How Software Intelligence Can Save Your Agile Workflow

Published on 15 December 2018

The digital revolution has transformed every business into a software company. Irrespective of the industry you operate in, you must offer a host of digital services, including website, mobile apps, web-enabled service deliveries, and more to your customers. Whether they admit it or not, all enterprises – small, medium, and large – are invested in software development.

The push towards digital does not end with just digitisation. Organisations are forced to rethink and reinvent their traditional product offerings and service deliveries to integrate digital elements into them. This enables them to offer a unified and superior customer experience spanning the digital as well as the physical world. Because of this growing trend, consumers are increasingly experiencing brands and their products in digital environments. And, this throws up huge problems for enterprises.

The expectations of consumers from digital experiences is tremendous. Everyone is accustomed to the flawless and fluid-smooth experiences offered by social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. They expect the same level of seamless experiences from all other brands. To keep with the latest technologies, industry trends, continuous innovation, and rising competition, businesses release 3 new updates every hour to their software. Some cloud-based businesses are pushing out multiple updates every second, as the consumers hardly notice these updates from the front end in most cases. All they care about is that they get a smooth, unhindered experience irrespective of all the circus that’s going on in the back end.

This is why organisations are increasingly embracing agile development methodologies.

Agile: The Solution?

The intensely competitive digital landscape puts immense pressure on the enterprises to churn out new features, bug fixes, security patches, and product improvements. Delays in innovation come at a hefty price – loss of market share to competition, who is only too eager to innovate faster. However, faster deployments come with the risk of failure of untested or less rigorously tested code. To successfully balance this trade-off between rapid innovation and reliability of the codes, agile development process is being adopted everywhere, including in large enterprises. Agile makes it possible to innovate and push the code to the production environment at an unprecedented speed. 

DevOps: The Engine

Agile is easier to understand and hence courts much accord from business executives that easily understand it. However, its much complex but equally important support philosophy, DevOps, often goes ignored.

DevOps, in simple terms, is a software development and deployment methodology, which comprises tools, processes, services, and more, that seeks to expedite the development-to-deployment-to-feedback cycle by multitudes.

DevOps is the structure necessary to make the agile process a success. The absence of DevOps in an organisation that has adopted agile processes comes at a hefty cost. A survey conducted by Logz.io revealed that 70% of the responding IT leaders and developers felt that they could burn out soon on account of lack of time. Lack of understanding of DevOps and its improper implementation often drives the employees to the brink of burnout.

Software Intelligence: The Missing Support

When more than one development team is working on a single production environment, conflicts between the codes from one team with that of the other is a real and scary possibility. These conflicts can lead to security vulnerabilities, bugs, glitches and more. Not to mention the possible loss of revenue to the customer when it’s a B2B business. Poor user experience resulting from buggy software updates can drive the consumers permanently away from brands, especially when they have so many options these days in every industry. Therefore, it is critical to test the new code and its operability with the rest of the production environment code. That, as discussed above, only slows down the development and deployment process.

Dynatrace, a software intelligence company, suggests that the missing link could be – BizDevOps augmented by software intelligence.

BizDevOps brings together teams from IT and business departments and gives them tools that they can use to ensure superior deployment of technology updates. Software intelligence can track, monitor, and identify possible conflicts and inconsistencies in the code at lightning speeds.

The business teams can specify and allocate weight to a vast variety of metrics for the development teams to meet. The weight and the minimum qualification for each of these metrics must be defined based on a robust understanding of their priority for the customer or end user. Over time, the threshold for these metrics can be boosted to make the organisation’s software services more secure, more reliable, faster, and better in every other way.

BizDevOps, complemented by software intelligence, offers development and business teams the tangible evidence they need to demonstrate to the senior management that their approach is making the company’s products and services faster, safer, and better.

On the development end, this approach allows various teams to see how their contributions are directly impacting the scores of the various metrics. Business leaders should be careful enough to use these scores to make the development process more reliable and responsible, as each team can now take responsibility for ensuring that their code works seamlessly with the rest of the production environment code.

Conclusion

Software intelligence is making it possible for the enterprises to not only expedite their IT innovation capabilities, but also dramatically boost the reliability and success of their innovative features. Realising the potential of software intelligence, Dynatrace is completely moving from its traditional application performance management service to a completely AI-supported software intelligence ecosystem.

With Dynatrace software intelligence services, the possibilities are unlimited. To discover how Dynatrace’s services can help your enterprise emerge as the digital innovation hub of your industry, get in touch with AsiaPac by clicking here.

Tags:  Agile, DevOps, Dynatrace, Software Intelligence, 

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