Application Development Industry Analysts Weigh in on Greatest Gains Made in DevOps/ALM in 2016

Source – blogs.collab.net

Last year was a monumental one for CollabNet. Our customers, partners, and staff helped us to:

Make significant improvements to TeamForge, our popular enterprise application lifecycle management (ALM) product.
Launch a partnership with non-profit #YesWeCode to engender diverse workforce growth in our community.
Announce a global partnership with Spain-based application release automation (ARA) provider Clarive Software.
Release the innovative solution CollabNet DevOps Lifecycle Manager (DLM) designed for managing the entire DevOps lifecycle through a single platform.

That’s just to name a few of our milestones.

The world of application development saw some significant changes as well.

As every IT professional knows, a whole lot can happen in one year when it comes to technology. Looking back, we’re pleased to see all kinds of organizations, including those in government, continuing to make strides in Agile development and even more organizations, some very traditional, moving to DevOps practices – all to improve the quality of software and to speed its development and delivery!

We’ve interviewed some of the industry’s top analysts to find out what last year’s biggest successes were, what changes are coming in 2017, and what major challenges organizations will face this year in adopting DevOps and becoming more agile.

In this blog series (two more posts to follow), we’ll share the analysts’ responses to each of our three questions, beginning today with:

“What were the greatest successes made in 2016 in the software development industry, specifically for ALM and DevOps?”

“DevOps/ALM coming of age. Rather than being a ragtag collection of disparate tools chosen and used by individuals for their own ends, we are finally seeing tools coming through that enable full collaboration and control along the entire lifecycle, while still enabling a degree of individual choice as to the base tools being used.”

Clive Longbottom, Founder and Analyst at Quocirca

“I think the biggest success in the industry is simply getting companies to understand the significant value, and in some cases, the need for tools to assist in DevOps. DevOps and Agile are more than just the frameworks and ideas for faster application development but should be the model for the operational usage of them. That shift toward implementing operational usage and the tools needed for it was very important.”

Edwin Yuen, Analyst at ESG

“In application development and deployment, DevOps is now the new normal. Surveys are showing that virtually all enterprises practice Agile to some degree. The growing maturity of CI/CD products means that enterprises will be able to see higher levels of automation in the pipeline, faster time to value, higher levels of software quality, and increased IT productivity.”

Stephen Hendrick, AD Research

“Containers have been with us for awhile now. The issue has been portability and standardization. The Open Container Initiative Docker PoC and Release Candidates opened the door for industry standards around container formats, which will support greater portability in the ALM/DevOps space.”

Altaz Valani, Senior Research Director, Application Development Practice at InfoTech Research Group

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves! Tools abound in the DevOps lifecycle, but we’re seeing an even greater need today for integration of the entire toolchain. This will become even more important for organizations in 2017.

And, as long-time advocates of collaboration, sharing, re-use, and continuous feedback, we’re thrilled to have seen DevOps gaining traction among IT business leaders. Indeed, DevOps and Agile concepts are transforming both operations and software development, and the entire organization is benefitting as a result.

As is the case with cloud computing and Agile, we’ve been committed to DevOps (before it was even called DevOps) for quite some time, and it’s wonderful to see the IT community understanding the building blocks of our mission – to develop better quality software faster.