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Contents

VOLUME 2, ISSUE 62 • AUGUST 2022

FEATURES

NEWS 4

News Watch

Coding bootcamps provide great opportunities for future developers

Octopus Deploy introduces cloud native features

OctoML launches machine learning platform expansion

The biggest challenges facing developer managers today

page 8

COLUMNS 32 GUEST VIEW by Kerem Balci A senior engineer’s survival handbook

33 ANALYST VIEW by Jason English

DevOps Feedback Loop Explained: Delayed Feedback page 12

Hopping on the low-code locomotive

34 INDUSTRY WATCH by David Rubinstein

The future of working in the Metaverse

The tech generation gap

BUYERS GUIDE You can’t do more with less And agile helps companies stay focused on what really matters

page 28

page 16

Automated testing still lags

page 22 Software Development Times (ISSN 1528-1965) is published 12 times per year by D2 Emerge LLC, 2 Roberts Lane, Newburyport, MA 01950. Periodicals postage paid at Newburyport, MA, and additional offices. SD Times is a registered trademark of D2 Emerge LLC. All contents © 2022 D2 Emerge LLC. All rights reserved. The price of a one-year subscription is US$179 for subscribers in the U.S., $189 in Canada, $229 elsewhere. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to SD Times, 2 Roberts Lane, Newburyport, MA 01950. SD Times subscriber services may be reached at subscriptions@d2emerge.com.

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NEWS WATCH Visual Studio update: Git branch switching, C++ experience Some users may have previously experienced delays when switching branches, or had to wait for projects to reload after switching branches. According to Microsoft, the process of switching between branches in Visual Studio using Git tooling requires the program to invoke the corresponding Git command for checking out the branch, as well as invoking applicable project and solution reloads, which can take a long time depending on what is required. One of the improvements

Microsoft is rolling out is to avoid having to reload for many scenarios. This is achieved by using targeted in place solution updates. The company also improved the solution and project reload time and reduced corresponding blocking operations. Microsoft claims that the number of needed branch switches have been reduced by about 80% and solution reloads have been improved by 30%, on average. The company also improved development speed when coding in C++. Improvements include reduced indexing time and an updated Go to All experience. According to the company,

People on the move

n Red Hat has announced that Matt Hicks will be taking over as president and chief executive officer, replacing Paul Cormier in the role. Hicks has been at Red Hat for 15 years and has worked in several different areas of the business. As CEO he will focus on scaling the company and accelerating the adoption of open source technology. n Alexandre Pinto is joining Signal AI as the company’s new SVP of data science. Pinto has over 20 years of experience in the industry and holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from the NOVA School of Science and Technology at NOVA University of Lisbon. He also has received an award for excellent innovation from the European Commission and is a guest lecturer at Imperial College London. n SD-WAN provider Aryaka has appointed Srini Addepalli as its new chief technology officer to drive the company’s existing platform into a next generation SASE platform. Previously he was a technology strategist and architect at Intel. n Network integration company LightRiver has announced the appointment of Scotty Benda as its new chief product officer. Prior to joining LightRiver, Benda held senior positions at Nortel, Lucient, ONI, and Ciena. n Contrast Security has named Ben Goodman senior vice president of corporate development and strategic alliances. He will be responsible for strengthening current partnerships and developing new ones, as well as building up the alliance team at the company. Before this role he held the same title at ForgeRock.

in Visual Studio 2019 16.11, it would take about 26 minutes for the Chromium repository to index fully, and with this latest update it should take about six minutes to do the same. The company also gave examples of coding in an Unreal Engine 5 solution, which has a 72 second improvement in Visual Studio 2022 17.3 over Visual Studio 2019 16.11, and a 4.3x faster time to colorization after a cold start. Go to All is a Visual Studio feature for moving around quickly in files. As of this release, results will show up as you type rather than after you stop typing. Go to All also now includes Contextual Code Previews, which allows developers to preview code search results and make edits within the code.

CodeLogic introduces Continuous Software Intelligence platform This new developer toolkit scans post-compile binaries, runtime app behavior, and database connections in order to offer a complete picture of infrastructure-wide software connections and dependencies. According to Stack Overflow, a lack of productivity is the top cause of unhappiness among developers and with this release, CodeLogic seeks to solve that complexity. The new Continuous Software Intelligence platform works to free developers from managing break/fix cycles, training new team members, chasing down vulnerabilities for security audits, evaluating technical debt, and other activities that don’t involve coding. According to CodeLogic, this new platform assists developers in ending break/fix cycles by exposing all software

connections and interdependencies by performing postcompile scans of binary code and scanning runtime environments. Additionally, users gain access to heightened visibility into software structures that are not present in the source code itself. This includes inserted third-party libraries, stored procedure calls, and database connections. The new platform also works to inform development strategy by helping to accurately predict and scope planned projects by fully understanding downstream impacts to reconsider proposed plans and roadmaps before the team begins heavily working on them.

SmartBear rolls out web testing on BitBar This comes as an answer to user requests for an all-in-one web and native mobile app testing solution. This release will bring users reliable and streamlined cloud-based testing available with instant access to all of the latest browsers and devices in order to support a consistent digital customer experience. According to the company, BitBar is highly scalable and performant, helping it to support the diversity of every test automation framework, environment, and language that software testers are already using. BitBar enables testing teams that are responsible for ensuring a consistent, highquality experience to quickly and securely test across real browsers and devices without needing to maintain those inhouse. In addition, new deploy-

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ment options, including private cloud and dedicated devices, are available in order to support enterprise complex use cases and security needs.

CData Arc Cloud adds integration automation This release works to enable organizations to automate their B2B integration workflows in minutes and share data with partners both in the cloud and on premises. According to the company, CData Arc Cloud brings businesses comprehensive no-code B2B solutions in the cloud, allowing businesses across several industries to simply modernize and streamline their EDI, MFT, API, and application integration strategy. The cloud solution also helps to reduce IT bottlenecks by ensuring that every user has the ability to connect their data and handle more complicated B2B workflows without the need to write or maintain code. This release brings several new features, including an intuitive visual interface with drag-and-drop features, builtin reporting, and powerful business rules to allow teams to easily monitor and maintain integrations without the need for specialized skills.

CodeSee introduces Open Source Hub Open Source Hub (OSH) offers developers of all skill levels a place to learn, contribute, explore, and connect through open-source communities globally. According to the company, rather than being a community dedicated to highlighting projects for developers to work on, OSH provides developers with

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ServiceNow announces LightStep Notebooks This release allows developers to analyze data through visualizations while creating a structured view of the investigation steps as well as a path to resolution. LightStep Notebooks also enables SREs and developers to resolve incidents quickly and prevent recurrence. With the use of LightStep Notebooks’ analysis engine, Change Intelligence, any developer, operator, or SRE can understand changes in their services health and underlying infrastructure. This works to simplify investigating incidents, collaborating across teams, or documenting learning to share with the rest of the organization. Additionally, this release brings users high data retention with 100% of trace data able to be retained for up to three days. This allows SREs to have the time they need to find the root of an issue without losing any data. Another key feature of this release is improved collaboration as SREs can now share Notebooks analyses with colleagues via a shareable link. LightStep Notebooks also brings developers reduced complexity by instantly generating a path to quickly narrow down where a problem lies and easy postmortems by allowing SREs to take the insights generated throughout an investigation into a postmortem. tools to onboard and fully understand all of the code in an open-source project. This works to simplify the process of contributing, collaborating, and making a meaningful impact when working with open-source code. This open-source community intends to bring together maintainers, contributors, projects, mentorship, support, and communication alongside a community Discord server. With OSH, developers can now see the impact of changes using CodeSee to create a visualization of the codebase as well as build personal profiles and portfolios that showcase their contribution and its impact. Additionally, developers can search for and begin projects that fit their needs and areas of interest, access engaging content and programs regularly, and participate in events such as livestreams, public stages, and hackathons.

Infragistics launches App Builder on-prem This edition can be used by both large scale designerdeveloper teams and developer-only enterprise teams. App Builder is included with the Ignite UI for Angular and Blazor web-based toolkits and works to eliminate the complexity of user interface design and development. App Builder On-Prem brings the same features and benefits as the cloud version to enterprise organizations that have not yet approved the use of cloud-based SaaS solutions or those with sensitive design work that are able to go beyond a company’s firewall. It is accessible only by internal personnel and can run on any infrastructure, ensuring that data and designs remain protected from outside influence. “The launch of App Builder On-Prem will further expand on

App Builder’s mission to streamline app creation, from design to code,” said Jason Beres, SVP of developer tools at Infragistics. “We’re continuing to push down barriers and launch innovative features so all developers and designers can accelerate app design and development–no matter where they work.” This On-Prem release comes as a part of Infragistics Ultimate 22.1 rollout which introduces new design-to-code features and capabilities for both versions of App Builder. These new features include OpenAPI/Swagger support, data visualization and charts, new controls, updated code generation, app templates, and screen layouts. App Builder is also included with the design-to-code platform, Indigo.Design. According to the company, this works to provide users with true UX design-development collaboration. z

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s p m a c t o o b g n i d o cprovide great opportunities for future developers BY JENNA SARGENT

etting a computer science degree from a four-year university used to be the only pathway into a high-paying tech job, but those days are over. Coding bootcamps are now just as viable an option for many jobs. It seems developers are catching on to this, because in the most recent Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 70% of respondents said they learned to code online, compared to 62% of respondents who learn from a college or university. In the previous year’s survey, only 60% of respondents were utilizing online learning. And companies have been changing their hiring requirements to account for these new methods of education. Google, for instance, is one of the major companies that has removed its requirement that candidates have a four-year degree. And it’s not just forward-thinking tech companies making the shift; Even the U.S. government updated its hiring guidance to become more skills-based. According to Greg Shields, senior director of IT Ops skills at the upskilling platform Pluralsight, this move by the federal government is significant in the movement towards shifting away from four-year degree requirements. That sends a very big signal not only to companies that work with the federal

government, but to companies everywhere “that if this is something that can work for the bureaucracy, it can work for your organization as well,” said Shields. More and more companies are coming to realize the benefits of bootcamps or other online training programs, and seeing that they can be just as valid as a college education, and in some cases may be better. A 2021 study from SwitchUp, which provides rankings of bootcamps, found that bootcamps offer about the same, and sometimes higher, employment placement rates when compared to computer science degrees from wellknown universities. Four bootcamps in the study have employment rates of at least 80% within a year, which is higher than some of the well-known universities for computer science. For example, the California Institute of Technology has an employment rate of 64%, Stanford University has an employment rate of 61%, and MIT has a rate of 56%. According to Shields, one of the main benefits of bootcamps is their ability to keep up with changing technology. He believes that it is difficult for universities to keep up at the same pace. He recalled back to his own college experience where some of the courses he was taking were teaching

technologies that had been aged out for several years. Dr. Christina Hupy, senior education program manager at GitLab, echoed this sentiment in a 2021 episode of the SD Times podcast, “What the Dev?” She explained how colleges typically don’t teach concepts like DevOps, which means that graduates might not fully be prepared for what to expect in the workforce. “I would say that most college graduates who are studying computer science and learning coding come out of their degree program with a very solid grasp of the fundamentals of coding … And then from there it really varies, but generally speaking, we find that the DevOps process itself, and the DevOps stages are not being taught. And that includes all the way from the beginning of the planning stage all the way through security and monitoring. That approach and that culture is not being taught specifically at universities,” said Hupy. Shields also highlighted that bootcamps can increase the candidate pool and bring in folks who might not have access to the traditional education path, be it financially or they just can’t commit the time to four years in school. In fact, the study from SwitchUp claimed that, on average, bootcamps cost about 10% of the cost of a computer science degree, and they can be completed in a matter of

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How to choose a coding bootcamp The basic hallmarks for a coding bootcamp are to provide practical competencies to people who want to start a new professional coding career within a very short period of time. It means the high speed of knowledge transfer and a high degree of condensation of educational material. Full-time bootcamps last about 3-4 months, and you have to commit your time and energy, as these courses are usually very intensive. Part-time courses can last even longer than six months, but you don't have to give up your job and the time to absorb knowledge is not as strained. Think thoroughly about what will suit your needs best.

How to prepare? First, read the manual. Before enrolling in a coding bootcamp

months, rather than years. He believes that this move to more skills-based hiring will be better at getting the “right people in the right seats.” Shields also advises that companies have their own upskilling programs to improve skills among their own employees and keep up with changing technology, so that learning doesn’t stop once someone is hired. According to Shields, getting one of these programs in place can be as simple as just setting aside the time for it within the company. “Inside our company, we have a period every couple of weeks that's just blocked off on everyone's calendars for internal learning,” Shields explained. “And when you have programs like that, it sets a really good signal — a cultural signal, so that people feel comfortable to take time away from the everyday activities or company and spend some time actually just doing some sort of education or some sort of learning that probably is related to their job, but might not be something they can immediately apply.” He believes that even in scenarios where things can’t get applied immediately in practice, there’s almost always something that can be taken away and used to improve a process and become more efficient. z

read thoroughly what is offered, as some courses are for total beginners, others will require you to have the basic knowledge of English language and basic mathematics. The most important is to know if you will have to do pre-work or an introductory course — you need this information to plan your free time for gaining this knowledge.

What things will you choose to learn? Some of the schools offer free consultations or online tests that will help you choose the language that is suitable for your needs, character, and predispositions. It is always worth checking before you decide to sign the final agreement. If you are not sure what language to choose then its popularity or job possibilities may be important as well. Find out what programming languages are being sought after in your area.

and the number of hours of live classes with lecturers may vary. Compare the prices and see how many hours of learning a course includes. You may prepare your own chart, as noting down and making comparisons may be really helpful in your final decision. Pay attention to how many hours of online consultation with a lecturer the course has as for sure some more complicated topics will appear during your learning process. The possibility to consult them individually will make a difference in your development.

Is it possible to complete the training? You should always ask course advisors all the questions that come to your mind. It’s a great idea to ask what is the percentage of students that actually finish the bootcamp. Why? Because by asking more questions you can find out if the bootcamp was too intense or... too boring and didn’t meet the basic needs of students.

How to check the value? What percentage of students who finish the bootcamp were employed within six months after completing it? It is wise to select a bootcamp that has a high alumni employment rate. You’ve completed the bootcamp — what’s next? There are many ways of job seeking when you want to change your career. Some bootcamps offer help in creating a project for your portfolio that will make you much more interesting for your future employer.

Read the opinions of alumni. If you come close to the point of having your three coding bootcamps favorites then it is a great idea to read the opinions of graduates. Most of them have started from the same point as you did. Seek those opinions that have the most information about expectations versus reality. This will give you a good view of how the school represents itself on the Internet and how the alumni sum up the process of learning under its wings.

Online or on-site? COVID pandemic made a lot of changes in the educational industry. Nowadays you can attend online classes without the fear that you will be missing out on some important aspects. Actually, not having to travel and commute may be the best option as you will gain more time for learning new things. Think about what will suit your needs best. There are some of us who prefer meeting in person and will appreciate group learning and external motivation. Also, remember that some online elearning platforms require logging in at a specific time. Consider what will suit your needs and daily schedule best.

Take your time. Remember that for at least 3 months you will be working intensively to gain new skills so it is important to choose a place that will give you a feeling of the beginning of a great adventure with coding. A good bootcamp should also help you with gaining confidence in the job market. z

The cost. The average coding bootcamp costs about $9,000 (8,000 euros)

— Grzegorz Morawski, partnership manager at Coders Lab

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The biggest

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challenges facing developer managers today he software development industry is one that is rapidly shifting and evolving. With new technological advancements coming onto the market everyday, managers of development teams need to be adaptable in their management style as well as persistent in overcoming roadblocks. As a manager, dealing with and overcoming challenges is inevitable. The real question is: which challenges are the most pervasive and how do you overcome them with the least amount of lost productivity? According to Ronak Rahman, developer relations manager at Quali, whose software looks to tackle infrastructure complexity, the biggest challenge facing managers right now is learning to trust their team in order to avoid micromanaging. “We are employing fully baked developers… and then we’re trying to tell them how to do the thing that they are experts at and that causes a lot of friction, especially when you have managers that don’t understand that,” he said. Rahman went on to explain that he views developers as creatives. Because of that, team members often feel a heightened investment in the software that they are building. According to Rahman, it is essential to give them the space to explore that creative instinct or else they will wilt and productivity will ultimately suffer.

BY KATIE DEE “Micromanaging and telling them how they’re going to deliver this work of art, this thing that they are pouring themselves into, can sometimes just be a little bit too much to bear,” he said. He explained that a manager’s job is really just to remove roadblocks for the developers on their team so they are enabled to produce the best end result possible. However, many managers fall into the trap of not trusting their team fully and thus, get sucked into the trap of being a helicopter manager.

Fostering team loyalty Josep Prat, open-source engineering manager at the data infrastructure company Avien, expanded on this, saying that he believes a big challenge managers have to overcome is being able to build this trust. Creating loyalty and a team mentality is not an easy task for any manager and, unsurprisingly, it has gotten even trickier to foster that kind of environ-

Dev Manager SERIES

ment in a world without physical offices. “We are in hybrid or completely remote environments, so that being said, having a team that feels that cohesion is really hard right now and that may be one of the biggest challenges at the moment,” Prat explained. Mike Morris, co-founder and CEO of the remote work developer productivity organization, Torc, built on Prats sentiments, saying that he feels that creating this loyalty is pivotal when it comes to retaining good employees, a common struggle for many managers. “[Remote work] has totally opened people’s eyes to the fact that there are no boundaries,” Morris said, “They can be working for any company… that flexibility has made people really cognizant of the fact that they can work from anywhere and on any project… and now there is very low overhead with switching jobs.”

Communicating with remote teams The transition to remote work has proven to be a challenge for several managers as they struggle to maintain productivity and communication in a workforce that has changed so much in such a small amount of time. Morgan Logue, VP of research and development at the low-code/no-code organization Outsystems, touched on this, saying that communication and continued on page 10 >

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proper context is a challenge managers must overcome in order to run productive teams. “Companies are very used to synchronous communication and in-person standup meetings… When you move to a remote workforce — even if you’re all in the same time zone — people do not work the same hours… It requires that you make a shift from processes where context is driven through personal communication to one where context is driven through documentation,” he said. Even with written documentation though, Prat believes that intentional conversations and one-on-one meetings are crucial to help remind the developers on your team that they are not working in a vacuum. Morris also touched on this, saying that human connection within the team will help to make developers feel less alone and also foster a culture of loyalty to the organization. “A lot of times [in person] this would have been the ‘water cooler conversa-

tions’ or an employee softball team or just general morale events, and that still has to happen, even virtually,” he explained. Morris went on to say that forging this human connection also means a shift in the way that meetings are run. He said, “You might jump on a 15minute standup with somebody but you really have to take the time to say ‘Hey, how are you? What’s going on? What’s new in your life?’ and if you don’t do that, then you’re going to miss when there’s something that’s wrong.” Prat stressed that taking note of the needs and suggestions of team members helps to create an environment where every member of the team feels appreciated and heard. Logue added that it is more important than ever to listen to your developers and get to know your team in order to learn how they best receive and retain information. “How does your team best communicate? Some teams are very written in the way that they communicate while [some] tend to be more visual,” he said.

“So, making sure that you understand how the team members communicate and how they process information is critical to the success of a team.” Unfortunately, it can sometimes be an obstacle to strike the right balance between maintaining active and open communication while still avoiding a micromanagement style. “It’s a fine line that each manager has to be sure to tread carefully. I need to give developers autonomy but I also need to give them the tools to perform the work that they need to do,” Prat said. Morris mentioned that one way to do this is to provide developers with tools that will offer them the data they need to track how they’re performing rather than the manager having to constantly tell them. “Just saying, ‘Here is this developer productivity tool, it’s your data and you can do what you want with it but we’re going to give you the ability to see how you’re comparing to other developers that are similar to you’... It has the same effect as using an Apple Watch to track

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Buyers Guide

How does Broadcom help companies practice Agile?

stay focused really matters Lo Guidice also added that at Forrester their number one inquiry for the last year for the application development and delivery team has been on scaling agile. Scaling agile is something that interests companies more than other hot topics like citizen development or cloud.

Value stream management ties multiple Agile units together Knudsen also explained that Agile is no longer just practiced by development teams. Over the past two decades it has been spreading into other areas of business. She said that newer companies who were born in this fully digital era don’t have any areas of the business that aren’t lean. But more established companies tend to have trouble keeping up, and she said they won’t keep pace unless they get over the idea that agility and lean principles are only for development teams. She added that value stream management comes into play here as it allows companies to incorporate different parts of the organization and focus them around customer value. Lo Giudice explained that value stream management is important even if Agile has not made its way out of

Broadcom leverages its enterprise-class Agile Management SaaS platform to help organizations scale Agile across the enterprise. Our ValueOps platform includes the proven Rally Software which enables organizations to plan, prioritize, manage, track, and continuously improve work so they can deliver the value that their customers need with speed, quality, and efficiency. It also provides visibility into progress, roadblocks, and dependencies across multiple teams, projects, and programs. This allows organizations to align strategic goals to the work and create better business results— and do it all in a single system of record. It also supports hybrid methodologies and is flexible enough to allow teams to work the way they want to work. We also have a variety of services and transformation assistance to help organizations on their Agile and/or Value Stream Management journey. z

development. For example, for companies that have broken their development teams up into much smaller units, it can be difficult to have an idea of the investments that are being made and what impact they are having once they’re in production. He explained that measuring value was much easier when 200 people were all working on the same siloed app together. “What we need to do now is bring that simplicity back,” said Lo Giudice. “That doesn’t mean going back to siloed apps, but it means having practices, tools and technologies to help have that vision again, of where the investments that are made are generating value, and where there are impediments, and that’s what I think value stream management is going to do.”

Challenges still exist Despite the age and prevalence of Agile as a methodology, there are still challenges that organizations run into. One big challenge that Knudsen sees is companies not seeing their business as a system. “You cannot change part of the system and expect that change to have a great impact,” said Knudsen. “We still see companies pitting departments against each other using management by objectives (MBOs) of leaders, with a mistaken belief that internal competition is a good thing. It can be, but not if part of your system loses in the process.

Today, those that can pivot and change to take advantage of opportunities that arise are the ones that will have success in the future. And to do that, work, data, and funding needs to flow through your entire organization, not just your development teams.” Another challenge is related to the process of scaling agile. According to Knudsen, companies that have a lack of understanding of agility in the first place will struggle to scale it. Of the companies she has seen struggle the most to scale, one common factor is that they didn’t implement agility well in the first place. She believes in addition to having disciplined agile practices, solid automation, and infrastructure, it’s important to have an aligned understanding of how work will be planned, performed, tracked, and measured. “Most leaders can’t even tell me their definition of done or their release criteria,” said Knudsen. “The most successful companies scale agility through the entire organization using value streams.” The three biggest challenges Lo Giudice sees in his research include: 1. A lack of product ownership 2. A lack of strong change management 3. A lack of commitment of product owners from the business “When I hear these inquiries around projects going from project to product, of course they’re trying to overcome some of these challenges,” said Lo Giudice. z

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Delayed Feed

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DevOps Feedback Loop Explained:

BY PAVEL AZALETSKIY AND JACK MAHER

FIRST OF FOUR PARTS

Feedback is routinely requested and occasionally considered. Using feedback and doing something with it is nowhere near as routine, unfortunately. Perhaps this has been due to a lack of a practical application based on a focused understanding of feedback loops, and how to leverage them. We’ll look at Feedback Loops, the purposeful design of a system or process to effectively gather and enable data-driven decisions; and behavior based on the feedback collected. We’ll also look at some potential issues and explore various countermeasures to address things like delayed feedback, noisy feedback, cascading feedback, and weak feedback. To do this, we’ll follow newly onboarded associate Alice through her experience with this new organization which needs to accelerate organizational value creation and delivery processes.

lice joined this company recently, getting a nice bump in pay and the promise of working on a cutting-edge digital product. Management recruited her aggressively to address an organization crisis: unacceptable speed of delivery. The challenge was to accelerate delivery from once a month to every

Pavel Azaletskiy is co-founder and CEO of V.S. Optima, a software company developing the Operational Excellence Platform to ensure business efficiency through processes, people, and technology harmonization. Jack Maher is a technology consultant for EPAM Systems Engineering Excellence team, and an appointed DevOps Institute Ambassador and instructor.

two weeks. The engineering team was relatively small (about 50 engineers) scattered across different functional areas. On day one, Alice learned that the product teams consisted of three cross-functional engineering teams, each with six engineers. She was excited to learn that test engineers and software engineers routinely work together. However, it seemed strange that the organization had separated shared services for data, infrastructure, and user acceptance testing (UAT), even though data and infrastructure were parts of the product. Learning that the current release cycle had “at least” one week for UAT, and the product team reserves some time to bug-fix on the following release cycle based on feedback from UAT was a bit of a surprise and of immediate interest. Alice knew that the software development process could be described as a set of feedback loops between code development activities performed by engineers and various feedback activities. (See Fig.1) These feedback activities verify the quality of implemented features from functional as well as non-functional standpoints. These activities are well known with multiple approaches, and are generally designed and executed by team engineers: unit testing, code reviews, security testing, and sometimes by specialized engineers, such as for performance testing, security testing, chaos engineering, and the like. These feedback activities are associated with different artifacts or manifestations — code change, a feature branch, a build, an or an integrated solution, as examples. Feedback activities might (should) affect the whole delivery process for both effectiveness and efficiency.

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Delayed Feedback Delayed feedback has several adverse implications for the speed of capability delivery: • While waiting for feedback regarding a product's qualitative attributes, engineers often continue writing code on top of the codebase they assume to be correct; therefore, the more delayed the feedback the greater potential for rework, that is more likely to be impactful. • Often such rework is not planned; therefore, it will likely delay direct and collateral product delivery plans as well as negatively impact resource utilization. It was evident to Alice that the UAT team provided feedback to the product team very late, so it could be a great starting point to accelerate delivery by eliminating delay or shortening its release cycle. Alice started her analysis journey by calculating the UAT delayed feedback impact on the delivery. It is easy to calculate; we just need to know the probability of feedback from a step. To do so we need to know the ratio of all features with defects to all features delivered to the UAT step of the process. It gives her a probability that a feature requires rework after UAT, in this case, it was 30%; therefore percent of complete and accurate features in this case is 70%. continued on page 14 >

Figure 1. Simplified software development process with feedback

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“The Alice Challenge”

Source: VS Optima

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The diagram shown above was created on the VSOptima platform to explore “the Alice challenge”. If you go to https://tinyurl.com/bdf2jur, you can run a simulation and see the implication of the rework ratio and delayed feedback loop to the overall delivery throughput, activity ratio and lead time. What is important is that you can observe that such a feedback loop consumes the capacity of the code development activity and generates flow’s loops. Next, we can calculate how much the rework costs for the delivery team. There are two components of this cost. The first is direct cost to address an issue. Alice learned that on average one defect costs about one day of work for software engineers and test engineers since they needed to reproduce an issue, determine how to remediate, write and execute tests, merge the fix back into a product, and verify the fix didn’t affect other features. The second is the cost of product roadmap delay. If we delay the release for one day what would be a revenue loss? Often it is hard to estimate that, and Alice didn’t get any tangible number from the product managers. But even just the direct cost associated with the feedback fix gave her excellent ammunition to defend her plan to shorten the release cycle. Out of 20 features delivered on average in each release cycle, on average six required rework. Remediation typically takes six days for 12 engineers, which is about 20 percent of the release planned capacity. We have three teams of six engineers each, a total of 18 engineers. The release cycle is one month; therefore, 20 working days. If we multiply 18 engineers by 20 working days we will

get the full capacity of 360 engineering working days Since we have six features for rework, we need six days of 12 engineers to do rework, which is 72 engineering working days So 72 out of 360 is 20% of engineering working days spent for rework. Alice set the first goal to accelerate delivery up to 20%. She knew they could do that if she found a way to reduce the time required to produce feedback and made it immediately available for engineers while they were still in the code. Alice asked the UAT team to specify acceptance scenarios for all features as part of the work definition or story so that a cross-functional feature team can implement automated testing for these scenarios along with their code development. Therefore, a feedback loop can be almost instantaneous. If the acceptance test doesn’t pass, then the engineer can immediately address a defect in a much faster way. Alice also investigated several other issues known as noisy feedback, cascaded feedback, and weak feedback. We will unfold these terms in the following stories. In summarizing this story, we would like to emphasize the importance of the frame of a feedback loop when you do optimization of the digital product delivery, and understanding that it is not linear — the longer it takes to get feedback the more difficult it is to address a defect because the code base and complexity grows with time. To accelerate digital product delivery, leaders should strive to eliminate or mitigate backward cycles generating unplanned work and affecting planned capacity; instead, we should design processes where work is done the first time correctly. z

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The future of working BY KATIE DEE

acebook’s transition into Meta and the teases that followed about the Metaverse have resulted in many questions that are still yet to be answered. While the buzz around virtual and augmented reality technology continues to grow, the potential of the Metaverse is seemingly endless. Just as computers and the internet did all those years ago, the Metaverse is in the position to radically alter the way we live our day to day lives, and that includes the way we work. According to David Whelan, chief executive officer at the virtual reality technology company, Engage XR Holdings PLC, the true impact that this technology will have on the workforce remains unknown. “It really is vast and open. What we’re seeing today is that a lot of businesses are already using virtual office spaces to replace physical

offices,” he said. Whelan went on to explain that these virtual office spaces and meta worlds have been an incredibly useful tool as more and more of the workforce becomes remote and employees crave a deeper connection with their team. “When we talk about the Metaverse, it’s an evolution of the internet… The internet, as it is now, is a very solo experience. You look at webpages, you look at texts, you look at photographs, or you watch video, but you’re sitting in a room by yourself,” he said. “The internet of the future, the Metaverse, you go into these virtual locations with other people…so it’s a shared experience.”

Bringing the Metaverse into the mainstream workforce Tuong Nguyen, senior principal analyst at Gartner, said that since the Metaverse is the next natural evolutionary

step of the internet, the question of its adoption in the workplace is not one of if, but rather when and how. “It’s hard to delineate when you’re talking about an evolution,” he said. “Obviously [the adoption] will increase, but how you measure that depends on how you define or characterize the Metaverse.” Whelan also mentioned that because the experience of the Metaverse is so immersive, the anonymity that is so often associated with the current internet has to be controlled, especially in a work environment. He explained that security measures must be taken to ensure that users with nefarious intentions cannot enter virtual workspaces that they do not belong in. “You can’t have that end user in there who might be abusive or racist or getting in people’s faces… So, you

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He said that merely manufacturing the same environment that people would get in an in-person setting is not enough. Rather, working in the Metaverse has to offer new, heightened experiences that we cannot access in the real world. “These companies want special onboarding programs or programs for employee well-being and how you design those products is vastly different from what you would do in the real world,” he said. “You’re going to need to be very creative, because the only thing you are limited by is your imagination.”

The Metaverse could mean trouble for certain industries

in the Metaverse should have a kind of police force who will man some of these digital locations to add new people if needed or kick people out if needed as well,” he said.

How we will work in the Metaverse According to Whelan, many jobs that previously required face-to-face communication will most likely find a new home in the Metaverse. He explained that with this technology, people will be able to make a virtual doctor's appointment or visit a virtual bank branch to tackle issues that would have previously warranted an in-person visit. “There are going to be a lot of design jobs as well that will be done in the Metaverse that won’t need to be done in physical offices,” Whelan said. “If you’re getting a house designed… the end user will have the tools available to them to design the house very easily by dragging and dropping items… So I

think things like that will actually be put into the users’ hands.” According to J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, another area that will be affected is the remote service industry. “I think for remote work and assistance, being able to pull up a schematic of a machine that you’re fixing and overlaying it on that machine and helping you fix it, that is a very powerful scenario,” he said. Information workers is another group that Gownder said could experience big benefits. He explained that the use of virtual office spaces would allow teams to collaborate effectively without the need to travel and meet in person, bringing together both in-office and remote teams in one shared space. Whelan also emphasized that in order for the Metaverse to reach its full potential, businesses are going to have to think outside of the box.

Another aspect of the workforce that can be changed in the wake of the Metaverse is the prevalence of some roles. According to Whelan, several jobs run the risk of becoming obsolete once this technology enters the mainstream. He compared this to the emergence of the internet, saying, “If we go back in history to ‘93 or ‘94, there were a lot of jobs that have now become obsolete because the internet took over and I think that same sea change is certainly available today.” He explained that the transportation industry is a space that can expect to face this challenge. Without the need to travel to an office anymore, many of these roles will not be needed as frequently. “With remote work and digital nomads, people aren’t going to be sitting in traffic for two or three hours a day to go in and out of offices,” Whelan said. He also mentioned that with the possibility to work remotely in the Metaverse, the need to live in big cities goes away. With this, the need for highend real estate companies is significantly reduced, threatening jobs in that area as well.

The qualifications of working in the Metaverse As we see the transition of the workforce within the Metaverse becoming more rounded out, new qualifications continued on page 19 >

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Different generations and the Metaverse The shifting of the workforce into the Metaverse will be felt by people of all generations. However, as Gen Z is the up and coming generation, they will most likely be the most affected group. According to David Whelan, chief executive officer at Engage XR Holdings PLC, working in the Metaverse will feel like a natural progression for members of this generation. “I think they will take to it like a duck to water,” he said. “They’re used to evolving technologies and a lot of these people have already been using virtual worlds for quite a while in Minecraft and games like that that got them used to working in 3D environments.” J.P. Gownder, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, also touched on the ease that Gen Z will have when it comes to transitioning into the Metaverse. He said, “It’s an unfamiliar interface for many people, particularly those in older age cohorts. It will be coming more easily to Gen Z and millennials as well as people who are gamers who may be accustomed to navigating 3D space.” Gownder went on to say that getting members of older generations to make this transition could be challenging at first because they were not raised in the era of technological advancement that we currently live in and so, generally, they tend to be more wary. This does not mean that older generations will take issue with this shift, though, as Whelan expects them to grow accustomed to it as well, especially in the height of remote working. He compared it to the initial launch of Facebook and the transition the website saw from teenagers being its main demographic to

< continued from page 17

will more than likely emerge as well. Whelan said one of the biggest new qualifications will revolve around the return to actual social interaction in the workplace. “You have people and web admins who would be very good at writing up a post and posting it and getting lots of likes and stuff like that… But, I think confident people who carry themselves well in the real world will actually excel in the Metaverse,” he said. This is because of the non-verbal communication that the Metaverse offers. Employees will no longer be limited to verbal cues and emails, but rather they will be able to fully express

older adults using it to forge connections with people they may have lost touch with. “The same thing will happen in the Metaverse. You’re going to have Metaverses for social gatherings, Metaverses for dating, Metaverses for business, and education that will be easily explorable. So, once you get the communication aspect of it going… I think that's when the older generation will certainly hop in,” Whelan said. He also discussed the possible training process that both generations would have to undergo in order to operate effectively in the Metaverse. Whelan said that while older generations tend to be more tame with what they post online, Gen Z is more willing to share their lives under the guise of a username. Conversely, this generation runs the risk of causing problems due to the perceived anonymity that the internet has offered up until this point. That being said, Whelan inferred that there would need to be training that encourages them to view the Metaverse as a real-life environment rather than one that offers the obscurity and namelessness of the current internet. “There needs to be a level of training because you need to act in the Metaverse the same as you would in the real world,” he explained. “You can't just go out there and blurt something or go into an echo chamber because it is very dangerous… I do think this is a bit of a reset where we should learn from the mistakes of the past… This is a more social space so we do need some checks and balances.” z

sentiments with body language and non-verbal cues again. According to Whelan, this will result in less information being lost in translation as the interpersonal communication becomes clearer and overcomes the limitations that the current remote working world faces. On top of this, Forrester’s Gownder stressed the importance that new training methods will play in the hiring process in order to gauge how well the employee and the technology work together, redefining the technological qualifications for certain roles. “Give someone a self-assessment or a diagnostic and see where they are. Are they someone who's picking up on

this kind of stuff easily? If they are, then maybe there is a fast track that would be right for them and maybe there’s also a more intentional track that goes step by step and brings people [who need it] through it,” he said. Overall, Whelan believes the Metaverse is positioned to combine all the successful parts of the internet that we already know, with the best parts of non-verbal communication and social interaction; fostering a brand new experience for current and future workers. “I think it is a really exciting time, there's a lot of parallels to the 1993 and 1994 timeframe… The birth of the internet and the birth of the Metaverse, it’s the same thing,” Whelan said. z

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DEVOPS WATCH

Octopus Deploy introduces cloud native features BY KATIE DEE

Octopus Deploy, provider of continuous deployment orchestration software, today announced that it has expanded support for teams that are containerizing their applications and services. With the latest updates, DevOps teams now have the ability to modernize CI/CD practices at their own pace as well as manage new and older applications all in the same tool. Octopus 2022.2 expands support for cloud-native applications that run on container hosted platforms such as Amazon EKS and ECS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE. According to the company, this release makes it simpler for users to configure their cloud resources through dynamic infrastructure discovery and improve support for serverless components such as Amazon Lambda.

Additionally, users gain access to integration previews with enterprise change management using ServiceNow. “The release of Octopus 2022.2 isn’t about arbitrarily shifting every component or rewriting every application elsewhere for its own sake, but it helps teams take advantage of opportunity. Our customers can now combine the right set of technologies and tools, and be strategic about where to modernize and where to maintain,” said Paul Stovell, founder and CEO of Octopus Deploy. Octopus 2022.2 brings users several other new features as well, including: l Dynamic caching introduced to Octopus Cloud in order to improve performance and responsiveness across multiple regions

Improvements that allow teams to customize the look and feel l Security updates for OAuth authentication flows and session invalidation. z

OctoML launches machine learning platform expansion BY KATIE DEE

Today OctoML, provider of a machine learning acceleration platform, released a major platform expansion in order to accelerate the development of AI-powered applications by eliminating bottlenecks in machine learning development. This release is intended to enable app developers and IT operations teams to transform trained machine learning models into agile, portable, production-ready software functions that integrate with their existing application stacks and DevOps workflows. According to OctoML, the platform expansion will help to conquer the challenges of enterprise software development by abstracting out complexities, stripping away dependencies, and delivering models as production-ready software functions. “AI has the potential to change the

world, but it first needs to become sustainable and accessible,” said Luis Ceze, CEO of OctoML. “Today’s manual, specialized ML deployment workflows are keeping application developers, DevOps engineers and IT operations teams on the sidelines. Our new solution is enabling them to work with models like the rest of their application stack, using their own DevOps workflows and tools. We aim to do that by giving customers the ability to transform models into performant, portable functions that can run on any hardware.” A few key features of this platform expansion include: l Automation detects and resolves dependencies, cleans and optimizes model code, and accelerates and packages the model for any hardware product l OctoML CLI brings users a local

experience of OctoML’s feature set and integrates with SaaS capabilities to create accelerated hardware-independent models-as-functions l Comprehensive fleet of over 80 deployment targets in the cloud and at the edge with accelerated computing, including GPUs, CPUs, NPUs, from NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, ARM, and AWS Graviton l Expansive software catalog covering all major ML frameworks, acceleration engines, and software stacks from chip makers “NVIDIA Triton is the top choice for AI inference and model deployment for workloads of any size, across all major industries worldwide,” said Shankar Chandrasekaran, product marketing manager at NVIDIA. “Its portability, versatility and flexibility make it an ideal companion for the OctoML platform.” z

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Automated testing BY JAKUB LEWKOWICZ utomated testing initiatives still lag behind in many organizations as increasingly complex testing environments are met with a lack of skilled personnel to set up tests. Recent research conducted by Forrester and commissioned by Keysight found that while only 11% of respondents had fully automated testing, 84% percent of respondents said that the majority of testing involves complex environments. For the study, Forrester conducted an online survey in December 2021 that involved 406 test operations decisionmakers at organizations in North America, EMEA, and APAC to evaluate current testing capabilities for electronic design and development and to hear their thoughts on investing in automation. The complexity of testing has increased the number of tests, according to 75% of the respondents. Sixtyseven percent of respondents said the time to complete tests has risen too.

Challenges with automated testing Those that do utilize automated testing often have difficulty making the tests stable in these complex environments, according to Paulina Gatkowska, head of quality assurance at STX Next, a Python software house. One such area where developers often find many challenges is in UI testing in which the tests work like a user: they use the browser, click through the application, fill fields, and more. These tests are quite heavy, Gatkowska continued, and when a developer finishes their test on a local environment, sometimes it fails in another environment, or only works 50% of the time, or a test works the first week, and then starts to be flaky. “What’s the point of writing and running the tests, if sometimes they fail even though there is no bug? To avoid this problem, it’s important to have a good

Increasingly complex environments, l architecture of the tests and good quality of the code. The tests should be independent, so they don’t interfere with each other, and you should have methods for repetitive code to change it only in one place when something changes in the application,” Gatkowska said. “You should also attach great importance to ‘waits’ — the conditions that must be met before the test proceeds. Having this in mind, you’ll be able to avoid the horror of maintaining flaky tests.” Then there are issues with the network that can impede automated tests, according to Kavin Patel, founder and CEO of Convrrt, a landing page builder. A common difficulty for QA teams is network disconnection, which makes it difficult for them to access databases, VPNs, third-party services, APIs, and certain testing environments, because of shaky network connections, adding needless time to the testing process. The inability to access virtual environments, which are typically utilized by testers to test programs, is also a worry. Because some teams lack the expert-

ise to implement automated testing, manual testing is still used as a correction for any automation gaps. This creates a disconnect with the R&D team, which is usually two steps ahead, according to Kenny Kline, president of Barbend, an online platform for strength sports training and nutrition. “To keep up with them, testers must finish their cycles within four to six hours, but manual testing cannot keep up with the rate of development. Then, it is moved to the conclusion of the cycle,” Kline said. “Consequently, teams must include a manual regression, sometimes known as a stabilization phase, at the end of each sprint. They extend the release cadence rather than lowering it.”

Companies are shifting towards full test automation Forrester’s research also found that 45% of companies say that they’re willing to move to a fully automated testing environment within the next three years to increase productivity, gain the ability to simulate product function and perform-

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social media management tool. “As your application is a living thing, so are the tests that are for it. You need to factor in maintenance costs and expectations within your budget.” Also, just because a test worked last sprint, doesn’t mean it will work as expected this sprint, Garthe added. As applications change, testers have to make sure that the automated tests cover the new process correctly as well. Garthe said that he has had a great experience using Selenium, referring to it as the “gold standard” with regard to automated testing. It has the largest group of developers that know how to use it and can step in and work on a new project. “We’ve used other applications for testing, and they work fine for a small application, but if there’s a learning curve, they all fall short somewhere,” Garthe said. “Selenium will allow your team to jump right in and there are so many examples already written that you

lack of skilled personnel make adoption difficult ance, and shorten the time to market. The companies that have implemented automated testing right have reaped many rewards, according to Michael Urbanovich, head of the testing department at a1qa, an international quality assurance company. The ones relying on robotic process automation (RPA), AI, ML, natural language processing (NLP), and computer vision for automated testing have attained greater efficiency, sped up time to market, and freed up more resources to focus on strategic business initiatives. RPA alone can lower the time required for repetitive tasks up to 25%, according to research by Automation Alley. For those looking to gain even more from their automation initiatives, a1qa’s Urbanovich suggests looking into continuous test execution, implementing self-healing capabilities, RPA, API automation, regression testing, and UAT automation. Urbanovich emphasized that the decision to introduce automated QA workflows must be conscious. Rather

than running with the crowd to follow the hype, organizations must calculate ROI based on their individual business needs and wisely choose the scope for automation and a fit-for-purpose strategy. “To meet quality gates, companies need to decide which automated tests to run and how to run them in the first place, especially considering that the majority of Agile-driven sprints last for up to only several weeks,” Urbanovich said. Although some may hope it were this easy, testers can’t just spawn automated tests and sit back like Paley’s watchmaker gods. The tests need to be guided and nurtured. “The number one challenge with automated testing is making sure you have a test for all possibilities. Covering all possibilities is an ongoing process, but executives especially hear that you have automated testing now and forget that it only covers what you actually are testing and not all possibilities,” said David Garthe, founder of Gravyware, a

can shortcut the test creation time.” And, there are many other choices to weave through to start the automated testing process. “When you think about test automation, first of all you have to choose the framework. What language should it be? Do you want to have frontend or backend tests, or both? Do you want to use gherkin in your tests?” STX Next’s Gatkowska said. “Then of course you need to have your favorite code editor, and it would be annoying to run the tests only on your local machine, so it’s important to configure jobs in the CI/CD tool. In the end, it’s good to see valuable output in a reporting tool.” Choosing the right tool and automated testing framework, though, might pose a challenge for some because different tools excel at different conditions, according to Robert Warner, head of marketing at VirtualValley, a UK-based virtual assistant company. “Testing product vendors overstate their goods’ abilities. Many vendors continued on page 24 >

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believe they have a secret sauce for automation, but this produces misunderstandings and confusion. Many of us don’t conduct enough study before buying commercial tools, that’s why we buy them without proper evaluation,” Warner said. “Choosing a test tool is like marrying, in my opinion. Incompatible marriages tend to fail. Without a good test tool, test automation will fail.”

AI is augmenting the automated testing experience In the next three years 52% of companies that responded to the Forrester report said they would consider using AI for integrating complex test suites. The use of AI for integrated testing provides both better (not necessarily more) testing coverage and the ability to support agile product development and release, according to the Forrester report. Companies are also looking to add AI for integrating complex test suites, an area of test automation that is severely lacking, with only 16% of companies using it today. A1qa’s Urbanovich explained that one of the best ways to cope with boosted software complexity and tight deadlines is to apply a risk-based approach. For that, AI is indispensable. Apart from removing redundant test cases, generating self-healing scripts, and predicting defects, it streamlines priority-setting. “In comparison with the previous year, the number of IT leaders leveraging AI for test prioritization has risen to 43%. Why so?” Urbanovich continued, alluding to the World Quality Report 2021-2022. “When you prioritize automated tests, you put customer needs first because you care about the features that end users apply the most. Another vivid gain is that software teams can organize a more structured and thoughtful QA strategy. Identifying risks makes it easier to define the scope and execution sequence.” Most of the time, companies are looking to implement AI in testing to

leverage the speed improvements and increased scope of testing, according to Kevin Surace, CTO at Appvance, an AI-driven software testing provider. “You can’t write a script in 10 minutes, maybe one if you’re a Selenium master. Okay, the machine can write 50 in 10 minutes. And yes, they’re valid. And yes, they cover your use cases that you care about. And yes, they have 1,000s of validations, whatever you want to do. And all you did was spend one time teaching it to your application, no different than walking into a room of 100 manual testers that you just hired, and you’re teaching them the application: do this, don’t do this, this is the outcome, these are the outcomes we want,” Surace said. “That’s

what I’ve done, I got 100 little robots or however many we need that need to be taught what to do and what not to do, but mostly what not to do.”

QA has difficulty grasping how to handle AI in testing Appvance’s Surace said that the overall place of where testing needs to go is to be completely hands off from humans. “If you just step back and say what’s going on in this industry, I need a 4,000 times productivity improvement in order to find essentially all the bugs that the CEO wants me to find, which is find all the bugs before users do,” Surace said. “Well, if you’ve got to continued on page 27 >

AI/ML excels at writing tests from unit to end-to-end scale One area where AI/ML in testing excels at is in unit testing on legacy code, according to Eli Lopian, CEO of Typemock, a provider of unit testing tools. “Software groups often have this legacy code which could be a piece of code that maybe they didn’t do a unit test beforehand, or there was some kind of crisis, and they had to do it quickly, and they didn’t do the test. So you had this little piece of code that doesn’t have any unit tests. And that grows,” Lopian said. “Even though it’s a difficult piece of code, it wasn’t built for testability in mind. We have the technology to both write those tests for those kinds of code and to generate them in an automatic manner using the ML.” The AI/ML can then make sure that the code is running in a clean and modernized way. The tests can refactor the code to work in a secure manner, Lopian added. AI-driven testing is also beneficial for UI testing because the testers don’t have to explicitly design the way that you reference things in the UI, you can let the AI figure that out, according to Dan Belcher, cofounder of mabl, a testing company. And then when the UI changes, typical test automation results in a lot of failures, whereas the AI can learn and improve the tests automatically, resulting in 85-90% reduction in the amount of time engineers spend creating and maintaining tests with AI. In the UI testing space, AI can be used for auto healing, intelligent timing, detecting visual changes automatically in the UI, and detecting anomalies and performance. According to Belcher, AI can be the vital component in creating a more holistic approach to end-to-end testing. “We’ve all known that the answer to improving quality was to bring together the insights that you get when you think about all facets of quality, whether that’s functional or performance, or accessibility, or UX. And, to think about that holistically, whether it’s API or web or mobile. And so the area that will see the most innovation is when you can start to answer questions like, based on my UI tests, what API tests should I have? And how do they relate? So when the UI test fails? Was it an API issue? And then, when a functional test fails, did anything change from the user experience that could be related to that?,” Belcher said. “And so the key to do this is we have to bring all of the end-to-end testing together and all the data that’s produced, and then you can really layer in some incredibly innovative intelligence, once you have all of that data, and you can correlate it and make predictions based on that.” z

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increase productivity 4,000 times you cannot have people involved in the creation of very many use cases, or certainly not the maintenance of them. That has to come off the table just like you can’t put people in a spaceship and tell them to drive it, there’s too much that has to be done to control it.” Humans are still good at prioritizing which bugs to tackle based on what the business goals are because only humans can really look at something and say, well, we’ll just leave it, it’s okay, we’re not gonna deal with it or say this is really critical and push it to the developers side to fix it before release, Surace continued. “A number of people are all excited about using AI and machine learning to prioritize which tests you should run, and that entire concept is wrong. The entire concept should be, I don’t care what you change in the application, and I don’t understand your source code enough to know the impacts are on every particular outcome. Instead, I should be able to create 10,000 scripts and run them in the next hour, and give you the results across the entire application,” Surace said. “Job one, two, and three of QA is to make sure that you found the bugs before your users do. That’s it, then you can decide what to do with them. Every time a user finds a bug, I can guarantee you it’s in something you didn’t test or you chose to let the bug out. So when you think about it, that way users find bugs and the things we didn’t test. So what do we need to do? We need to test a lot more, not less.” A challenge with AI is that it is a foreign concept to QA people so teaching them how to train AI is a whole different field, according to Surace. First off, many people on the QA team are scared of AI, Surace continued, because they see themselves as QA people but really have the skillset of a Selenium tester that writes Selenium scripts and tests them. Now, that has been taken away similar to how RPA disrupted many industries such as customer support and insurance claims processing. The second challenge is that they’re not trained in it. “So one problem that we see that we

6 types of automated testing frameworks 1. Linear Automation Framework — Also known as a record-and-playback framework in which testers don’t need to write code to create functions and the steps are written in a sequential order. Testers record steps such as navigation, user input, or checkpoints, and then plays the script back automatically to conduct the test. 2. Modular Based Testing Framework — One in which testers need to divide the application that is being tested into separate units, functions, or sections, each of which can then be tested in isolation. Test scripts are created for each part and then combined to build larger tests. 3. Library Architecture Testing Framework — In this testing framework, similar tasks within the scripts are identified and later grouped by function, so the application is ultimately broken down by common objectives. 4. Data-Driven Framework — Test data is separated from script logic and testers can store data externally. The test scripts are connected to the external data source and told to read and populate the necessary data when needed. 5. Keyword-Driven Framework — Each function of the application is laid out in a table with instructions in a consecutive order for each test that needs to be run. 6. Hybrid Testing Framework — A combination of any of the previously mentioned frameworks set up to leverage the advantages of some and mitigate the weaknesses Source: https://smartbear.com/learn/automated-testing/test-automation-frameworks/ of others. z

have is you explain how the algorithms work?,” Surace said. “In AI, one of the challenges we have in QA and across the AI industry is how do we make people comfortable that here’s a machine that they may not ever be able to understand. It’s beyond their skillset to actually understand the algorithms at work here and why they work and how neural networks work so they now have to trust that the machine will get them from point A to point B, just like we trust the car gets from point A to point B.” However, there are some areas of testing in which AI is not as applicable, for example, in a form-based application where there is nothing else for the application to do than to guide you through the form such as in a financial services application. “There’s nothing else to do with an AI that can add much value because it needs one script to handle the one use case that you care about. There are no more use cases. So AI is used to augment your use cases, but if you only have one, you should write it. But, that’s few and far between and most applications have hundreds of 1,000s of use cases perhaps or 1,000s of possible combinatorial use cases,” Surace said. According to Eli Lopian, CEO at Typemock, a provider of unit testing

tools to developers worldwide, QA teams are still very effective at handling UI testing because the UI can often change without the behavior changing behind the scenes. “The QA teams are really good at doing that because they have a feel for the UI, how easy it is for the end user to use that code, and they can see the thing that is more of a product point of view and less of does it work or does it not work point of view, which now is really it’s really essential if you want to an application to really succeed,” Lopian said. Dan Belcher, the co-founder at mabl, said that there is still plenty of room for a human in the loop when it comes to AI-driven testing. “So far, what we’re doing is supercharging quality engineers so human is certainly in the loop, It’s eliminating repetitive tasks where their intellect isn’t adding as much value and doing things that require high speed, because when you’re deploying every few minutes, you can’t really rely on a human to be involved in that in that loop of executing tests. And so what we’re empowering them to do is to focus on higher level concerns, like do I have the right test coverage? Are the things that we’re seeing good or bad for the users?” Belcher said. z

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August 2022

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You can’t do more BY JENNA SARGENT

any companies have been grappling with a labor shortage at some point over the last year, whether short or long term, due to the Great Resignation. This phenomenon continues, with many workers hopping jobs to find better offers elsewhere. On top of that, all signs seem to be pointing to a recession in the U.S. economy, which could lead to slashed budgets, layoffs, and a lot of uncertainty. A number of tech firms have already begun laying off workers, including those from their development and IT teams. Companies will be relying on the processes they have in place to make it through these times, and an important one to practice will be Agile. Agile enables development teams to do more with less because they focus on the work that matters and are able to eliminate unnecessary work that doesn’t help their customer or add value to the business. “This is the only way to avoid building stuff that is not necessary,” said Diego Lo Giudice, VP principal analyst

And agile helps companies on what for research firm Forrester. “And therefore the concept of minimum viable product, minimizing the product features and focusing on the ones that you really want is the best optimal way to deal with lower budgets … That minimum viable product concept helps with focusing and spending the money in the right way, for those that understand it.” Laureen Knudsen, chief transformation officer at Broadcom, explained that

AgileThought releases new Agile guilds AgileThought recently announced the release of eight technology guilds that are aimed at enabling businesses to accelerate their digital transformations through Agile. The guilds are groups that have domain experience that work crossfunctionally in teams called Agile Squads. The eight guilds include: 1. Data and AI 2. Enterprise Solutions 3. Front-end Engineering 4. Cloud Platforms and Back-end Engineering 5. Quality 6. Design and Product 7. Cloud Operations and Cybersecurity 8. Agility According to AgileThought, for companies to successfully keep up in times

of rapid change, they need to have both expertise and an agile culture that can quickly adopt new technologies. “The rapidly changing digital market has provided a need for companies to react more quickly to transform their business while continuing to provide increasing value for their customers. Through our Guilds, we are bringing our business and technology experts, proven agile methodology, and customer-first approach to deliver at a rapid pace to our clients every day. This framework will also provide high-growth career paths for our employees and help deliver on the latest digital trends and innovations for our clients,” said Alejandro Manzocchi, chief delivery officer and chief technology officer at AgileThought. z

the idea of ‘doing more with less’ maxed out about 10 or 15 years ago. Companies cannot place more work on fewer developers and expect good results. “There is no more space in our people’s schedules in which to do more. The focus needs to be on eliminating the waste to free up space so we can focus on creating more value. We need to stop looking at how to be more efficient and look at how we can be more effective,” said Knudsen. Though Agile is rather widely practiced at this point in time, there are still those who have yet to successfully implement it. But as 2020 showed us, people make a lot of changes when they are under pressure to do so. Think of all the changes companies had to quickly figure out in 2020: remote work, online ordering of things that didn’t have that type of system in place before, and more. “What I saw during the pandemic is that companies that were not adopting it, they started adopting Agile because it was the only way for their distributed teams to do something,” said Lo Giudice. Another recession is an example of a pressure that could inspire companies to either rethink their Agile practice or adopt new parts of it they weren’t really practicing before.

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Buyers Guide

How does Broadcom help companies practice Agile?

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A guide to Agile tools n

FEATURED PROVIDER n

n ValueOps by Broadcom Software: ValueOps by Broadcom Software delivers on the promise of value stream management (VSM) as the first to combine business and investment-oriented product management with advanced, operationallyfocused agile planning and management capabilities. The integration of Broadcom’s proven Clarity and Rally Software Agile management products enables every role within an enterprise to fund, manage, track and analyze unified value streams with a consistent value orientation and methodology. Combining these leading-edge products as one comprehensive VSM solution delivers crucial insights tailored to meet the needs and requirements of each discipline. It aligns teams across the enterprise, increasing alignment, reducing inefficiencies, and improving time to value. n Atlassian offers Jira Software, a software development tool used by agile teams. As an agile project management tool, it helps teams plan, track and move work forward. Atlassian’s Jira Align extends the power of teams working in Jira by connecting business strategy to technical execution while providing real-time visibility at enterprise scale. It allows enterprises to aggregate team-level data and makes all work visible across the organization in real-time. n Azure DevOps is Microsoft’s suite of DevOps tools designed to help teams collaborate to deliver high-quality solutions faster. Agile teams can utilize the solution to plan, track and discuss work as well as use Scrum-ready and Kanbancapable boards. Other features include Azure Pipelines for CI/CD initiatives; Azure Boards for planning and tracking; Azure Artifacts for creating, hosting and sharing packages; Azure Repos for collaboration; and Azure Test Plans for testing and shipping. n ConnectALL is the value stream management company that helps organizations See, Measure, and Automate their software delivery value streams. Our VSM platform, captures and interprets data for measurements and analytics by connecting the tools used to develop and deploy software, and power automation via integration, interoperability, and monitoring of VSM activities. ConnectALL

has been recognized as “Best in Show” in the VSM category from 2019-2021 in the SD Times 100. Visit us at https://www.connectall.com. n Digital.ai is a leading platform provider for Value Stream Management, Agile planning, DevOps and source code management. Its offerings provide global enterprise and government industry leaders a cohesive solution that enables them to ideate, create and orchestrate the flow of value through continuous delivery pipelines with measurable business outcomes. n GitLab is a single application built from the ground up for all stages of the DevOps lifecycle for Product, Development, QA, Security, and Operations teams to work concurrently on the same project. Agile teams can use GitLab to plan and manage projects with features like issue tracking and boards, task lists, epics, roadmaps, labels, and burndown charts. GitLab supports SAFe, Spotify, Disciplined Agile Delivery and more. n Micro Focus ALM Octane is an enterprise DevOps Agile management solution designed to ensure high-quality app delivery. It includes Agile tools for team collaboration, the ability to scale to enterprise Agile tools, and DevOps management.

n The Perforce Helix ALM suite provides end-to-end traceability across the lifecycle. It includes modules dedicated to requirements management, test case management and issue management. In addition, it works with popular Agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban and XP and supports traditional methodologies such as waterfall. n Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning solution enables organizations to adopt and embrace Lean-Agile practices, scale Agile beyond teams, practice Agile Program Management, and better connect strategy to Agile team delivery while continuously improving the flow of work and helping them work smarter and deliver faster. With Planview, choose how you want to scale and when. We’ll help you transform and scale Agile on your terms and timeline. n Plutora ensures alignment between software development and business strategy and provides visibility, analytics and insights into the entire value stream. Plutora ensures governance and management across the entire portfolio by orchestrating release pipelines, managing hybrid test environments, and orchestrating complex application deployments. n The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is the leading framework for scaling Agile across the enterprise. It is designed to help businesses deliver value on a regular and predictable schedule. It includes a knowledge base of proven principles and practices for supporting enterprise agility. n Targetprocess: To connect portfolio, products and teams, Targetprocess offers a visual platform to help you adopt and scale Agile across your enterprise. Use SAFe, LeSS or implement your own framework to achieve business agility and see the value flow through the entire organization. z

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Guest View BY KEREM BALCI

A senior engineer’s survival handbook Kerem Balci is a Software Engineering Manager at Achievers, an employee engagement platform.

s with anything in life, adjusting to a new role is not always easy. Making the leap to a senior engineer position can be challenging since it requires taking on more responsibilities, improving prioritization, and honing soft skills. Whether someone has been recently promoted to Senior Engineer or is trying to prove they are ready for the next level, here are the top lessons to keep in mind to ensure success in the role.

ing a new piece of technology in an organization can be burdensome. The piece of code no one wants to touch is the one that has a complex design and is not necessarily the most difficult. As Martin Fowler said: “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.” Make it a priority to deliver solutions for humans.

Prioritization over perfection

It’s not just coding, it’s also talking about code

Perfectionists can be tempted to spend countless hours trying to improve the codebase, distributing the coding best practices, asking for more hours to refactor, and fixing every bug in the backlog that they can get their hands on. However, fixing the bugs customers don’t complain about in a feature that is not heavily used is not a good use of time. Prioritization should be at the heart of a senior engineer’s approach to work. Software engineers need to fight the urge to pursue roads that do not provide value to the business and block their impact.

A common pitfall software engineers fall into is forgetting to focus on soft skills. An engineer that writes code the fastest and can produce complex solutions isn’t necessarily prepared for a senior title. A senior engineer is expected to articulate every solution that belongs to them, from the past or in the present. If an engineer is unable to explain their reasoning behind a solution they have built, it signals that they are just following what they see from others and not putting thought behind every decision they make. At this level, precision is key and execution at both the technical and communication level is indispensable. The bottom line is that a senior engineer does not have to be the one that can write the most code, but they must be the one that can clearly explain every solution they build.

Prioritization should be at the heart of a senior engineer’s approach to work.

Crystal clear clarity Senior engineers are not just delivering code — they are delivering solutions. Avoid trying to fit design patterns where they are not needed and looking for ways to make the code “prettier” to fit a specific aesthetic. The reality is that no one cares about unique aesthetic preferences, but rather they care that the solution makes an impact and would survive year after year. Engineers should pick clarity over complexity when writing code, designing architecture, communicating a piece of information, or advocating for a new piece of technology. By doing so, the solution has a better chance of making an impact and surviving over the years. A lot of software engineers want to play around with shiny new technology, or a new programming language. Take a step back and look for opportunities to accomplish the same goals within the existing tech stack. While new tech is cool, keep in mind that even the overhead of learning and teach-

Important to the business, important to you Ultimately, this is the most important principle to chase as a senior engineer and critical for the next generation of talent. Do not think that you are just there to do what you are told or sulk when working on a project you are not fond of. We are all in this profession to provide solutions where they are expected, and we must continue to do that. Sometimes it’s a software engineer's job to poke their nose into things and find out what is preventing their business from delivering more value and make the case to go build it. It might not be possible to solve all the big problems an organization or users might have, but you can start from somewhere. The best approach you can take is to act as a good scout and leave the place better than you found it. Take the lead and inspire others to follow your steps. z

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August 2022

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Analyst View BY JASON ENGLISH

Hopping on the low-code locomotive W

ill enterprise developers go loco for lowcode, or will the whole concept someday become a no-go? Until recently, analysts would lump low-code in with no-code and a host of tools offering some form of drag-and-drop ease that enables ‘citizen developers’ (meaning: non-developers) the means to deliver apps. But where should you start in thinking about your own enterprise’s journey to low-code? Looking at the rate of investment and vendor acquisition in the low-code solution space, it seems like this arena has never been hotter. But in another sense, it’s always been with us. Before RAD and 4GLs appeared on the scene, there was Visio and some VB tools on Windows, and Hypercard on the Mac. Even Excel started a revolution among skilled spreadsheet wizards armed with a few macros. These early forms of low-code were pretty localized in orientation, predating the explosion of content yet to come via internet services.

Low code is on a continuum According to my colleague Jason Bloomberg, lowcode is on a continuum between no code (tools requiring no coding at all) and pro code (tools that ease developers in reusing code or leveraging development skills). There are parallels between the low-code spectrum of ‘assisted development’ solutions and the closely related business process automation and testing spaces, which share several commonalities, including a business user-centric or ‘no-code’ point-and-click simplicity on one end, and an engineering-centric ‘pro-code’ side.

Low-code tools must add features that are modular, interoperable and especially maintainable, so developers aren’t left trying to pick up the pieces within a muddled, object-disoriented code dump. 2. Integration. Many low-code tools started out from an integration perspective: allowing teams to stitch together and move data between multiple tools or services to provide new functionality that wasn’t readily available before. Low-code solutions should include both internal core systems and external services into workflows, without requiring users to understand how to construct their own APIs. 3. Security. SecOps teams are extremely resource constrained, and have difficulties figuring out exactly how to authorize conventional development teams for environment access, much less giving low-code citizen developers appropriate access. Ideally, modern low-code solutions can ease this security management burden, with rolebased access controls assigned for team and functional responsibility levels. Fail to do security right, and you will either get hacked, or get Rogue IT as teams run off to do-it-anyway without draconian oversight. 4. Functional integrity. Manually coded processes and rote processes hidden within monolithic silos need to be rebuilt by business domain experts inside the prospective low-code platform. Whether the new functionality is vertical or horizontal the low-code platform should provide adequate ‘safety bumpers’ in the form of pre-flight testing and early monitoring and feedback, so owners can be alerted if any application is going off track.

It seems like this arena has never been hotter. But in another sense, it’s always been with us.

What will drive further low-code adoption? Low-code solutions arose from the natural desire of every business to get ‘all hands on deck’ and become productive in delivering on the needs of customers, given constrained IT resources and budgets. Beyond that desire, there are several major challenges that call for a low-code approach: 1. Maintainability. By far, technical debt is the grandaddy of low-code challenges. The need to maintain existing systems and retire or refactor obsolete or malfunctioning application code takes up the bulk of most established companies’ IT resources.

Jason English is a principal analyst and CMO at Intellyx.

The Intellyx Take If low code was just about reducing labor costs or IT resource constraints, the space would gradually be consumed by adjacent development tools becoming easier to use, or automation tools becoming robust enough to define applications. Bringing the intellectual capital of business expertise to bear within our application estates might just be the biggest game-changer for the future of low code. Wherever the code road ends, a new opportunity arises. z

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August 2022

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Industry Watch BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN

The tech generation gap David Rubinstein is editor-in-chief of SD Times.

ecent studies show a divide between older workers — many in management positions — and the younger ones trying to get ahead. It’s a generation gap, for sure, exacerbated by the advances in technology that place a burden on both cohorts. This is because they view work differently. Many older executives (full disclosure: I am unabashedly one) joined their companies years ago, perhaps even before they used computers. Over the years, they learned enough to do their jobs, but always viewed software with disdain, as they didn’t understand it beyond how to use it, and it was never seen as something critical to the company’s bottom line. These older folks quite likely see themselves retiring in the not-so-distant future, and often just don’t have the gumption to stay on top of all the new changes coming at them rapid-fire. This doesn’t only affect them. It also affects the younger up-and-comers, who are spending what they believe is too much time mentoring the older workers on how to use the new software. They view the older workers with the same disdain with which that cohort viewed software. Many simply wish the older managers would ride off into the sunset already, so the company can hire more likeminded, software savvy, younger workers. This divide can also be seen in how older and younger executives view remote work, and what they perceive as disparate treatment of remote and in-office workers. As you might expect, research done by Slack-backed consortium Future Forum shows younger executives — in their 30s and 40s — have this as their top concern, while the older executives — mostly in their 50s and above — ranked the issue dead last. Younger workers want the flexibility and freedom of remote work, while more senior managers have a bias toward those who show up in the office, giving them better performance reviews and opportunities for advancement. A recent article I wrote talked about how “psychological safety” is a critical factor for enabling software developers to be truly innovative. They want to know they’ll be allowed to fail without

It’s taken a pandemic, a rethinking of how and where work gets done... to get closer to that employment nirvana.

repercussion. Some urge a work environment that is “blameless.” To me, that just means no one is accountable. But that’s just me, I guess. Last month, feature flag and progressive delivery company LaunchDarkly released a report on psychological safety in which 93% of responding developers agreed that the confidence to safely release code updates empowers them to innovate more. Experts agree this need for psychological safety has sprung from the new generation of workers, who want to work on meaningful projects, have the freedom to take risks to secure better outcomes, and who don’t want to be pressured to minimize deployment errors, according to the report. They look for organizations where leadership supports this kind of risk-taking; 100% of the respondents said taking risks and applying new development strategies can positively affect business outcomes, by encouraging the staff to innovate (53%), increasing adaptability (52%) and improving the bottom line (49%). “There is this kind of confluence of really challenging factors,” Ravi Tharisayi, senior director of product marketing at feature management software provider LaunchDarkly, said, “especially since the pandemic, where digital and software development has now become so core and so critical, where outages can really damage your business even more. It feels like every year, the cost of an outage feels more and more impactful to the business, that the stakes are higher and higher.” One of the factors the report homed in on is the process organizations have for software development. Most developers (94%) say internal processes, tools or culture are necessary to feel safe about taking risks to deploy updates, according to the report. But 61% said their company’s heavyweight development processes are barriers to innovation. Workers have always believed that if left alone by managers (and processes), they’d do their job better, and provide greater value to the organization. It’s taken a pandemic, a rethinking of how and where work gets done, and the realization that software development is the business, for us as an industry to get closer to that employment nirvana. Oh, and a changing of the guard, who realize the importance of their skills and actually have the power to effect those changes. Good for them, and good for all of us. z

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SD Times August 2022

Articles inside

INDUSTRY WATCH by David Rubinstein

News Watch

GUEST VIEW by Kerem Balci