Idea to Delivery: Three Ways to Align IT Teams with Business Outcomes
By Simon King
Business is demanding better, faster delivery of value from IT so it can
compete in a market that’s moving at breakneck speed. How can IT accelerate
business outcomes if it’s taking nine months to complete projects?
First and most important, align IT teams with business goals: acquire new
customers, retain current customers, and boost revenue. When IT understands
its role and significance in supporting those outcomes, it will earn a seat
at the executive table.
Scheduling is critical
Transaction systems need to be rock solid, which is why platform releases are
often six or nine months in the making. Business logic may need to be
adjusted on a quarterly basis to support business changes while the User
Experience layer may demand continuous updates for competitive reasons.
Pace layer ma... (more)
Why Treating Test Management and Test Environment Management Separately Is
Killing Your Efficiency
By Alon Inditzky
Imagine that you have hundreds of development, testing, and operations teams
spread across the globe that rely on each other to execute software testing.
You have 245 test environments and you release to pre-production several
times a day and deploy to production once a week. How do you manage all the
software tests, test data, and test environments?
Traditionally, the answer would be to fill out spreadsheets or siloed tools,
send emails, and hope that everything an... (more)
Control Costs: Use Cloud Test Environments
By Dalibor Siroky
There is no more effective way to reduce your overall test environment spend
than to migrate to cloud test environments and embrace testing and
infrastructure automation. The nature of test environments is inherently
temporary—you set up an environment, run through an automated test suite,
and then tear down the environment. If you can reduce the cycle time for this
process down to hours or minutes, then you may be able to cut your test
environment budgets considerably.
This is the “Holy Grail” for both cost savings and... (more)
How often is an environment unavailable due to factors within your
project’s control? How often is an environment unavailable due to external
factors? Are the software and hardware in an environment up to date with the
target Production systems? How often do you have to resort to manual
workarounds due to an environment?
Metric: Availability and Uptime Percentage
QA and Staging environments seldom require the same level of uptime as
Production, but tell that to a team of developers working 24/7 on a project
that has an aggressive deadline. As a Test Environment Manager, you know t... (more)
How to Weave Lean Thinking into Your Release Management for Predictable
Delivery
By Simon King
"The core idea of Lean is to maximize customer value."
Lean Enterprise Institute
What is Lean?
Businesses are being driven up against the wall by continual industry
disruption. Many are fighting back by adopting Lean as a means to support
business transformation. The aim is simple: create more value for customers
with fewer resources.
Lean thinking views the whole, not its parts. Then it identifies and
eliminates waste across value streams. Here's how you can implement Lean
thinking t... (more)
Plutora provides Enterprise Release and Test Environment Management SaaS solutions aligning process, technology, and information to solve release orchestration challenges for the enterprise.
Amy Eager
Michel Courtoy
Amitabh Sinha
Mark Leake
Rajeev Kozhikkattuthodi
Stefana Muller
Jordan Shamir
Tracy Bannon
Lev Lesokhin
Nishanth Kadiyala
