Agility is the key to success in today’s busy, mobile-first application world. It’s no longer a matter of spending months developing an application and rolling out the red carpet for one major release. The reality is that apps must be released quickly and iterated frequently so one can learn from user feedback and meet business expectations.

Many of us are familiar with agile development, a system of processes and tools that ensures the efficient development of high-quality apps. But that’s only half of the story. Once development is ready to release an application, how do we support the next stages of the release process with equally agile operations?

Agile delivery

The basis of agile delivery is when development and operations teams actively collaborate to seamlessly build and manage an application throughout its lifecycle. Several businesses have already proven just how far this approach can carry them. NYSE Euronext, in the midst of its merger, reduced their two-year web development cycle into an iterative, two-week production cycle by adopting agile delivery. They were able to release 40 new business-critical apps in 18 months as a result.

Pinterest credits release automation and DevOps smarts with being able to successfully support its 5,124 percent explosion in growth last year. Facebook releases apps twice a day and processes up to 300 changes per day for one billion users, perhaps representing the pinnacle of agile achievement.

A crisis of collaboration

However, although they are striving for more frequent releases, most companies don’t yet have the processes and tools to support agile delivery. Development and ops teams still grapple with ongoing misunderstandings because they don’t have shared visibility and accountability for an application’s success once released into production. In fact, collaboration issues are still so serious that the leading causes of application failure can be traced back to them. These include failed software upgrades, the inability to scale to meet unforeseen demand, resource exhaustion and configuration errors, according to research from Carnegie Mellon University.

All of these issues have lead to a phenomenon of blamestorming between development and operations teams. Seventy five percent of ops teams admit that development perceives them as a roadblock, or only somewhat supportive of agile development, while 72 percent of ops professionals say that development is not supportive of their goals.

Three steps to agile delivery

As big as this challenge may seem, it is not insurmountable. The solution involves bringing down the invisible wall that has traditionally separated development and operations. In its place, build a bridge of automation and collaborative workflow, the foundational components to agile delivery. This involves establishing tools and processes that maximize shared visibility and transparency, while diminishing the likelihood of errors through handoffs, as well as maintaining the security and control of the production of the production environment.

I’ve seen companies succeed when they started with three components and then built up their agile delivery from there. These components are automation, shared visibility and troubleshooting.

Automation

Automating deployments reduces the chance of error when development teams pass code and instructions to ops. In an ideal world, developers can specify the exact components that are needed for their app in a self-contained package that incorporates all of the necessary application prerequisites. The automation process enables all of these requirements to be applied as part of the application’s release package.

In the case where an application encounters significant errors, the other key element to automate is a rollback capability. Here, what a team needs is a controlled change process where the option exists to revert to a previous version with all of its associated extensions and configurations. Ideally, this process can be applied from the operations side in a simple series of clicks.

Shared visibility

Shared visibility provides the foundation for collaboration once an application has successfully moved into production. This enables a developer to know whether his app is performing or behaving in a different manner in production than it did in the dev/test environment. Without this insight, the operations team may be unaware of unusual application behavior and impending challenges.
However, there is also a question of control. The key is to find a way to give developers access to the information they need for troubleshooting and to understand an app’s behavior, without giving them hands-on access to the production systems (think “read only” visibility without the ability to change settings).

Troubleshooting

The third crucial area is troubleshooting. This is the most common cause of blamestorming between dev and ops teams.

The key here is that developers need access to production debugging information in a controlled manner, and a troubleshooting toolset so they can understand what happened on the production system. Ideally, with the visibility mentioned above, a developer can actually see why an error occurred, and avoid unnecessary experimentation to try and replicate the error.

This means going beyond ops sharing screenshots of application error pages, and finding a way to record major errors in an application’s code execution for later analysis by the developer.

Agility that goes beyond development

Organizations that embrace agile development while relying on disconnected operations processes are making the painful discovery that much of the value gained from agile development is negated. Today’s iterative development approach requires special attention to the operations and delivery side of applications. Once a business starts with these three foundational elements, they can build and refine their agile delivery even further, placing a focus on advanced application monitoring and continuous performance and scale, which I’ll discuss in my next post.

Andi Gutmans is CEO and co-founder of Zend Technologies. Founded in 1999, Zend was instrumental in establishing PHP. Today, Zend helps others create and implement back-end infrastructure for mobile and web applications. Zend Server and Zend Studio are deployed at more than 40,000 companies worldwide.

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

Developed by Flickr to enable up to 10 code releases each and every day, DevOps is a continuous deployment methodology that uses high levels of automation to bring development — coding engineers — closer to operations, the team that builds and runs the servers that deliver the software to users.

According to a new report by IT automation provider Puppet Labs, 63 percent of companies are now using at least some DevOps methodology. Companies that do, ship code a staggering 30 times more often than companies that don’t and accomplish that rapid turnover with 50 percent fewer errors.

Not surprisingly, the deploy rate — how often companies actually update live production code — increases as the length of time of DevOps implementation increases, and the change lead time decreases. In addition, the change failure rate decreases.

How?

Puppet Labs’ report says that version control, which allows instant rollback and quick pinpointing of changes that could have adverse effects, and automation, which helps companies create and run a set of repeated and automatic steps for each and every code deployment, result in the achievement of what might be seen as two diametrically-opposed goals: quick reaction time and lower error rate.

More details, visually, in the infographic:

photo credit: Leonardo Rizzi via photopin cc

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

These days, most companies are releasing software multiple times a week. In fact, according to Zend CMO Elaine Lennox, for “born-on-the-web” companies, this release cycle is several times a day. In that speedy environment, you don’t want to spend a lot of time bugfixing.

In, fact, you can’t afford to.

One of the most common source of problems is coordination between those who build and those who provision: development and operations. Different operating environments, lack of automation, and complex deployment procedures cause challenges between the two groups: 56 percent of teams have built apps that work just find in testing environments, but fail in production environments.

Source: John Koetsier

Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012

So Zend will be releasing a new version of its Zend Server and Zend Studio next week that, it says, will bridge the gap between development and operations. I chatted to Andi Gutmans, CEO and one of the original authors of the almost-ubiquitous PHP language, and Lennox yesterday.

“There’s a lot of pressure in companies to deliver mobile, cloud-enabled apps,” Gutmans says. “Half of teams are telling us that that they’ve missed dates because they cannot work together.”

Not working together causes bugs, and compounds the issues when bugs actually arise. According to Zend, 70 percent of the time for “fixing bugs” is actually spent in just finding the problem. Only 30 percent of developers’ time is spent solving it.

The new Zend Server 6 is designed to eliminate that 70 percent.

“The differences between development and live environments only get worse over time,” Lennox told me. “The development side doesn’t have visibility into errors in production, so the first step to fixing problems is to recreate the development environment from 3 months ago. We’ve seen teams literally waste weeks simply trying to reproduce issues.”

When that happens, people get upset. In numbers Lennox cited, 75 percent of developers say that operations is a “roadblock.” And, since one bad turn deserves another, 72 percent of operations engineers say that development is “not supportive of their goals.”

The fix?

Gutmans isn’t revealing just now what Zend is doing to solve the issue, except that Zend Server 6 will provide ”the tools, processes and infrastructure to enable teams to streamline and simplify their collaboration.”

More on that next week.

photo credit: e_monk via photopin cc

VictorOps is a platform to help teams of developers “be victorious” when managing their software systems. This Boulder, Colo.-based startup emerged from stealth mode today and revealed $1.58 million in financial backing from Foundry Group, Tango, and the founders.

CEO Todd Vernon previously founded Lijit, an advertising platform for publishers that was acquired by Federated Media last year, and Raindance Communications, a web conferencing company that sold for over $170 million in 2006. His latest endeavor strives to tackle some of the pain points he encountered while running those software-as-a-service businesses.

“We are building the worlds first vertical alerting and collaboration platform for Ops, DevOps, TechOps teams,” he said in an email. “The platform is design to help these teams solve problems faster. Remediation of the platform is a constant in [SaaS] companies. Salesforce.com is for sales teams. Rally is for dev teams. There is no platform currently to help Ops teams.”

This “Vertical Collaboration Platform” will enable these teams to address issues regardless of physical location, connected device, or time of day. Advancements in technology mean that customers expect businesses to be up and running 24/7. In response, businesses set up complicated and large infrastructure that need constant monitoring. VictorOps is a support system for the teams working behind-the-scenes to keep it all functioning smoothly.

Vernon founded VictorOps with COO Bryce Ambraziunasis and CTO Dan Jones, fellow members of the “band of brothers” and veterans of Raindance Communications. These three steely eyed men (view photo above) are forging ahead in the fight against system outages from their mountain base camp. They may look more like former Marines than technology startup guys, but they are armed with years of experience, fierce battle glares, and warm winter clothing. Oh, and venture capital. That helps too.