Redefining Development and Testing for a Digitally Transformed World

In a world where customer demands and technical requirements are shifting at a breakneck pace, organizations are scrambling to adopt digital transformation to keep up with rapid, ever-changing development cycles. 

Legacy companies often talk about DevOps as a first step in promoting modernization, but it means more than simply aligning your development and operations teams. DevOps is a paradigm shift in aligning people, processes, and technology to support continuous and iterative progress. While DevOps offers a great deal of promise, it can be difficult for larger businesses to shake up their long-standing IT cultures and operational structures. Additionally, the cumulative effect of years of waterfall development often leads to monolithic applications with tremendous technical and political inertia against DevOps.

High-growth companies, on the other hand, are building their IT practices from scratch, providing them with an edge in the marketplace and making them attractive acquisition targets.

Digital Transformation and The Rise of DevOps

Many businesses are exploring digital transformation as a way to move beyond using isolated technology services and become a truly digitally native entity. This status is increasingly necessary in meeting customer demands, creating a situation in which many software developers are honing in on issues pertaining to the customer experience in designing their apps. 

As customer experiences become the focal point of modern apps and services, organizations need to:

• Shorten dev/test cycles to address new requirements.
• Continually innovate to maintain customer attention.
• Stay ahead of vulnerabilities and risks to maintain user trust.
• Test continuously to avoid performance hiccups that can derail user experiences.

In the case of testing, many companies still outsource to manual, offshore providers. This process is slow and doesn't scale to the demands of continuous integration. Making the move to DevOps to support digital transformation must also involve updating testing capabilities to automate repeatable processes and add a layer of data-driven intelligence to software evaluation.

Businesses Leading the Charge in Next Generation Development and Testing

Larger companies looking to advance their DevOps testing processes often look to startups, but staking your mission-critical applications on the future of a new vendor can prove risky. Fortunately, Insight focuses only on later-stage, next-gen vendors with proven track records of successful deployments that can scale to meet enterprise demands. Here's a look at how these organizations are disrupting the DevOps and testing segments:

• Tricentis and QASymphony: These two leaders recently merged. Between Tricentis' focus on enabling continuous testing and QASymphony emphasizing better collaboration and more efficient processes, this software testing hotbed is leading the way in automated testing and agile test management.
• Checkmarx: They focus on security, delivering a DevOps-driven application testing platform that bolsters secure code practices without holding teams back from  trying to move at the pace of a digitally transformed world.
• SonarSource: Supporting constant development via agile and DevOps methodologies requires continual software tests. SonarSource is built for this demand, providing automated code quality inspections designed for modernized IT teams.
• Jama Software: Jama’s product development platform helps companies establish a Predictive Product Development process — to mitigate risk, improve quality, identify opportunities and decrease time to market — via an integrated solution for guiding the product lifecycle from idea to launch.

The development world is changing quickly in response to digital transformation, giving startups a chance to stand out by claiming a flexibility edge that larger competitors can't match.

Thomas Krane Managing Director More By The Author