Debugging Software

Anyone who lives on the California arc of the Ring of Fire knows that there is no such thing as geologic stability. We sit on tectonic plates that inexorably move and change direction, mostly unseen and unfelt until the big one(s) hit.

In the world of software, news that CA bought iTKO and Compuware acquired Dynatrace reminds us that as changes continue to grind away in the software development lifecycle, earthquakes like these two acquisitions will inevitably occur. The traditional silos of development, test and deployment/operations have been colliding for years as agile, DevOps and Cloud play to the overall need to reduce the time and effort to produce new business solutions.

The fact that two predominantly APM vendors have dived headfirst into ALM starkly illustrates the need to provide seamlessly integrated tools and management across a rapidly changing software development process. Leverage and value are now moving from “after the fact” monitoring and issue triage to pre-deployment detection and resolution.

ALM products are now at a premium because they can be effective at any point of the software development lifecycle.

There is a well-worn bromide describing the ever-elusive “synergy” between two partners: 1 + 1 = 3. So, if good partnering is 1 + 1 = 3, then the recent announcement that the HP Elite Partner Orasi will be selling ReplayDIRECTOR represents great partnering: 1 + 1 = 4.

Orasi, winner of the 2011 awards as HP Software Partner and Support Partner of the year, is a rapidly growing dynamo bringing not only products such as HP ALM/Quality Center, Loadrunner, QTP and Performance Center to F500 customers, but also a finely tuned set of services and best practices associated with implementing and integrating software testing environments to reduce the cost and risk of software failures. In short, they are software testing gurus.

Our ReplayDIRECTOR Java defect management product already integrates with HP ALM/QC with more product integrations coming. When you add that to the Orasi testing domain expertise and HP product proficiency, any Dev or QA organization can immediately improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their defect management process by working with Orasi to implement RD.

Add it up: ReplayDIRECTOR Java record and replay technology, top-notch HP Application Lifecycle Management products, product integrations and Orasi software testing best practices and consulting—4x synergy that a customer can take to the bank.

We’ve been doing a lot of analysis on our DevOps survey results and one of the over-arching themes is the need for comprehensive automation. One of the savvy observers of DevOps draws the elegant analogy between “Design for Manufacturing” and DevOps, citing the need to provide tools that automate and coordinate all the steps in the development and deployment lifecycle—from requirements definition to operations. To continue the analogy, for software it would be “Design for Deployment.”

This morning we are announcing a major integration of ReplayDIRECTOR and Selenium—our way of deepening and extending test automation. The project arose from a customer engagement and is being driven by shorter and shorter development cycles. By adding test integration to our existing defect tracking integration, ReplayDIRECTOR seamlessly extends defect management automation from defect identification to defect communication, replication and root cause analysis.

We’ll be following the Selenium integration with support for other test frameworks because the ROI is very compelling and our customers are telling us that reducing the time and effort required to deal with defects is essential to meeting their business commitments.