VP AppDev Confessions

“The time we spend waiting for environments exceeds our sprint cycle.” —VP of AppDev Agile methodologies have promised greater velocity for development processes: discreetly breaking up development cycles, iterating faster, and providing more process transparency. But the Buffalo Theory applies, an idea that suggests a herd of buffalo only moves as fast as the slowest beast, and in the case of Agile, the laggard is often setting up data and environments. Dev and test spin their wheels waiting for environments populated with timely, relevant and fresh data, so they can get started. “Shift left? Testing has shifted so far to the right it has fallen off the end of the project plan.” Better quality means moving testing earlier in the delivery cycle rather than parking it at the end—that’s shifting it left. The problem is that agile teams often see testing as a bottleneck as they attempt to up their velocity. —VP of AppDev environment to execute test cases across functional, Spring cycles are invariably too short to accommodate testing because late development drops don't leave enough time. This is especially true when it takes weeks to create or roll back an integration, regression, usability, security and other testing. UAT and end-to-end testing fall victim too, often getting cut from the plan completely. It’s why the secret to shifting left is slashing environment setup to minutes, so testing is never an afterthought. CONFESSIONS VP OF APPDEV DBA 5 “I push out release dates by six months, every six months.” —VP of AppDev Whatever the initiative - whether it be cloud migration, ERP upgrade, digital project, or app/data integration - it's easy for the delivery schedule to seemingly roll out endlessly in the future. Teams not only need more environments for multiple scrum teams and testing cycles, but they are often starved of them due to cost and complexity. Why VPs of AppDev Love Delphix VPs of AppDev love Delphix because it’s simple and fast to spin up nonproduction environments with the latest data almost instantaneously, enabling them to release up to 50% faster and shift late-stage testing to earlier in the software development lifecycle. Delivers data fast for DevOps agility Delphix quickly delivers production-like data in minutes. Developers and testers can also readily integrate this data—branched and versioned in parallel with code—into existing DevOps workflows. Testing teams can rapidly populate their environments with full production copies, subsets, masked data that originate from different points in time, accelerating test cycle times by 30-50%. Speeds cloud migration and ERP upgrade initiatives Delphix cuts complexity and volume associated with standing up and refreshing environments for applications, like SAP or Oracle EBS, by delivering production data to ERP teams more efficiently than legacy processes. Multiple environments mean data volumes can quickly add up, slowing down refreshes. This is why Delphix's data virtualization cuts non-production data storage by up to 90%. “Delphix transforms how we use AWS and increases our development velocity. When we implemented the Delphix platform Cuts the complexity from the hybrid cloud Federated or composite apps depend on data It’s called “environment hell” with teams wasting days setting within our hybrid cloud architecture, we from multiple heterogeneous environments, up environments across multiple dev, test, staging, different immediately increased our ability to scale including cloud and on-premise. Delphix can versions of data, and fixing bugs because of environment issues rather than real problems. Without infrastructure that quickly spins up consistent environments to keep development moving, it's easy to end up with continuous rolling delivery schedules rather than continuous delivery. CONFESSIONS to meet new business requirements.” —Sai Adivi | Director of Application Development, Dentegra synchronize that data to the same point in time— down to the second or transaction—and provision synchronized copies to integration environments in just minutes. Data masking ensures no sensitive data falls through the cracks. VP OF APPDEV DBA 7