HP: DevOps Brings Fundamental Change to IT Management

The real challenge with agile development is that it exposes all the silos in the IT organization, warts and all. Unfortunately, none of these problems magically go away. They require somebody in the senior leadership of the IT organization to take ownership of the problem.

Whether that person is the CIO or someone sporting some newly minted title such as “applications release manager” doesn’t much matter. Any approach to solving the problem requires a commitment to both new processes and the tools required to implement them.

To address that latter issue, Hewlett-Packard today released updates a broad range of DevOps tools that have been optimized to manage agile development. They include:

• An update to HP Quality Center Enterprise management platform that adds support for more customizable reports.
• A new version of the HP Business Process Testing suite that automates more testing functions.
• A 3.0 version of HP Service Virtualization software that adds support for SAP environments in addition to providing a new Web-based management console.
• Support for mobile computing applications within the HP LoadRunner and HP Performance Center application testing tools.
• An HP Agile Manager 1.1 release that gives application development teams access to better analytics tools.

According to Kelly Emo, director of product marketing for HP Software, agile development requires approaches to continuous testing that require a new framework for bridging the traditional divide between developers and IT operations teams. It’s not outside the realm of possibilities that these two organizations are going to work collaboratively of their own accord. But without a mandate from the most senior level of the IT organization, it is unlikely to occur.

Once that mandate is in place, however, IT organizations will almost immediately need to find a new highly automated framework for managing DevOps in a way that actually works for all concerned.