Application development has evolved significantly in recent years. Gone are the days of siloed application developer and IT teams who require months to deploy new infrastructure and have limited options for scaling and iterating on their deployments over time. Thanks to a highly competitive market and ever-increasing end-user demands, today's application development is moving in parts and/or as a whole to remote cloud infrastructures, and the advent of microservices has created a new need for distributed architectures ...

In the DevOps rapid iteration cycle, too many organizations push their software and services out without being able to properly test for bugs that will show up with production traffic. This can cause unanticipated downtime, which means it's a big risk; it could take down the whole service. And no one wants that. So, what can be done? ...

We now move on to Step 8 of the Twelve-Factor App, which recommends scaling out via the process model discussed in Step 7 ...

The expert stage of test automation is all about continuous optimization. More specifically, this phase is about collecting data about your existing process, analyzing that data to derive quality insights, applying those insights to improve your practice and then measuring these improvements as part of repeating the cycle again. There are three key steps to realize continuous optimization ...

By now, the concept of experimentation in software development is fairly well known. Most development teams understand at a high level the benefits that can be achieved through experimentation. Perhaps the most important of those is the ability to identify positive or negative impacts of a feature — in terms of both app performance and customer experience — earlier in the development process ...

In the current landscape where there is constant pressure to deliver faster and more frequently, without compromising value, companies need a way to control the overall process from the development level up to c-suite. To make it work, they are turning to value stream management ...

In Part 1 of this three-part series, we covered the first steps of introducing automated testing into your software development lifecycle. Now that you've done the early work of codifying manual tests into an automation framework and achieved some quick wins with initial smoke tests, you can continue to build confidence in test automation ...