Skytap, HP Optimize ALM for Cloud Dev, QA, Provisioning

Beyond simple ALM, the Skytap/HP approach lets cloud adopters use automation to break through silos across dev/test, QA and provisioning to more quickly identify, locate and resolve bugs — and even make user-requested updates.

Skytap and HP are partnering to provide automated cloud-enabled ALM (application lifecycle management). Beyond simple ALM, the Skytap/HP approach lets cloud adopters use automation to break through silos across dev/test, QA and provisioning to more quickly identify, locate and resolve bugs — and even make user-requested updates.

By putting cloud’s three key stakeholders (dev, QA and provisioning) on the same page, Skytap can reduce time and cost for getting cloud apps designed tested and up and running by up to 70%, Sundar Raghavan, Skytap’s chief product and marketing officer, told IDN.

“While everybody talks about ‘dev/test,’ we talk about ‘quick response time between phases or silos,” Raghavan said. This distinction is not just wordplay, he added. It is a core perspective for how Skytap is working with HP to optimize ALM for an emerging class of new cloud-based approaches to software design, development and deployment.

Raghavan explained Skytap’s approach to an automated, cloud-focused ALM to IDN this way:

“As people embrace the cloud, they are moving to dev/ops model, where traditional IT policies are applicable. But, they are also creating environments where they need to do a better job of moving [projects] back and forth between phases – not just share with team members in one phase,” Raghavan said.

 

“While everybody talks about ‘dev/test,’ we talk about ‘quick response time between phases or silos.”

Sundar Raghavan,
Chief Product Officer
Skytap

While agile and similar methodologies do bring some benefits to developers, these methodologies can also create silos between developer and testing/QA phases. That, in turn, can delay provisioning and operations,

“Silos add time and costs because they make it impossible for dev and QA teams to identically reproduce errors or behaviors,” he added.

Skytaps’s Automated ALM for Cloud:
Role-Based Access to Virtual Images

Under the covers, Raghavan makes using Skytap sound as simple as publishing a blog post from “draft” to “make public” in WordPress.

“To share a project from development with a production user is simple. You can promote your [dev] project to QA, pre-production or production, restricting changes,” he said. “If the QA users find issues, they simply can send the project back to the dev team, where everyone can see the actual problems, as well as share, collaborate and retest against the same image, and this makes a huge difference.”

Skytap lets a wide range of stakeholders duplicate images, share images or even move images back and forth between stages – all to make sure errors are precisely shared without the inability to replicate. The approach also provides exact duplicates of projects, snapshots of code instances at every step and better managed source code control.

“Instead of version control, we allow images to be updated, based on role and access control,” Raghavan told IDN. “This gives all stakeholders more control so that developers can fix bugs found in QA, and even end users can ask for changes in systems already rolled out to production.”

A Deeper Look at Skytap, HP ALM 11 Integration
Skytap also announced integration with HP’s ALM 11 suite to enable customers and HP partners to more easily leverage the cloud for comprehensive software development and testing.

The integration leverages Skytap’s support for security policy management, advanced virtual data centers and self-service hybrid clouds. Capabilities enabled by the integration include:

 

  • Requirements management for agile development and testing environments
  • Capability to fully test the performance and scalability of applications before they are deployed
  • Ability for software teams to automatically set up, run, and tear down Skytap environments directly from the HP ALM interface.
  • Distribute development and test workloads between on-premise private clouds and create secure hybrid cloud architectures in under 10 minutes.

Because HP ALM 11 allows business analysts, developers, project managers, manual testers, quality and performance assurance professionals to collaborate on a single system of record, adding Skytap integration lets customers further reduce time and costs, said David Griffin, vice president of cloud, HP Software, in a statement.