A “day in the life” with HCLSoftware DevOps

HCLSoftware DevOps provides an integrated solution that satisfies any organization’s DevOps needs. Need proof? Let’s go over an example using a fictional ecommerce company we’ll call “Emerald.” Watch the video below or keep scrolling to read through the scenario.

 

Emerald’s big Memorial Day sale is just a few weeks away. This annual sale event is Emerald’s second-largest revenue generator of the fiscal year, so it’s very important that everything on their site is functioning perfectly. Unfortunately, visitors to Emerald’s site have been reporting confusion on how to register as a new customer and are having problems signing into the Emerald application. The product team needs to fix this issue and get the change into production as soon as possible so Emerald can be ready for the Memorial Day sale. Fortunately, Emerald uses HCLSoftware DevOps solutions, including:

• HCL Compass for enterprise planning
• HCL Accelerate for value stream management
• HCL Launch for deployment automation
• HCL OneTest for test automation

All of these solutions are being deployed on HCL SoFy, HCLSoftware’s cloud native solution, which makes Kubernetes easy. Users can simply select the products they want to use from the HCL SoFy catalogue and click the “deploy” button. Within minutes, the user has the solutions they need to do the job.

While working in HCL Compass, Paula, a project manager at Emerald, notices that a high-priority defect has been submitted, so she completes the planning field to kick off the remediation. In doing this, she identifies the team, owner, and the number of story points she believes are appropriate based on history. She also sets the class of service to “expedite” due to the importance for the business. She also selects the release and sprint the fix should be included in, then moves it into the backlog state.

Next, Al, an analyst at Emerald, reviews the work item and provide additional information for the developers. Al finds this latest work item by searching HCL Compass for all work items in backlog. By opening the item and expanding the “planning” section, Al sees that Paula has flagged this as “expedite” and scheduled for delivery in the active sprint. To fully understand the problem, Al first examines the Emerald application in production to see why website visitors are confused. He updates the defect description in HCL Compass and moves the work item into the “analyzed” state.

Diane, a developer at Emerald, already has some work assigned to her in this sprint, but is currently waiting for some dependent tasks to be completed. Since she has available bandwidth, she logs into HCL Compass and checks for any high priority work items she can pull into the work state. There, she finds the defect that’s been marked “expedite” so she accepts ownership of the work item and begins working on the fix.

Linda is a development team lead at Emerald. Her day begins with a flurry of emails and messages informing her of this new defect and stressing how important it is to get the fix into production. Adding to this stress, Linda already had concerns that her team was at capacity, and she doesn’t have an answer for the root cause or how to address this capacity problem. In HCL Accelerate, Linda can review the value stream dashboard to see a summary of production incidents and notice that HCL Accelerate has identified a bottleneck in the work stage of the Emerald Commerce Storefront Value Stream. Drilling into the value stream, Linda hovers over the bottleneck to see that it is a result of flow imbalance, meaning more work has entered the “work” stage than has exited. HCL Accelerate is able to identify bottlenecks using AI capabilities and applying algorithms to data stored in Accelerate’s repository, aiding teams in identifying slow spots, and providing detail on root cause to accelerate remediation. Linda knows that pushing work into a stage before the team is ready potentially exceeds the cognitive capacity of the team resulting in a manmade, yet avoidable, value stream bottleneck. Linda also sees that HCL Accelerate is highlighting that the “work in progress” limit for the “work” stage has been exceeded. She reviews the list of work items and sees that there are two additions in the last 24 hours. With a quick search of the work item ID, Linda can easily isolate and review the two work items. She can also filter the work items by sprint to ensure that only work associated with the active sprint is actually in the work stage. Now, armed with the data she needs, Linda decides to discuss at her next standup meeting how pushing work into of pulling work into a pipeline stage can disrupt flow.

During this daily standup meeting, Linda shares her screen displaying HCL Accelerate’s swim lanes view filtered by owner. After each team member shares updates on the work assigned to them, Linda raises her concerns and asks for the team’s thoughts on pushing one of the stories back to the analyse phase. This will address the bottleneck and work in progress issue identified by HCL Accelerate and allow the team to focus on the high priority tasks at hand.

Peter, a product owner at Emerald, is getting concerned because he has heard through the grapevine that there’s a customer issue in production that could delay feature releases. To get the latest data on the situation, Peter goes to the swim lanes view in HCL Accelerate and filters by epics. He is quickly able to see the two epics he is most concerned about and where they stand in production.

Once Linda has reviewed Diane’s software fix, she closes the pull request from Diane and accepts the changes. Closing the pull request triggers the merge and build of a new version ready for deployment. To quickly move things along, Linda navigates to the pipeline view in HCL Accelerate and sees that the new version is listed as a deployable artefact having based unit tests and static scans. Linda is ready to deploy the latest version to the dev environment, where it will be subjected to a level of testing.

Working in HCL Launch, Linda starts off by confirming that the latest application version has not been deployed to any of the environments. In HCL Launch’s snapshots view, Linda validates that the new version is available for deployment and requests deployment to the dev environment by selecting the deployment process to be followed. In the execution log, Linda can see all the steps of the deployment process as they are happening and drill down into the output log to see details on each step. Using the power of the API, HCL Launch sends data to HCL Accelerate to update the pipeline view, showing that the latest application version was successfully deployed to the dev environment.

Tim, a tester at Emerald, is aware that a change is being deployed to dev and is anxious to verify the new functionality. Tim works in HCL OneTest Server to launch the necessary tests. After reviewing the Emerald project dashboard, he can see that while seven test suites of varying test types were executed, one of those tests suites failed. Before sounding any alarms, Tim checks out the HCL OneTest test execution results of the failed test suite. Scrolling through the test steps executed and seeing images of the application screens exercised during the test, Tim comes to the conclusion that the application is working properly and the test is executing correctly. The issue is with the test data.

Tim is getting frustrated with tests failing due to bad test data, and even more frustrated with the amount of time wasted maintaining these test data files. He decides to perform an experiment and execute the test using synthetic test data generated by HCL OneTest Server’s test data fabrication capability. If this experiment is successful, Tim believes it will result in time savings for the long-term, and optimize Emerald’s test efforts to a new level. Working in the data fabrication pane of HCL OneTest Server, Tim sees that the schema provided here would generate a test data file which contains exactly the data fields he needs. Tim reruns the test with the test data fabrication schema, and it passes.

As all the testing is being done, test execution results are automatically sent to HCL Accelerate. Linda can get up-to-date testing data in the “insights” view of HCL Accelerate via the quality report, making it easy for her to give Emerald stakeholders updates on the application fix. Linda can continue to move this code change through the different environments into production and track its progress in HCL Accelerate.

Using several solutions from the HCLSoftware DevOps portfolio, the Emerald product team was able to

• Quickly introduce new work into the delivery pipeline
• Expedite work across the entire value stream
• Effectively collaborate across the team
• Efficiently and accurately deploy and test software changes
• Incorporate process improvement and increase pipeline optimization
• Eliminate risk to the business and delight its customers

Watch the video below to see this story in action.