How AI-assisted software testing makes DevOps work

Nearly two-thirds of large enterprises are running mainframe-based apps dating back two decades, according to the recent Mainframe Modernization Business Barometer Report from Advanced. Over a quarter of businesses run production applications that are as much as 30 years old–some even go back to the 1960s.

In other words, as much as we like to tout the cool, new tech, many enterprises are mired in not-so-cool, old tech.

For example, in a conversation with a friend at a U.S. public pension fund with nearly $100 billion under management, he told me they decided to take action and migrate most of their remaining mainframe applications from COBOL to Java. Why move from COBOL? Well, for one thing, it was hard to find developers who knew the language, or wanted to, with COBOL ranking #1 as the “most dreaded” programming language in Stack Overflow’s annual survey. But there were more reasons for embracing Java, starting with a desire to make better use of DevOps to improve software delivery.

Less COBOL, more DevOps
When migrating from COBOL (or any language) to Java (or any language), it’s smart to start with testing requirements. After all, much of your code may no longer even be used. And as you migrate to Java, you definitely need unit tests to know where you have arrived and to ensure a code base you can confidently upgrade over time as requirements constantly change. In the case of this pension fund, they decided to start with AI-powered Diffblue to automate writing those unit tests, something I’ve addressed before.

Migrating or upgrading decades-old apps can be complex, yet companies increasingly feel compelled to go that route. Data suggests more modernization took place in 2020 than years prior, as businesses confronted the shifts in demand and operational disruption of the pandemic.

Businesses are under pressure to create new value for their customers. Coupled with the demand for software-based products and services, the trend of competitive differentiation through technology isn’t a huge surprise. Additionally, organizations are finding that traditional approaches to software development and delivery are not sufficient to meet these needs, giving rise to trends like DevOps. By moving from COBOL to Java, for example, companies like this pension fund are able to embrace containerization and cloud.

The alternative–mainframe code, applications, and environments–created the following significant speed bumps for the company:

Rigid and difficult to access development and test systems.
Extreme sharing of environments, causing bottlenecks in development and test.
Code that is difficult to understand and difficult to establish dependencies within.
Unfamiliar or unknown build and deploy procedures.
Back-level software, with no idea how to upgrade or what impact that may have.
Inability to make changes.
Lack of integration/coordination with other platforms.

The company’s first thought was to try to embrace DevOps while sticking with COBOL and their mainframes; however, implementing a culture of DevOps against a mainframe environment is incredibly difficult. First, the lack of a service-oriented architecture and extensibility make “systems thinking” a challenging task. Second, the core concept around DevOps is to connect development with technology operations. Big Iron is notoriously expensive to extend, which makes enabling mobile access to data a risky move. When the system itself is the biggest hurdle to realizing a culture of continual experimentation and learning in the name of competitive edge, it is time to replace the system.

“IT moves heaven and earth”
My pension fund friend runs a large software shop for the fund, with more than 150 people in IT. As it should, business requirements are driving his strategy to embrace a DevOps approach and move as many workloads as possible off the mainframe to Java.

“What I heard from the business…was IT moves heaven and earth to get us our enhancements, to get us fixes, and to roll out our application changes,” he said. “However, every time they rolled something out, it broke something else. I see that as a challenge to try to solve and incorporate into our internal IT processes. It’s really a culture change. I have taken it upon myself to improve our regression testing to hopefully speed our delivery and give our delivery higher quality.”

So far the pension fund has successfully moved 70% of its COBOL code to a Java code base covered by tests, with another two million lines of code remaining on the mainframe written in COBOL. But that change is coming: “We haven’t really gone live yet into multiple development environments so we don’t really know about what the performance is going to be,” he said, until it goes live into the company’s DevOps pipeline.

As developers check in code, the company automatically runs Diffblue Cover to generate JUnit tests. Diffblue Cover allows the developer to incrementally build test suites to measure progress and detect unintended side effects. Tests can be run continuously, and results are provided immediately.

The move off the mainframe has been an enormous effort, he said, and the fund isn’t ready to embrace automated coding in other areas outside of testing. But his team is exploring options in the cloud. He moved identity management to Okta, so that’s a start.

“We want to be nimble, flexible and where we can go from Azure to AWS, and wherever else, with containers and Kubernetes in the future,” he said. “We are investing a lot in DevOps, test automation and automating the business of IT. My focus has been in improving our quality of code, development operations, and getting our organization to a point where we can open up to cloud computing.”

This Article Source is From : https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-ai-assisted-software-testing-makes-devops-work/

Digital transformation: What CIOs have learned about culture in the last 9 months

Throughout this year, the MIT Sloan CIO Digital Learning Series has been providing a window into how leading digital companies are handling the pandemic. The recent final pair of panel discussions in the series was nominally about digital transformation, but it was really about the changes that CIOs have been making over the last nine months or so.

So this is a technology story, right? Indeed, there’s been technology involved. A common theme throughout this series has been how quickly things changed. Stephen Franchetti, vice president, IT & business technology, Slack, described rolling out his company’s chat product to 100,000 users at a grocery chain over a weekend. Cynthia Stoddard, senior vice president & chief information officer, Adobe, says her company “clicked over 24,000 people without a blink.” All that takes technology.

But there’s been another theme that was even more front and center at this event: the importance of people and culture.

Companies with digital maturity put people first

Dr. George Westerman, senior lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management, has previously written about their research into how “the best companies — those we call Digirati — combine digital activity with strong leadership to turn technology into transformation. This is what we call digital maturity. Companies vary in their digital maturity, and those that are more mature outperform those that are not.

As a panel moderator at this event, Westerman added, “The first law of digital innovation: Technology changes quickly. Organizations change much more slowly. Unfortunately, organizational cultures change even more slowly.”

And a company’s leadership has a great deal to do with establishing that culture. Westerman argues: ”If you think about digital transformation as two words, we pay too much attention to the digital and not enough to transformation. It’s not a technology challenge, it’s a leadership one.”

Shamim Mohammad, senior vice president, chief information and technology officer, Carmax, went so far as to call culture “the operating system that runs the company.”

The technology leaders were unanimous that everything starts with people, a view shared by panelists at the past MIT Sloan events, such as Aarti Shah, senior vice president, chief information & digital officer, Eli Lilly and Company. For example, Stoddard talked about how people need breaks. At Adobe, she explained, they “try to be very respectful of the weekends. [We] have also started having a global day off every third Friday.” And based on their network traffic, “people are taking advantage of it.”

Zeeshan Tariq, senior vice president and CIO, Zimmer Biomet, talked about how making sure employees were both physically and financially safe was a key step when the pandemic first hit. Zachary Smith, managing director, Packet, an Equinix Company, described how one of the things that most helped them was focusing on their workforce. “I’m safe, I belong, and I matter. I’m safe working in the datacenter.”

Post-pandemic world: Goodbye, old office norms
Participants also had a lot to say about what a post-pandemic world might look like from the perspective of how businesses operate. They were unanimous about this, too: Things will be different.

As Mike Grandinetti, mentor, instructor, and program development Fellow, University of CA at Berkeley Sutardja Center of Technology and Entrepreneurship, summed it up: “When VCs are willing to give out money based on a Zoom call, you know the world has changed.”

One area of change is the office. Franchetti predicts, “The office is going to be reinvented.” Tariq asks, “Do we need all our facilities? Do we need them in their current capacity?” The consensus: Most companies won’t see a return to business as usual, but they won’t go 100 percent remote either. Tariq added that he doesn’t anticipate travel to disappear but does expect it to shrink considerably.

As many office-centric companies have found, these IT leaders are also seeing that remote work can work well and can even be better in some ways than before. For example, Stoddard remarked, “People are very creative. They want the organization to succeed. Everyone is equal in a way. We have had remote workers before. But with people in a physical conference room, people remote could feel a bit left out.” She also observed, “Many people who never spoke up before [in physical meetings] are now speaking up.”

Tariq shared that his organization is very high-touch, with company reps often in operating rooms to provide medical device assistance, pre-COVID. But with hospital systems locked down, the company was able to make subject matter experts available virtually to the people present in the facility. They also piloted augmented reality (AR)/mixed reality quickly.

Agility is the new scale

One lesson that has emerged throughout the pandemic: Organizations with the right culture and technology have been able to quickly adapt when they’ve had to. The speed has even been a bit surprising to some of the best-prepared participants. And it’s leading some to ask: If they can do things this quickly in a crisis, why does it take so much longer in normal times?

For example, Stoddard observed that “things which would have taken six to nine months have taken weeks.” While “there needs to be a certain process and checkpoints that let you go faster and still have quality,” she and others also wondered if “maybe we don’t need to go through all of the long cycles.” Tariq discussed how, before the crisis, they tracked sales on a monthly basis. But for supply chain and other reasons, they quickly needed to pivot to tracking on a daily basis. “Don’t expect us to ever go back,” he added.

Digital transformation team success secret: Trust
It’s easy to listen to panelists like these and conclude that their lessons may apply to digital leaders who have already done a lot of the heavy lifting to react to and survive the current environment. Indeed, Carmax’s Mohammad credits their success with the fact that “over the past few years, we have been going through a lot of transformation to make it a digital company and innovate faster. Customers were changing rapidly. We wanted to meet customers where they wanted to meet.” Tariq noted that “luck favors the prepared” in that “when the COVID crisis started in late 2019, we did a tabletop exercise to see what would happen if it became a pandemic.”

But we’ve seen adaptability across many businesses. To Smith, it’s been “pretty incredible that even small and regional healthcare providers were able to scale,” with one customer having a 500 percent increase in home interconnectivity within about a week, along with additional networking demands due to telemedicine.

Preparedness is one lesson here, yes, including with respect to technology platforms and cools. But the broader lesson comes from Stoddard: “Build trust with the team and let them innovate.”

This Article Source is From : https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2020/10/digital-transformation-culture-lessons

Cloud computing will power pandemic recovery in 2021

Looking at the public clouds developed in the last 15 years, it almost seems like they were designed to handle the global demand shock caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only did the pandemic turn millions of office workers into home and remote workers overnight, it also changed how every IT department and development shop functioned. Without public cloud apps, development services, tools and infrastructure available to every business and consumer on demand, imagine how different (and hobbled) the pandemic response would have been. In 2020, cloud proved that, indeed, one should never let a good crisis go to waste.

In 2021, cloud will power how companies adapt to the “new, unstable normal.” No one knows how far into 2021 we’ll continue to work from home, shop primarily online, or avoid air travel — but it’s clear that every enterprise must become more agile, responsive and adaptive than ever before. Here’s how Forrester predicts cloud computing will help companies around the world accelerate pandemic recovery in 2021:

We will see the hyperscale public cloud market return to hypergrowth. After some softening in public cloud revenue growth rates in late 2019, the pandemic turbocharged the market by mid-2020, and Forrester now predicts that the global public cloud infrastructure market will grow 35% to $120 billion in 2021. Alibaba will take the number-three revenue spot globally, after AWS and Microsoft Azure. Buckle up — the cloud ride is taking off…again.

Cloud-native tech demand will spike as serverless and containers heat up. Prior to the pandemic, about 20% of developers regularly used container and serverless functions to build new apps and modernize old ones. We predict 25% of developers will use serverless and nearly 30% will use containers regularly by the end of 2021, creating a spike in global demand for both multicloud container development platforms and public-cloud container/serverless services.

On-premises disaster recovery (DR) strategies will fade, with recovery bound for the cloud. COVID-19 shined a bright light on every company unprepared to recover from a data center outage and refocused enterprise IT teams on improving resiliency. Before the pandemic, few companies protected data and workloads in the public cloud. In 2021, we predict that an additional 20% of enterprises will shift DR operations to the public cloud — and won’t look back.

Those are just a few highlights of how we think cloud will accelerate recovery from the pandemic. We’ll also see changes in software buying habits, with a resurgence in interest in cloud marketplaces, and watch out for new regulations that restrict how and where companies can store data in the cloud.

This Article Source is From : https://www.zdnet.com/article/cloud-computing-will-power-pandemic-recovery-in-2021/

Digital transformation: A manifesto for moving from good manager to true IT leader

Good management of technology and processes is now table stakes. To succeed with digital transformation, you and your teams must practice these new IT leadership skills

Digital transformation means it no longer makes sense to distinguish “business” from “technology” or to seek alignment between those two functions. Today, business and technology are the same – you can’t have one without the other.

It also no longer makes sense to charter and execute “technology projects.” Today, there are only business change projects. Achieving these business changes requires effective cross functional leadership.

Uncovering better ways of leading IT organizations is my passion. Having worked alongside and coached countless IT professionals over the years, I’ve found that being successful today requires more than good management, it requires inspirational leadership. To that end, I’ve crafted an IT leadership manifesto and some guidance for how to personally adopt it.

This manifesto is for you if you’re:

• Leading or supporting a digital transformation program.
• A relatively new IT leader with only a few years of leadership experience under your belt.
• Taking on a larger leadership role and want to refresh your practices.
• Coaching your own managers to become more effective leaders.

The New IT Leadership Manifesto

Managers perfect “what is,”
Leaders create what is yet to be.

Managers address How and When,
Leaders address What and Why.

Managers shape people’s performance,
Leaders inspire them to be their best selves.

Managers minimize risks and mistakes,
Leaders take calculated risks and experiment to learn.

Managers tell, Leaders ask.
Managers know, Leaders wonder.

Managers speak to,
Leaders speak with.

Managers prefer consistency,
Leaders relish ambiguity.

Managers “Have to … ,”
Leaders “Choose to … .”

Managers try,
Leaders do.

Managers strive to be right,
Leaders strive to be helpful.

Managers avoid and minimize discomfort,
Leaders seek it out and leverage it.

Managers manage their time,
Leaders manage their focus.

Managers believe in “outside-in,”
Leaders come from “inside-out.”

Managers are uncomfortable with “No.”
Leaders use positive “No’s” to empower their “Yes’es.”

Management is a role you play,
Leadership is how you are being.

Why this matters with digital transformation
While there is great value in good management, we value inspirational leadership more.

There certainly is still a need for good management of technology and processes within your organizations, but that is table stakes today. Being agile and transforming from project management to product management requires you and your teams to practice these new IT leadership skills.

The many organizations that struggle to realize the value from agile and product management do so because they have not yet mastered these distinctions.

In order to thrive today, your organization needs great leadership to invent and create a sustainable, equitable, and profitable future for your organization, your team members, your clients and customers, and your communities.

How to use the new IT leadership manifesto
Most of you will respond more strongly to some of the manifesto’s distinctions than others. Since most of these require changes in the way you think and behave, pick one or two that resonate most strongly with you and spend the next few weeks putting them into practice. Each month, pick a couple more and work on embracing those as well.

Also remember there will still be times when you need to be a manager in addition to a leader. These are not intended to be “either/or” distinctions. They are offered as “and/with” distinctions so you can enhance your team and organization’s performance.

How to make the shift to true leadership
If you find yourself or your colleagues identifying with more of the manager actions than the leader actions, that’s OK. This is a cultural shift and goes against many long-taught management principles.

Achieving some of these requires a relatively simple mindset change. For example, asking versus telling, wondering versus knowing, speaking with versus speaking to – these are all things you can start doing today. Here are some examples of how:

Asking vs. telling: While you may know “an” answer, you may not always know “the best” answer. Cultivate a practice of asking your colleagues for their ideas before sharing yours. You may not only come up with better solutions to problems, you will also help your colleagues build their skills.

Wondering vs. knowing: As Mark Twain once said, “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” Be more curious about what could be true and learn to question your long-held assumptions.

Speaking with vs. speaking to: Most of the actions in this manifesto related to leadership are about enhancing relationships and engaging more fully with others via dialog. This means leaving space in your conversations for others to share what’s on their minds, and making it easy for them to do so.

Four of the most difficult changes to achieve
Some of these other items require more coaching, more dedication, and more open mindedness. For example, seeking out and leveraging discomfort is much more difficult than avoiding and minimizing it.

In particular, I consider these four more difficult to achieve. Here are a few strategies for achieving them.

1. Managers perfect what is. Leaders create what is yet to be: This distinction is at the core of Digital Transformation. As we focus on process and product improvement, we can certainly provide incremental operational improvements. i.e., we can maximize our batting averages by hitting singles. But to hit home runs, we need to be taking bigger swings at faster pitches, which means striking out more often in order to get those big hits. This means creating a culture where it’s OK to strike out from time to time, and not always get it right.
2. Managers address how and when. Leaders address what and why: Related to the above, if we are improving what already is in place, we focus on the mechanics or tactics of execution for what already is. While doing so adds value, it’s rarely as impactful or as inspiring to others as crafting a compelling vision of what we want to achieve and why it matters so much.

As I’ve written before: Employees who understand and emotionally connect with the rationale for the change – why it’s important to the organization and to them – feel inspired rather than manipulated, and will do all they can to creatively support and implement the target change.

3. Managers shape people’s performance. Leaders inspire them to be their best selves: If you force every one of your team members to be mini-me’s, your teams will only be as strong and creative as you are. You can’t know for sure the best behaviors for capitalizing on every situation. Nor can you force others with different world views to behave just as you would behave in a similar situation. We all have the potential for greatness within us. Great leaders look for what unique perspectives and skills that others can bring to bear on any issue, and as part of speaking with rather than speaking to, draw on that diversity of thoughts and skills to enhance the team’s performance.
4. Managers minimize risks and mistakes. Leaders take calculated risks and experiment to learn: This relates to continuous process improvement vs digital transformation. I would argue that if you’re not making mistakes then you are not taking enough risks. While it is certainly required that your systems of record are at least 99.99 percent accurate, your systems of differentiation and systems of innovation (per Gartner’s Pace-Layered Model) are best developed with agile product management methodologies. This means creating a set of hypotheses for each user story and testing them out in one or two sprints that deliver new working code that is then tested by users.

Per the scientific method, a successful experiment is one in which we learn more about our hypothesis. It does not require that we prove that hypothesis to be correct.

This Article Source is From : https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2020/7/digital-transformation-leadership-manifesto

Digital transformation

success requires more than good management,

it requires inspirational leadership.

What’s The Impact Of Artificial Intelligence And Technology On Society

What do we need to consider about a future where artificial intelligence (AI) and tech have transformed the way we live? That was exactly what we pondered when I recently spoke with Jamie Susskind, barrister, speaker and award-winning author of Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech.

Trends That Are Changing Civilization

Technology is changing society. Digitization is challenging the way we live. These changes create conveniences and ways of problem-solving that were never possible before. Along with the positives, there are also challenges that need to be overcome.

Here are three trends that are taking us to a phase of civilization that’s quite different than anything that’s come before.

1. Increasingly capable systems

We already live in a world where non-human systems can do things that previously only humans could do. In some cases, these non-human systems can do tasks even better than we can. Artificial intelligence can now mimic human speech, translate languages, diagnose cancers, draft legal documents and play games (and even beat human competitors). We’re already in a society where systems can accomplish tasks we didn’t believe would be possible in our time. The capabilities of non-human systems will continue to expand.

2. Systems become more ubiquitous

“This line between online and offline, real space and cyberspace is one that will become less important and less meaningful as time goes on. Systems are becoming more capable and more integrated into the world around us,” Susskind explained. It used to be very easy to distinguish between technology and non-technology. Today and increasingly in the future, technology will be dispersed in the world around us in objects and artifacts that we never previously thought of as technology such as smart homes with smart appliances and in public spaces in smart cities dense with sensors.

3. Increasingly quantified society

“We generate more data now every couple of hours than we did from the dawn of time to 2003. What that means is that when that data is caught, captured and sorted those who own it and control it have an insight into our lived experience beyond anything that anyone in the past could ever have dreamed of into what we think, what we care about, how we feel, where we go, what we buy, who we speak to, what we say, what we do on any given day, who we associate with. We leave a trail of these things which offers a window into our soul both individually and collectively that dwarfs anything that the philosophers or the kings or the priests of the past could have dreamed of,” Susskind explained.

These three trends are accelerating, and it seems highly unlikely that we as humans are going to be unchanged in the way we live together as a result of them. We’ve never had to live alongside such powerful non-human systems. We’ve never known what it’s like to be surrounded by technology that’s never switched off. We’ve never been in a world where our lives are datified to such as extent. In his book, Future Politics, Susskind examines these changes and proposes what we might need to do, theorize and think about regarding these changes as a society.

“The Digital is Political”

“The digital is political. Instead of looking at these technologies as consumers or capitalists we need to look at them as citizens. Those who control and own the most powerful digital systems in the future will increasingly have a great deal of control over the rest of us,” Susskind predicts.

Technologies exert power. They contain rules that the rest of us must follow and those who write the rules increasingly have a degree of power. In our society there are two major benefactors of technology and who wield this power: governing bodies that can use technologies and surveillance for enforcement of rules and large corporations, specifically tech companies or companies who use a lot of tech and are increasingly writing the “rules” we must abide by (think the 280-character limit on Twitter).

By gathering data about our preferences, browsing history and more other people have power over us. They know what makes us tick and they know our “carrots” and “sticks.” In the example of Cambridge Analytica and the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, the company had a couple of thousand data points about 200 million Americans. This enabled them to project an image of a candidate that was tailored to the preferences and prejudices and biases at an individual level.

Bottom line: The more data that is gathered about us, the easier it is for others to persuade, influence and manipulate us. In addition, just knowing that data is being gathered about us is likely to change our behavior. Many people don’t understand the level of surveillance that’s already going on. As more people become more cognizant of the fact that we’re always being watched, Susskind believes that people will start changing their behavior. This is a kind of power itself, albeit subtle but important.

Technology Enables Perception Control and Power

We currently rely on third parties to tell us what is going on in the world and those third parties are more often than not mediated by digital technology. When we get our news from a newsfeed we’re at the mercy of those technologies who decide which very small slice of reality we’re going to be presented. We must acknowledge that those who own and control the technologies that filter our perception of the world are very, very powerful because they shape our innermost feelings and our soul as well as our collective understanding of what matters.

Power cascades onto other simple political concepts like democracy. How we deliberate online changes the democratic process. There are also questions of freedom. What does it mean to live in a world when rules are set often not by states but private companies and often in ways that aren’t liberty maximizing?

Thinks about justice. What’s it going to be like living in a world where your access to important things like jobs, insurance or credit might well be mediated by algorithms which are themselves not necessarily as fair as morality or the law would like them to be? As an example, there have been face recognition systems that don’t see people of color because they were trained on datasets of white people. Similarly, voice recognition systems can struggle to understand voices with accents. Previously these kinds of problems were seen as engineering problems or corporate problems, but Susskind sees them as political problems.

Call for Clarity

While individuals have the power to improve digital hygiene, one person by their individual actions doesn’t have the power to sway these issues. These are problems that can only be solved through collective means and mechanisms. Susskind believes if you want the rules of the game to be changed for everyone, then law, legislation and regulation are the only way to do it.

“It’s a call to action at a level which will make some people uncomfortable particularly in the United States because some are skeptical about the state trying to correct issues that are thrown up by private ordering but I think is necessary,” Susskind shared.

Although some are reticent to trust governments to establish regulations and boundaries for technology, Susskind believes we must have some faith in politics if we’re going to make sure we don’t live in a world where we’re not fundamentally buffeted around by forces that are effectively invisible and out of our control because they are concentrated in private hands.

Tech companies are led by humans who have the pursuit of profits as a goal in a capitalist society. While there is nothing wrong with that, we designed political systems to hold them to account for when they slip up. That’s precisely why the political steps we take are critical in a world transformed by technology.

This Article Source is From : https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2020/03/09/whats-the-impact-of-artificial-intelligence-and-technology-on-society/#5463ca5e3098