Agile Application Delivery

Foster collaboration, shrink agile development times, and get better insights into costs.

Technology users across the globe are unrelenting in their demand for faster delivery of engaging applications with high-quality and excellent performance. Speed, quality, and scale must be balanced and continuously achieved to stay ahead of the competition. These constantly evolving demands to deliver new digital innovation faster than ever before challenge the teams responsible to build, test, and deliver software in new ways every day. And these teams need an evolved approach to support Lean, Agile, rapid software
delivery.

While business pressures may drive many IT organizations toward faster release cadence, Lean, and more Agile-like development processes, many groups have developed processes and practices that already work very effectively, without requiring significant change.

In 2015, Gartner Research introduced the concept of bimodal IT, whereby they assert that organizations may opt to run in two distinct modes to support their business demands. Mode 1 organizations require little application development process or tooling changes and already do a good job at satisfying their business goals. Mode 2 organizations require a much faster and regular delivery cadence, involving more Agile frameworks and may include concepts such as continuous delivery, DevOps, and Lean software delivery.

Benefits

Micro Focus ALM software has been a trusted and market-leading ALM platform supporting ALM for over a decade, and continues to support Mode 1 clients in their delivery activities across the globe.

Now, with the new ALM Octane release, Micro Focus Software expands the ALM experience with a new set of ALM capabilities, which embody next generation.

This ALM experience, part of the overall ALM software product, helps organizations to not only support Mode 2 activities and processes
but also aid organizations as they adopt Mode 2 processes and practices such as Agile development and continuous integration. This new set of software lifecycle management capabilities are optimized for the speed, quality, and scale challenges of organizations adopting Lean and Agile delivery practices, as well as delivering software through DevOps pipelines.

ALM Octane Features

Plan: Predictable application delivery requires awareness of progress and alignment with goals and milestones, as well as the ability to access updated information without relying on error-prone manual data gathering. ALM Octane platform allows teams to assess the status quickly within their context and access the right data to make the correct decisions.

Understanding business needs is the most critical piece of data any project team can have. ALM Octane has integrated Agile user stories and backlog management directly into the ALM software platform. Through this, teams can quickly document business needs and map them to supporting artifacts in the software development lifecycle, such as defects or tests.

Build: High-velocity teams realize that a quick understanding of what went into a build and where to triage is an effective means to faster application delivery. ALM Octane integrates directly into your Jenkins continuous integration and build environment, so you can quickly view release and quality pipelines, as well as adjust as new or changing validations and regression tests are created.

Embracing open source: ALM software continues to embrace open source standards and tools within the framework. With the beta release, you can author tests using Gherkin, support test automation management of Selenium scripts, which is based on a GIT architected back-end platform, and tightly integrate with your team’s Jenkins build environment.

Business rules: To allow teams to provision workspaces and environments quickly as well as simplify the administration of the system, ALM Octane introduces visual business rules. This helps teams to control access, enforce process and workflow, and align with team priorities consistently. The most beneficial process assistance comes through productive guidance, rather than obstructive blocking.

Test: Consistent quality is critical in any application being delivered to support your business. ALM Octane platform provides the ability for teams to author tests using Gherkin, assisting in the conversion of automated scripts and manages the execution of your test suites. Whether you’re planning your tests within the context of a continuous integration pipeline or executing regression tests on the fly, with ALM software you can view aggregated quality within the context of your entire application.

Track: Whether you want to log a defect—quickly and easily—during a regression test, or review the status of a test or user story, ALM Octane provides information tailored to your context. Customizable reports, graphs, and dashboards help the team stay on top of critical items and with prioritization.

Asset sharing, reuse, and tagging: Being able to share similar artifacts between teams or projects doesn’t just help save time and lower risk but is a very common reality for many teams today. Using applications modules within ALM Octane, teams can easily assign tests,defects, and user stories to a specific application release, and can use custom tagging that quickly filters and views items across the lifecycle.

How can Northway help?

Northway Solutions Group ALM Professional Services focus on innovative solutions for lifecycle management of modern-era enterprise applications. Services include:

  • Enterprise agility solutions for scaling Agile and Lean practices at different levels of the enterprise — from large Agile teams up to Agile portfolio management
  • DevOps solutions for driving agility across the IT value chain (requirements to deployment)
  • Enterprise Mobility solutions for supporting DevOps solutions specific to “extreme Agile” mobile applications
  • ALM Optimization solutions for helping our customers accelerate value and return on investment (ROI) using Micro Focus ALM technologies based on our library of best practices and prebuild accelerator utilities
  • Enterprise Centers of Excellence (COE) solutions for ALM functions such as testing, Agile, and requirements management
We offer outcome-based services geared toward generating specific outcomes that are enabled through SLAs