Webinar: Increased Velocity with Better Control

New webinar: increased velocity with better control

Software is vital to just about every aspect of an organization, from finance to customer engagement and business intelligence. As demand for software skyrockets, the innovation cycle shrinks. This is putting more pressure on engineering teams to deliver faster without sacrificing quality.

Make no mistake, software delivery has never been more important. However engineering teams are often plagued with manual toil, scripting, and wasted time in getting code to production, making it harder to innovate at pace.

Harness’ own Martin Reynolds, Field CTO, joined The Register’s Tim Philips to discuss the challenges that modern software delivery teams are facing, including what gets in the way of transformation and how to make change without slowing down delivery. Tim and Martin also discussed if it’s possible to achieve velocity, quality and governance while maintaining control and how cost management and security can come into play.

The current state of the SDLC is broken

Currently, the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC) is a brittle and inefficient process, due to a build-up of combined sets of tools that have been stitched together. On top of this, businesses are expecting their software developers to do even more – such as shifting left on security. Instead, developers are having to spend time on ops tasks and fixing issues, rather than doing what they do best – coding.

Martin notes that it should be easy for developers to deploy their software. But the reality is – for many organizations, it’s not – and often teams get “used to the broken-ness”. They look at the process in place and think it is too hard to fix – and so hot fixes and workarounds have become the norm.

Where are developers spending their time?

If we look at where developers spend their time, for many, it’s not building software.

Many developers are stuck waiting for builds to happen, doing manual testing instead of automating, tracking down how deployments performed, or unraveling code following a security failure. A Harness survey of over 500 organizations shows that, on average, 40% of developer time is spent on non-coding toil – which is approximately two days a week. Martin thinks it is time to question what the best use of engineers’ time actually is, because the current state of software development is far from aspirational.

He points out: “No-one comes into software development saying they want to carry out compliance reviews.” 

Giving the time back

This is the problem Harness is addressing, by moving forwards to something that’s more integrated and flows more easily. Harness helps engineering teams with CI and CD, but also has modules to support every area of the SLDC, including security testing using ML and AI. It learns what looks good and tells you when something’s broken or even rolls it back for you.

“That’s what Harness wants to do, give developers time back,” Martin continues.

Speaking from experience

Martin shared his own experience as an end-user of Harness in his role as a DevOps & IaaS director at previous employer, Advanced. He explained, “We wanted to get a grip on our deployment process and were spending a lot of time trying to consolidate tools like Jenkins, GitLab, CircleCI, and home-grown scripting. This setup broke often, and some deployment processes took weekends, which is not a good place to be.”

To see what Harness could do, Martin put it to the test. He carried out a deployment with his team in a day and a half, before watching Harness do the same deployment in just 30 minutes during a call. He noted it’s amazing to see so many capabilities come straight out of the box, from Kubernetes container support to canary or blue/green deployments.

He also explains how Harness acts as a partner, bringing whole teams together to understand an issue and help customers overcome their challenges.

How do you know you have been successful?

Harness can help to win over organizations and engineering teams showing success and demonstrating how easy it can be. Read more about how Harness has worked with some of the worlds’ most innovative organizations, helping engineering teams to:

·       Eliminate 50% of major production incidents at Ancestry

·       Accelerate Citi’s release times from days just 7 minutes

·       Reduce deployment toil by 75% at United Airlines

You can listen to the full recording of Martin’s webinar, ‘Increased Velocity with Better Control’, on The Register here.