Tech Insights

As popular as automated processes are now, many IT organizations have yet to embrace application deployment automation. In this article, I cover some of the top reasons why automating your application deployment process will make you look forward to the days when manual deployments are a distant memory.

One of the foundational steps in moving to DevOps is application monitoring, which is not always easy. There are many different possible performance problems and limitations, and the only way to track them down is by collecting information in bulk. Ask any developer who has maintained an application without the proper monitoring tools, and you'll probably hear a story or two about some issue that took months to track down or is still plaguing the application. Developers, server admins, and network engineers need information to be able to track down a problem.

In this article, I walk through an example of how application performance monitoring can help quickly discover, isolate, and solve problems that can negatively impact the user experience.

When it comes to testing mobile and web applications, web applications have one distinct advantage – the developer deploys the latest changes. Beta testers just fire up their preferred browsers and get to testing. Testing mobile applications, however, can be a bit more painful when developers, QA testers, and business stakeholders run the applications on their own devices. Rather than playing the ultimate game of “but it runs on my device,” try building a continuous delivery pipeline so features are ready for review as fast as you can develop them.

There are several approaches for application migration to the Cloud, and each has its own merit. Depending on the current state of your application, you might choose to simply “lift and shift” it to the Cloud or, you may recognize the need to refactor, revise, or rebuild it to capitalize on the benefits Cloud technology provides. Here are two questions that every Cloud migration strategy should answer to help guide and define your implementation plan in a way that adds maximum value to the business.

This may be a bold claim, but embracing the sprint retrospective is the key to adopting the agile rhythm with your scrum team. Agile itself is about incrementally improving a product and making it work for those who use it. The retrospective meeting is “agile for agile” – it’s the system that drives continuous improvement.