In this episode of The Crossroads, Patrick Egan, Publisher of the CM Journal talked with Clyde Logue, VP of Product Marketing at StreamStep about agile development, StreamStep and DevOps.
During this interview, Clyde talked about the new movement in software development called DevOps. A similar concept to agile, it focuses on a greater level of collaboration between development and operations teams. With lightweight planning of release schedules, coordination of complex deployment processes, and a high level of automation, companies can bridge the "DevOps gap" and get their code in the hands of customers faster. The StreamStep solution gets everyone involved in real-time automation, coordination and planning where they can see what’s being done and how it’s going using a collaborative toolset. This improves speed to resolution for problems and drives higher release success rates. All this translates directly into a high ROI and happy management. Clyde says that by bridging the DevOps gap, your organization can adapt to changes faster, all without losing control over the big picture.
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Interview Transcript
From CMC Media, this is The Crossroads. I'm Patrick Egan. Well, I'm talking today, remotely, with Clyde Logue, Vice President of product marketing for StreamStep about agile development, StreamStep and DevOps.
Well Clyde, we were talking earlier about corporate culture and it sounds like it's just not feasible for most companies to change some of their fundamental operations communication strategies to facilitate the support of agile development.
So how does StreamStep enable that change without changing the culture?
Yeah, I mean I having been in IT for several years in a large corporation and later ran a release manager team, I definitely understand about some of the barriers that companies have in terms of adopting and changing so we designed the solution to be as adoptable as possible and to work in a sort of evolutionary way with existing processes and existing in technology, so we've integrated with partners like Rally on the development side and we have a great partnership with BMC software on the, on the operations side.
So those two things, both the integrations as well as the ability to give a company a, a sort of road map to getting quick wins and then ultimately into a sort of full adoption of greater levels of automation, which is that's mostly the goal, but I understand it's, having seen it up front in close.
It's very difficult to jump, you know, to full automation or very, very fast releases. You need to move in a sort of measured progress way toward that.
Okay, well let's move to the end of the development life-cycle now. I hear a great deal of concern from some of our customers focused on agile and cloud different development about what to do, once the product is ready for deployment. So, you see DevOps as a way to tie up the loose ends.
Yeah, we see that the new movement, similar to Agile, is around what's called DevOps and it's about the beta, it's about a greater level of collaboration between development and operations teams to move that code, transition it into production faster.
So, companies are, and our particular software solution is focused on three things, helping those companies plan that process in a very lightweight way, not sort of in a waterfall plan, but attacking some of the sort of higher level planning of releases. And helping mesh the process into their existing processes in their organization.
And then also the coordination of the different activities that have to take place to do a particular deployment, especially in complex organization in complex software, hardware stack, and then finally automating as much of that as possible.
So, with those three things in place, we're helping companies bridge that DevOps gap and actually get their code into the hands of customers faster.
Well great, Clyde, let's talk now about scalability. Now how well does StreamStep support teams all the way from small groups up through enterprise deployment?
Yeah, scalability in terms of the performance we have customers that are, you know, have hundreds of users, we Obviously scale up to thousands of users or possibly hundreds of thousands of users for any particular customer install. I mean, we're probably in the order of it's really like the IT groups.
So, several thousand users easily. We support different data base to the back like MySQL and Oracle. On the actual implementation side? Yeah, it's useful for even a small team. I mean, we use it internally with a relatively, you know, small development team. And then externally, we have large customers who are using and have significant - in the range of developers using these solutions.
Thanks, Clyde, that's perfect. And now we're talking about management again, and really want to know about ROI. So, how can your customers show a good return on investment from using StreamStep?
Yeah, I think there are two pieces that sort of build the ROI that we see inside of customers. On the just turning the crank side, you have the operational efficiency ROI. I want to be able to develop more and develop better, with the same or, you know, less resources. Or I want to develop more with the same resources.
On the risk side, I want to know that my deployments are being done in the most competitive way possible. I want to be able to prove that I'm not compromising my security, that I am maintaining, you know, a path to production that is Sarbanes-Oxley, and SAS and control.
So, those are the two kind of core things. I mean you can't, sometimes you can't put an exact number on things like risk. I mean certainly you can put the reputational loss of things like larger scandals that we've all heard about, in terms of the credit card issues.
But, on the inefficiency side and errors, and rework, and things like that, when you make mistakes in that DevOps transition you can really generate a lot of pain for your organization, both on the operations side, and on the development side, because typically what you do is you end up pulling some of your best developers to help figure out why that deployment didn't go well.
And that takes away from the number of cards or storage that you can get completed in an agile cycle iteration.
All right, perfect. Well, back to DevOps again. How do you see Stream Step be used to bridge the gap for people who have some change management process in place already?
Right, I think that's a great point. So that you have on the operations side, they typically have a change management system. They probably put in place some level of ITIL.
What we do is we help bring some of that capability of the change management system to the dev teams. So, if a dev team or a project management team is moving a development effort through the process, I was trying to figure out, okay, which operation's tickets do I need to put in, when do I need to put them in?
We have a process called life cycles which allows them to collaborate with the operation teams. They move a code, a code base or an application through a set of stage gates into production.
All right, let's talk integration. There are a lot of tools out there already for change management and life cycle management. So, how does StreamStep work with the tools already in place? Right, so we firmly believe in the tool chain strategy to solve DevOp so we've made integrations with obviously BMC, but we have integration with Capstrano and controlled tier and other operation side tools.
And we expect that over time we may add to on the dev side to help bridge that gap Just like anything, I mean, you know, rally integrates the front end with several build systems and source code repositories. We integrate it with them for the, as they move across that transition line into production and pre-production, late pre-production environment.
So these, the tool chain, you know, every company will build their own, we believe tool chain. Because, if you look at this or best practices of, the larger suites that have the integrated set of tools, we find that they tend to fail somewhere that tend to be not quite the perfect solution in some areas, and for some teams.
So it makes sense if you want to be agile to have your teams have some flexibility in terms of the tools that they can select. And the other thing is, I guess in terms of large organizations, if you look at the adoption of different types of tools within a large enterprise organization you might find that some teams are using rational.
Some teams are maybe still on telelogic. Some teams have got rally. We find it is heterogeneous both vertically in the organization as well as horizontally across the process.
Well, thanks again for joining us today, Clyde.
Thank you very much.
If you want more information about StreamStep you can check out their website at StreamStep.com.
If you'd like to hear more interviews like this one, just visit us on the web at CMCrossroads.com. I'm Patrick Egan with CMC Media.
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