actually had data scientists working internally in our labs, studying the patterns, looking at the data, and testing concepts such as intelligent testing.

It's helping you narrow down whether will it break the code, whether it will actually affect certain features and functions of this software application that’s out there. It's narrowing it down and helping you say, "Okay, I only need to run these 50 tests and I don't need to go into these 10,000 tests, because I need to run through this test cycle fast and have the confidence that it will not break something else."

So it's a cultural thing, like James said, but the technologies are also helping make it easier.

Gardner: It’s interesting. We're borrowing concepts from other domains in the past as well -- just-in-time testing or fit-for-purpose testing, or lean testing?

Kuthiala: We were talking about Lean Functional Testing (LeanFT) at HP Discover. I won't talk about that here in terms of product, but the idea is exactly that. The idea is that the developer, like James said, knows his code well. He can test it well before and he doesn’t throw it over the wall and let the other team take a shot at it. It’s his responsibility. If he writes a line of code, he should be responsible for the quality of it.

Gardner: And it also seems that the integration across this continuum can really be the currency of analysis. When we have data and information made available, that's what binds these processes together, and we're starting to elevate and abstract that analysis up and it make it into a continuum, rather than a waterfall or a hand-off type of process.

Before we close out, any other words that we should put in front of continuous as we get closer to DevOps -- continuous security perhaps?

Security is important

Kuthiala: Security is a very important topic and James and I have talked about it a lot with some other thought leaders. Security is just like testing. Anything that you catch early on in the process is a lot easier and cheaper to fix than if you catch it in the hands of the end users, where now it’s deployed to tens and thousands of people.

It’s a cultural shift. The technology has always been there. There's a lot of technology within and outside of HP that you need to incorporate the security testing and the discipline right into the development and planning process and not leave it towards the end.

In terms of another continuous word, I mean I can come up with continuous Dana Gardner podcast.

Governor: There you go.

Gardner: Continuous discussions about DevOps.

One of the things that RedMonk is very interested in, and it's really our view in the world, is that, increasingly, developers are making the choices, and then we're going to find ways to support the choices they are making.

Governor: One of the things that RedMonk is very interested in, and it's really our view in the world, is that, increasingly, developers are making the choices, and then we're going to find ways to support the choices they are making.

It was very interesting to me that the term continuous integration began as a developer term, and then the next wave of that began to be called continuous deployment. That's quite scary for a lot of organizations. They say, "These developers are talking about continuous deployment. How is that going to work?"

The circle was squared when I had somebody come in and say what we're talking to customers about is continuous improvement, which of course is a term again that we saw in manufacturing and so on.

But the developer aesthetic is tremendously influential here, and this change has been driven by them. My favorite "continuous" is a great phrase, continuous partial attention, which is the world we all live in now.

Gardner: I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been exploring the concept of continuous processes around development and deployment of applications.

I'd like to thank our guests, James Governor, Founder and Principal Analyst at RedMonk, and Ashish Kuthiala, Senior Director of Marketing and Strategy for HPE DevOps.

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I'd also like to thank our audience for joining this special DevOps Thought Leadership Discussion. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HPE-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

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Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on the concept of continuous processes around development and deployment of applications. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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