Fast and Accurate Deployments Across Environments

Duration: One hour

Speakers:
Ryan Haffey, Solutions Specialist, UrbanCode, Inc.
Eric Minick, Lead Consultant, UrbanCode, Inc.
Francesca Matteu, Moderator, CM Crossroads

Do your software projects stumble over the deployment hurdle? If so, you are not alone. Many software projects struggle to achieve consistent deployment across their environments—from test, UAT, staging, and on to production. Poor deployments can squander many of the gains made by agile development.

• The downside of manual deployments
• Cultural barriers to overcome when improving deployment processes
• Self-service deployments

Achieve Continuous Delivery Through a Basic Maturity Model

Time: 11:00 AM PT | 1:00 PM CT | 2:00 PM ET
Duration: One hour

Speakers:
Maciej Zawadzki, Co-founder and CEO, UrbanCode Inc.
Eric Minick, Lead Consultant, UrbanCode, Inc.
Francesca Matteu, Moderator, CM Crossroads

How mature are your continuous integration and continuous delivery practices? Where can you get the most improvement based on your specific problems and needs? How are other organizations solving these same problems?
 
In recent years the role of automation in software development has expanded dramatically. The collision of the Agile practice of continuous integration with the realities of development projects has resulted in increased automation efforts throughout the lifecycle. But for some the adoption of automation has been uneven. Many software teams struggle with manual, slow, and high-risk deployments. There are many paths to improving your development automation efforts, but where do you start? In this web seminar, we will present a simple model for scoring the maturity of your organizations automation efforts across the development lifecycle, including build, deploy, test and release. This model will also help you understand industry norms and how you’re keeping up or falling behind the competition.
 
You’ll also learn:

• Industry norms based on UrbanCode’s experiences in the field
• Specialized practices like the build lifecycle of Scrum teams
• Identify and prioritize opportunities for improvement based on your context
• When advancing in automation maturity isn't worth the effort

Closing the Agile Loop: Continuous Integration, Continuous Information

Broadcast Date : Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Time: 09:00 AM PT / 11:00 AM CT / 12:00 AM ET
Duration: One hour

Speakers:
Darryl Bowler, Senior Systems Architect, Services, CollabNet

Early and continuous delivery of valuable software is the number one principle behind the Agile Manifesto. That’s why agile practices demand looking beyond code, to build and test. Continuous integration (CI) and test-driven development are accepted as critical elements to accelerate the software delivery process. However, exclusive focus on automating the build and test process is not enough. A key benefit of CI is the ability to effectively close the loop between development, build and test, and back, through continuous information flow. By gaining timely visibility into build and test results, development teams can be more proactive in dealing with defects, and project teams gain vital information into each build, including which requirements have been addressed. This increases team productivity and accelerates faster delivery of high-quality software.

Attend this session to:
    •    Understand the fundamentals of closed-loop CI
    •    Hear practical examples and case studies from implementations of a CI solution
    •    Learn how to effectively integrate tools like Hudson or Jenkins with ALM solutions

Mastering Complex Application Deployment

Broadcast Date: Thursday, August 18, 2011

Speakers:
Eric Minick, Lead Consultant, Urbancode, Inc.

Many development, test, and project managers see the deployment process as a cruel puzzle and a risky business. Not only do components often go to different servers, interdependencies between components and tiers demand that everything aligns perfectly. A single mistake often results in delayed releases—or worse, system failures.

Complex application deployments place strain across the organization. The resulting high anxiety around releases, finger pointing across the organization, and internal pressure for fewer releases frustrate development and operations even as the business is demanding more. The good news is that your organization can get deployment challenges under control.

Eric Minick explains in this web seminar:

• What process automation can and cannot do to help deployments
• How to consistently promote complex applications through environments
• Strategies to ensure the whole system is deployed with the right versions
• When and when not to trust test results

You’ll also learn how to create more consistent and repeatable deployments through new tools and deployment strategies based on automation and scripting.

Out-of-date; Out-of-touch. The Business Case for ALM Transformation

Broadcast Date : Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Time: 08:00 AM PT / 10:00 AM CT / 11:00 AM ET
Duration: One hour

Speakers:
Kevin Hancock, Senior Director, Worldwide Field Operations, CollabNet
Tracy Ragan, Consultant, OpenMake Software

Look into the quality, efficiency and agility of your current development platform.
Are legacy systems holding your company back?
If you can't trust the processes and systems supporting the applications that differentiate your business, then you are living dangerously.  And you probably don't even know it.
 
CollabNet and OpenMake have joined forces to help companies breakthrough these technical constraints with an open and scalable environment that meets their unique business need to transform. There is no reason to be locked into an obsolete platform.  Our speakers have been involved with a number of recent transitions from legacy Build, Issue and Version Control systems to include:
 
Build: Make, Serena ConfigBuilder, custom build scripts
Issue:  Bugzilla, Bugtracker, VM, Serena Tracker/TeamTrack
Versioning:  Serena PVCS, RCS, CVS, Visual SourceSafe, Rational ClearCase, StarTeam
 
This is a practical session sharing lessons learned and how guidance and enablement paved the way for change.  Our experts will demonstrate an integrated Application Lifecycle Management platform to:
•           Get your ALM in sync with the business
•           Ease user insecurity over change
•           Increase velocity with Continuous Integration and Build Automation
 
Attendees will be the first to receive a copy of a new white paper on ALM Transformation.

Development Clouds: Delivering Peace Between Developers and Testing

Broadcast Date : Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Time: 10:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM CT / 1:00 PM ET
Duration: One hour

Speakers:
Theresa Lanowitz, voke, Inc.

Cloud computing is happening in a big way.  No wonder: infrastructure-as-a-service, resource elasticity, and user self-service promises huge, visible, and fast returns.

The needs of software development and testing  for scalable, flexible, compute-intensive IT infrastructure makes it an incredible candidate  for the benefits of cloud computing. Whether it is vast clusters for testing, dozens of machines to run ALM tools, or the requests for “just one more box,” development and test teams are always asking for something , it is always changing, and time is of the essence.

Join us as Theresa Lanowitz, the founder of analyst firm voke, discusses the utilization of cloud resources for test and development.  Theresa will share research showing how this approach can lead to lower costs, more productivity, and more predictability..  Joining Theresa will be Anders Wallgren, CTO of Electric Cloud, who  will show how task and workflow automation, resource management, and tool integrations allow test and development  teams to effectively use a  cloud infrastructure.

Attendees of the event will receive the voke Market Mover Array^TM Report: Testing Platforms with detailed analysis on Electric Cloud.

Death to Manual Deployments! Achieving Consistent Deployments Across Environments

Broadcast Date : Thursday, June 30, 2011
Time: 10:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM CT / 1:00 PM ET
Duration: One hour

Speakers:
Jeffrey Fredrick, Technical Evangelist, Urbancode, Inc.
Eric Minick, Lead Consultant, Urbancode, Inc.
Patrick Egan, Publisher, CM Crossroads

Do your software projects stumble over the deployment hurdle? If so, you are not alone. Many software projects struggle achieving consistent deployment across their environments -- from Test to UAT to Staging to Production. Successful deployments must account for differences between environments; coordinate development teams and environment owners; balance schedule pressures; and create the requisite audit trail. When these challenges are compounded by error prone, inconsistent and inefficient manual processes, achieving a consistent deployment can seem impossible. The cost of this struggle is lost time, late breaking defects, and uncertainty.

The good news is that you do not need to choose between a careful, rigorous approach and speedy but slapdash one. It is possible to implement a solution that provides consistency and audit trails while improving productivity for your release engineers, operations personnel, and testers. In this webinar, we go beyond the whys of consistent automated deployments and examine best practices, helpful tools and common pitfalls encountered when seeking consistent deployments across environments.

Join us in this webinar to learn:

• the pitfalls of manual deployments;
• cultural barriers to improving deployment processes; and
• best practices, such as self-service deployments.

Embracing Technological Change: From Testing for Quality to Engineering for Experience

Broadcast Date : Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Time: 11:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM CT / 2:00 PM ET
Duration: One hour

Speakers:
Sivakumar Kalyanaraman, IT Architect, Cognizant

QA teams today are required to validate beyond functional and nonfunctional aspects of systems developed and to engineer them to deliver a user experience that exceeds expectations. These systems under test need to handle exceptional situations to prove that they can address business demands. One way to achieve this is to reengineer performance disruptions so that systems can achieve higher levels of scalability and performance. This web seminar will help you experience "newer realities" of quality and explore avenues to enable business assurance through engineering. You'll learn proven ways to redefine aspects of system performance including but not limited to capacity, availability, security, scalability, performance, and reliability; and to successfully adopt virtualization techniques and cloud models.

Enabling Self-Service Builds in the Enterprise

Broadcast Date: On Demand
Duration: One hour

Speakers:
Jeffrey Fredrick, Technical Evangelist, Urbancode, Inc.
Eric Minick, Lead Consultant, Urbancode, Inc.
Bob Aiello, Editor-in-Chief, CM Crossroads

Large organizations often feel the classic tension between centralized and decentralized development infrastructure. A centralized approach promises better compliance to standards, better economies of scale, and lower switching costs when moving staff between projects. Despite these potential advantages project teams often fight for a decentralized approach, arguing that relying on the centralized team will slow them down and cost them their ability to adjust, their agility. To respond to these arguments infrastructure teams are replacing the traditional rule-based approach with a user-centric self-service model that offers the best of both worlds.

In this webinar Jeffrey Fredrick and Eric Minick will share their practical experience in implementing self-service build automation in an enterprise environment. For teams looking to provide a common infrastructure to replace a hodge-podge of systems, or who are looking to quickly onboard new projects so that you can scale with control, this webinar will outline how you can get the most out of a common infrastructure while maintaining the agility for your client projects.

Topics covered will include:

• The benefits of a self-service build infrastructure.
• Pitfalls in implementing a common build system.
• The organization savings from tool consolidation.
• How a common build platform can help bridge organizational silos.
• Managing in-house and open-source dependencies.

Harnessing Team Ingenuity: Lessons from Aviation, Psychology, and Jazz

Broadcast Date: On Demand
Duration: One hour

Speakers:
Michael James, Software Process Mentor and Recovering Architect at CollabNet, Inc.
Patrick Egan, Publisher, CM Crossroads

The teams that shape the future will be innovative, and not just productive.  It turns out significant ideas have emerged from collaboration rather than the mythical lone genius.  But not all teams do well, even with Scrum or related approaches.  This session explains research from outside the world of software development that would benefit anyone working with small teams.