Whether you’re developing an external-facing financial application or an internal claim system for an insurance company, your DevOps team is always amid making continuous changes to your applications for defect remediation, performance improvements, security, and functional updates. While mobile apps bring additional requirements across iOS and Android platforms. And all that code needs to be verified and validated by your Quality Assurance (QA) team on a timely basis, both to improve the quality of your product and to meet your software delivery schedule.  

It’s important to ensure that recent changes aren’t corrupting or slowing down your apps, however the accelerated delivery of applications with weekly or daily changes can strain the resources of even the most talented AppDev and QA teams.  

That’s why it’s top of mind to align your DevOps and QA teams during development cycles using tools that are purpose-built for verification and validation and enabling your teams to improve quality without slowing down delivery. By optimizing the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and efficiently aligning it to business drivers you can improve your continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. 

What about the complexities of my custom pipeline? 

Melillo gives guidance for our customers around the Micro Focus application delivery and application modernization toolsets. Which are designed to accelerate and optimize DevOps from strategy to delivery, both on-prem and in the cloud. 

Our customers often ask, “How does this development tool fit into our Jenkins pipeline?” Or they want to know, “Can we automatically kick off a performance tests after invoking functional and API tests after a build push?”  

As mentioned earlier a software release is typically addressing a few things such as defects that have been identified, enhancement requests to improve specific functionality, or new features that are business critical or part of an ongoing backlog These items are driving the requirement to release the new software as well as test and validate that any identified defects have been resolved, enhancement requests or performance requirements have been met, and that security, like multi-factor authentication, is working properly. 

Those capabilities are supported within the Micro Focus toolset. Now you can take a software release and have test integrations referenced directly in the pipeline, which directly improves the efficiency of development with test automation. This gets back to the goal of breaking down the walls between AppDev and QA, increasing communication and the quality of a software or application update.   

The Melillo team helps existing customers who are already using the Micro Focus tools – ALM Octane, LoadRunner, UFT and others – understand what has changed in the tools and what new capabilities are available. Often, we find ourselves letting customers know that what they are looking for is already in the software license they own, and we just need to train them in its use.  

Of course, customers can download a data sheet or access online help file, but they really appreciate the opportunity to consult with someone directly who has years of experience with these solutions and say, “Tell me how LoadRunner Cloud is going to help me versus LoadRunner Enterprise that I have been using for 15 years now.” We can walk them through the different scenarios and benefits of using one over the other. 

Some customers have come to us saying that they don’t want to manage and maintain a physical data center and that they want to migrate AppDev solutions into the cloud. But when they have already made significant investments in time and resources into developing a process, customized tooling with historical data, they don’t want to lose those investments during migration. This is where we provide a level of solution awareness to highlight key questions, preparation, and potential risks that might exist before a major upgrade or migration from on-prem to cloud. 

An example of this concern is one customer that asked how they could take a library of performance test scripts and scenarios they had developed over time that they didn’t want to lose as they migrated from LoadRunner Enterprise to LoadRunner Cloud. We were able to support them on how to best prepare for that in-house or with a services engagement to minimize downtime and take advantage of the latest capabilities ASAP. 

Melillo helps customers through the entire process so they can better understand the capabilities and opportunities available in their DevOps tool chains and increase alignment between the AppDev and QA practices. 

Questions? Feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn or at Kent@mjm.com