AB Suite and DevOps: Accelerate Time to Market to Seize New Opportunities

Enterprises must innovate and quickly bring new ideas to market. They need to, after all, if they want to meet rapidly changing customer demands. This is never easy, especially when you consider the increasing application and platform complexity most software development organizations must manage.

DevOps promises to help enterprises be more responsive and bring higher-quality releases to market faster by improving communication, integration, and collaboration between development and operations teams. But for DevOps to be truly successful, these teams must adopt an attitude of shared responsibility.

If developers better understand the operation team’s pain, they’ll be more apt to find ways to simplify it. Similarly, when operations teams understand business goals, they’ll appreciate the need for increased IT agility. Speed and stability shouldn’t be mutually exclusive, nor should one be sacrificed to satisfy the other.

Fortunately, there is a way to foster shared responsibility among teams while increasing throughput and stability. Continuous integration, continuous testing, version control, automation, and continuous delivery are the DevOps concepts that make it happen. And they’re possible with Agile Business Suite (AB Suite®).

Continuous Integration

Continuous integration requires developers to regularly integrate code into a shared repository and provide rapid feedback, so defects can be quickly identified and corrected. Team members submit work daily, or more frequently, and conduct builds after each change.

With AB Suite Builder, you can generate and deploy solutions in one step. After you generate a solution the first time, Builder analyzes the changes and then generates only what is required to implement them, automatically optimizing the solution for the target environment.

AB Suite Builder can be integrated with Microsoft® Team Foundation Server (TFS), as well as the Team Foundation Build (TFBuild) function, and configured to automatically build and deploy your application. The Microsoft Build Engine provides options to build AB Suite applications without using the Microsoft Visual Studio® environment. The build is queued automatically when development artifacts are checked in.

Continuous Testing

Though it often determines software quality, the testing component of DevOps can be easily overlooked. Continuous testing requires an automated, end-to-end solution that integrates into the existing development process.

AB Suite Automated Test Tool (ATT) enables continuous testing. It integrates with the AB Suite development environment, enabling you to record, play back, and change transaction inputs at runtime to verify application changes. It can also confirm an application works as expected when the AB Suite model changes. ATT enforces quality by making unit and regression testing part of your standard check-in and build workflows.

Version Control

AB Suite Developer lets you choose any third-party configuration management tool that supports Source Code Control (SCC) APIs. It also includes utilities that compare separate versions of an application and report on the differences. With System Modeler, you can check in and check out elements, maintain multiple versions, and group them for release by label. AB Suite can also use TFS to easily audit changes, identify which user checked in a changeset, and identify the exact changes made.

Automation

DevOps relies heavily on automation, especially in the areas of application configuration, build, test, and deployment. By using automation, you can set up environments faster, with more standardization and repeatability. Build automation, test automation, and effective version control are all important elements of a successful DevOps practice.

Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery takes continuous integration to the next level by extending the concept across the entire release chain, including QA and operations, helping teams confirm every change can be deployed to production, as business needs dictate.

Most enterprises require manual review and approval processes for production deployment. They can achieve continuous delivery by continuously integrating the software released by the development team, building executables, and running automated tests on those executables to detect problems.

Driving DevOps with AB Suite

The ability to deliver frequent, predictable, low-risk releases means you’ll become more responsive to change while accelerating time to market. By using tools like ATT, you can reduce manual effort and increase productivity. Moreover, TFS integration enhances DevOps capabilities. With frequent deployments, developers receive feedback faster, creating an environment of continuous learning that helps them deliver more value to internal and external consumers.

Please do not hesitate to contact us at ABSuite@unisys.com if you’d like more information about taking the DevOps journey with AB Suite or wish to explore these capabilities in a pilot project.