IDC DevOps ’22 event in London

IDC DevOps UK 2022 is one of the first face-to-face events
that I’ve attended for a while. Since the pandemic, I feel like I’ve been
working in a digital bubble. I’ve had fewer conversations than ever with Tech
professionals outside my marketing technology field. So I find these events
immensely valuable, like the experience (for me) of going into the office 2-3
days a week. 

Just a few weeks ago, I was talking to a CIO at a major insurance
company about the challenges of bringing together 17 different companies that
his company had acquired, each with its legacy systems and ways to run IT and
Security teams. I would never have gotten that insight, sitting in a room with
a bunch of marketers, working on ‘buyer personas’

Jen Thompson, is the lead IDC analyst in Europe for ‘accelerated
app delivery’ and an expert on ‘The future of software innovation’. She
delivered the keynote at around 9.30 am, just after our breakfast and
networking session at 9 am. She talked about being fortunate to have so much survey-driven
data about her industry, some of which she wanted to share with us. 

One
challenge in DevOps is putting rules into place to enable innovation at scale.
The demand for new applications is so intense and growing so fast that a
competitive company must have an airtight system to deliver quality software quickly.

Jen also talked about how IDC has noticed companies moving
from ‘Digital transformation’ into a digital-first strategy. For 81% of
European organisations, digital innovation is the 2023 priority. Jen gave a few
examples:

  • Vodafone –
    putting software development at the centre of the business, and they plan to
    triple their number of software engineers by 2025 (adding 7000 hires).
  • Lego plans to triple
    its software engineers in the next three years.

Organisations that can scale their software development and
innovation will be the winners in the next five years. Then Jen mentioned three
questions that have come up repeatedly, not only during this event but at another
two-day CIO event I attended a few weeks earlier – CIO Connect at Sopwell
House:

  • What tools do they have to help them?
  •  Do they have enough skilled technical workers?
  •  Do they have the right culture to meet rapidly growing demands?


There will be a 2x increase in organisations with an
innovation-led approach. I couldn’t help thinking of how these insights will
play out in the UK; We are currently the ‘stagnation nation’ with flatlining
productivity, employee shortages, and lack of investment (both private and
public).

We need to think about how we design for speed and scale
since 40% of organisations are telling IDC that they want to deliver more and
faster than they have over the last two years.

The market delivers features in 4-5 weeks. However, ‘Disruptors’
(under 12%) release in 6 days or under – by 2023, it will be 20%. But those are
the numbers for Europe. On the one hand, Germany and France are famously 30% more productive
than the UK. However, on the other hand, the UK is ahead as a more innovative country. It made me think, how many of these ‘disruptors’ are operating out
of the UK?  It’d be good to get those numbers for the UK.


After Jen’s presentation, our very own Bernhard Klemm, Partner
Solution Architect EMEA at Tricentis, started with a strong statement: ‘The
faster you can deliver applications, the more likely you can beat your
competition and win retain those valuable customers.’

The majority of applications still take three months or more
to be delivered. The reason for such long delays?


Bernhard told us that the top three challenges stated that
complicate or delay the delivery of applications are:

• Integration with legacy systems

• Fuzzy and changing requirements

• The time necessary for testing and QA

To overcome those challenges and speed up application
delivery, organisations have mainly invested in customer-centric
practices like Agile Methodologies.

According to Gartner, by 2025, 70% of applications will
be powered by low-code or no-code technologies.

The low-code technology promises to help developers save
time by eliminating time-consuming, repetitive codes, freeing them up to ideate
and create more intuitive applications.

As the barrier of “code” disappears, the benefits
of test automation positively impact their daily life. Developers and Test
Automation Engineers are more likely to engage with Low-Code test automation –
where they can still use their coding expertise significantly – and retain
their core skillset. In contrast, Test and Business analysts are likely to be
more motivated to use no-code solutions.

The manager’s role is to ensure that the team delivers the
business value – fast and high quality. He doesn’t care how their team
accomplishes that goal. Does that seem familiar?

Bernhard explained that with Tricentis Tosca, you could
Build No-Code, resilient automated tests through a unique approach
that separates the automation model from the underlying application. This
approach has proven to reduce the maintenance effort required for adapting test
automation to frequent changes. Using Tosca, you can create a complete coverage
of your value stream by supporting more than 160+ technologies and
enterprise applications.

Bernhard ran through other products companies can use to
deliver no code, low code automated and AI testing. But one that stood out in
the presentation for me was Testim. Companies use Testim to automate web
applications. Whether you are a manual tester, developer, or automation
engineer, all users can use Testim to accomplish their goals. It’s SaaS-based,
Low-code and AI-powered to help you create tests fast, minimising test
maintenance to keep releases on time.

We finished the day with a roundtable in which we asked a
selection of senior DevOps professionals and application leaders this question:

Application leaders: Are speed and quality the key to
achieving top business goals?

I manned the white screen and started writing out our table’s
answers. Early on, an application leader at BT said that quality would always
be his priority. He said that quality must be guaranteed to ensure the
functioning of his company’s highly complex network technology. And the group
agreed with this point, so we moved on to our table’s question. 

-How do you build teams where quality is the entire team’s
responsibility?

Our table agreed that the solution to this was two-fold:

> Product-based teams

Ensuring that a team is working towards delivering a
specific product makes sure that each member is fully invested in completing
that product, whether an application, a new release, or even a newly developed
piece of software.

> Culture

From culture, we talked about the theme of the day – the war
for talent, and how all companies need more software developers, testers, DevOps
analysts, engineers, and automation engineers. But as many commented, the talent
pool did not seem to grow whilst the demand was.

We talked about the possibility of training. But the
consensus seemed to be – if I train one of my team to develop the skills needed,
such as to become an automation engineer, his skills become even more
marketable. He is even more likely to be poached by a recruiter and leave my company after I’ve invested much time and money into him.

Tricentis Sales Executive Cillian Golden presenting Airpod Pros to an IT Director at an Enterprise Company.

This conundrum highlighted the issue of trust in
the organisation. It seems to have broken down quite a bit. And managers and
their teams are often at loggerheads. For example, recently, Microsoft
commissioned a survey on working from home. 80% of managers thought their
employees worked more effectively in the office. But for employees, it was the
exact opposite. 80% of employees said that they worked more productively from
home.

Under the question of ‘Culture‘ we also discussed siloed
organisations being a blocker to quality. That quality requires cooperation
(altruism even), and inter-team coordination. And we agreed that innovation
also needs those conditions to thrive. Our table decided on the following as
our final point before the end of the afternoon:

>Negative – siloed approach, limited collaboration, low
trust, not sharing information or resources

>Positive – Product-led, common goals, end-to-end
ownership of app delivery value streams

I had no idea the moderator would ask ‘the spokesperson’ from each of the eight tables to outline what
we’d discussed. I was selected to go through the critical points on the
microphone, which gave me quite a kick of adrenaline at 4 pm – even better than
a double espresso!


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