Today we released our latest white paper: Cloud-Enabled Software Development and Testing: Putting the Agile into the Infrastructure. In the paper, we examine ways in which organizations can implement cloud-enabled software development by adopting an Agile IT strategy.
The following is an excerpt from the paper:
Agile software development is winning the hearts and minds of developers and testers in leading enterprise organizations. In the “State of Agile Development” 2011 study, VersionOne highlights that 80% of the respondents from 6,042 companies surveyed have adopted Agile development practices within their organization. Nearly 50% of respondents had between two and five Agile projects underway, and one third said their organization is running 11 or more. There is a business reason for this momentum. The Agile development model enables software teams to produce higher quality software that is more in-sync with customer needs and delivers release cycles faster and more cost-effectively than ever before.
Unfortunately, most software teams that adopt Agile development struggle to achieve its full potential due to legacy IT challenges, especially in the enterprise. While the Agile model accelerates the software development process, many teams find that their IT environments are not optimized to support the full potential of their Agile development release cycles. These legacy environments are often too slow, inflexible, and inadequate for Agile development processes. Consider this: Typical provisioning time for an enterprise-grade development environment can take, at a minimum, from several weeks to several months. Most Agile release cycles span four to six weeks at most. Not only does a four-week provisioning delay result in sub-optimal outcomes, but once created, these static environments are also difficult to change and cannot support the rapid iteration required for Agile development. Essentially, Agile development methodologies require Agile infrastructure for optimal efficiency.
Leading companies are changing the way their IT teams equip and support software development teams by integrating fast, dynamic, flexible, and easily shareable cloud-based environments that are available on-demand. They are changing IT architecture to incorporate cloud computing resources that enable Agile and empower software development teams with self-service. By integrating cloud-based services into the overall IT architecture strategy, software development teams are better enabled to create, change, and scale complex computing environments as often as needed. And at the same time, IT is able to retain the full visibility and control required for security and operational governance over these environments.
Download: Cloud-Enabled Software Development and Testing: Putting the Agile into the Infrastructure
