20 Great Ideas To Steal In 2013

DevOps, a mashup of development and operations that describes a method of software development, can have a significant impact on the speed of bringing a new product to market. As a result, it can also help the enterprise increase its number of customers and revenues, according to a recently completed CA Technologies survey.

CA worked with survey firm Vanson Bourne as it prepares to dip its toes a little deeper into the DevOps market as interest in the method and market grows. The number of people who have searched on the term DevOps over the last nine months equals all the searches on the same term from when it was coined in 2010 through the end of 2012, said Shridhar Mittal, general manager of application delivery at CA Technologies. "It's caught fire the last six to nine months," he said in an interview.

Interest in DevOps, sometimes also referred to as "continuous delivery," follows on the heels of widespread adoption of agile methodologies in software development. Agile impulses, bent on fast application delivery, tended to collide with the operations staff's concern about software stability and need to minimize frequency of updates. Agile likes speed of delivery and frequent updates.

DevOps is about getting more of the operations' point of view into the development process. When it works as planned, the development team and the operations team work smoothly together for the good of the organization -- although Mittal suspects that few companies have reached that nirvana.

[ Want more on "continuous delivery?" See Where Agile Development Fails: IT Operations. ]

So, between May and July, opinion surveyor Bourne collected feedback from 1,300 IT professionals on the state of DevOps and compiled the results into a white paper, TechInsights: What Smart Businesses Know About DevOps.

Among other things, it showed that one in six IT managers still isn't sure what the term DevOps means. But in a nutshell, the survey found that the adoption of DevOps sped up new services and products to market by 20%. With companies able to respond in the marketplace faster, they increased the number of customers by 22% and revenues by 19%. Thirty-nine percent of those surveyed had adopted some form of DevOps; 27% were planning to do so in the near future.

Respondents also said the implementation of DevOps disciplines "improved the quality of software deployed into production," said Mittal. DevOps requires more testing for compatibility with the production environment; it is not focused on function quality or the ability to fulfill business requirements, the way agile programming tends to be.

Responses were collected from IT professional in the U.S., Brazil, U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Israel, Australia, China, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

CA Technologies is the owner of iTKO Lisa, now dubbed CA-Lisa Service, a tool that can be used for pre-production testing. It simulates various mainframe and other data center systems to which a budding application might be connected. By testing software early for its ability to maintain operations with other pieces of the infrastructure on which it will be dependent, a finished application is more likely to deploy smoothly and successfully, Mittal said.

Earlier this year, CA acquired Nolio, a software release automation product.