Hello from Las Vegas! Serena Software is a sponsor at the Gartner Data Center Conference, happening now through December 12. We are showing our recently-announced Serena Release Manager v5 at our booth (pictured to right). Gartner interviewed over 200 CIOs in 2012 on the topic of DevOps; they said that release management was the number one issue they face.
While at the show, Jonathan Thorpe and I had the opportunity to attend a Monday session led by Ronni Colville and George Spafford, both from Gartner Research, titled “Leveraging DevOps for Scale.” Here are some of the key messages they delivered:
- Release Management is the foundation for DevOps and a concept that must be mastered. (At Serena, we completely agree!)
- When designing an enterprise release management process, the considerations are: be sure you understand who your key stakeholders are, establish shared metrics (Dev and Ops) to foster team work, and start on a prototype project to prove concepts (and in our view, for early success to establish momentum).
- A shared understanding between Dev and Ops should be the ultimate goal of releasing software into production.
- Application Release Automation (ARA) is a low hanging fruit. (Serena’s view is that ARA is necessary but not sufficient – you also need to focus on lifecycle processes.)
- Support of release types is important, especially as you consider Gartner’s Pace Layered guidance. (Serena agrees and supports different release types out-of-the-box with Release Manager v5.)
- A key challenge to implementing release management – integrations. (We agree. Serena does not believe in “rip-and-replace” but rather leveraging investments in existing tool chains.)
More coming soon from Las Vegas.
