DEVOPSdigest

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced the availability of HPE ALM Octane, an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) software offering, designed to help customers accelerate their DevOps processes.

This streamlined ALM solution leverages widely-used developer toolsets like Jenkins and GIT to bring continuous quality to lean, Agile, and DevOps-focused teams. HPE ALM Octane provides insights to developers and testers, helping them deliver applications quickly, without sacrificing quality or end-user experience.

To keep pace with a rapidly changing market landscape and deliver compelling customer experiences, organizations are building and enhancing software and mobile applications at lightning speed. This accelerating rate of change drives businesses to rethink how they optimize their internal software development processes. Application delivery management solutions that ensure on-going quality and scale at increased speed have not yet evolved fast enough to support development methodologies like Agile, Lean, and DevOps.

"At the core of successful business today, you will find agile, high-quality, high-performing applications that continuously provide engaging and intuitive user experiences," said Raffi Margaliot, SVP and GM, Application Delivery Management, HPE. "However, to rapidly deliver these remarkable applications, IT teams need to be equally agile and continuously deliver high-quality products. HPE ALM Octane is specifically designed for Agile and DevOps-ready teams, bringing a cloud-first approach that's accessible anytime and anywhere, bolstered by big data-style analytics to help deliver speed, quality, and scale across all modes of IT."

To improve product direction and execution, software development teams need products capable of integrating data from a wide array of developer and testing tools, to seamlessly report on the state of quality across the application delivery pipeline, and to enable big data-style algorithms to leverage lifecycle data. HPE ALM Octane achieves this for software developers to streamline production. Along with HPE ALM and Quality Center, HPE ALM Octane can bridge the gap for software developers and organizations who continue to use legacy methods of software development in existing projects to modern software development practices such as DevOps, lean, Agile, and more.

HPE ALM Octane is optimized for integration with widely adopted developer testing tools -- leveraging Swagger-documented REST APIs -- and an open platform architecture built on a layer of open source. While inherently open, HPE ALM Octane is designed to address the challenges associated with the scale required by enterprise software delivery. To accelerate application delivery across multiple teams, the solution provides visually guided and easily configured business rules and workflow.

HPE ALM Octane configures and manages automated testing within the context of a continuous integration pipeline, making it simple for developers to automatically view results and defects in context. In addition, through HPE ALM Octane's open architecture, organizations can leverage a wide array of test frameworks from both HPE and third party due to the incorporation of continuous integration tools such as Jenkins and Team City.

Key features offered by HPE ALM Octane include:

- Enhanced Open Source Dev/Test Toolchains - HPE ALM Octane, is integrated with a core set of widely adopted tools focused on test automation, collaboration and application deployment, which increase volume and shift testing left. Leveraging the strength of these tools, HPE ALM Octane adds value for cross-toolchain visibility and insight. The solution will support the following tools and frameworks:

- Jenkins and TeamCity integration to trigger continuous integration and testing activities, discover tests, execute test runs, and maintain relationships and report results -- including defects associated with each pipeline build.

- GIT to provide manual tests script version management and managing tests in source code.

- Business-Driven Development (BDD) via support of Gherkin to develop tests earlier in the design and development phases of the lifecycle; this helps streamline the use of automated testing from manual processes as tests are easily converted to automated scripts.

- A wide array of test automation tools from HPE and Open Source including, HPE Unified Functional Testing, HPE LeanFT, HPE StormRunner Load, and Selenium that are executed via CI integration; and test activities, types and results which are continuously reported and linked to HPE ALM Octane application modules, builds and defects.

- Swagger-documented REST APIs for straightforward third-party tool integration.

- Continuous Quality for DevOps Software Delivery - Utilizes the continuous integration process and associated activities to capture, analyze, provide, and present intuitively actionable data for defect management and tracking.

- Enhanced Collaboration with ChatOps - Proactively tracks rapidly evolving relationships between pipeline activity, application architecture and components, and state of quality. In addition, HPE ALM Octane tracks change between application components, backlog, builds, tests, and defects. Artifacts, status, and relationships are easily maintained through intelligent tagging and with ChatOps, collaboration becomes context rich and automatic.

In addition to the launch of HPE ALM Octane, HPE is also announcing several new features to HPE functional and performance testing that support Agile, DevOps, and quality at scale. Please click here to read more.

Organizations can leverage HPE ALM Octane as a cloud-delivered service starting today. On-premise HPE ALM Octane installations will be available later in 2016.

Additionally, current HPE ALM and HPE Quality Center enterprise customers on support are entitled to the new offering as part of their active support contract.

Mobile Center updates will be introduced to help developers further increase mobile application quality and user experience optimization throughout the application lifecycle.