Service Virtualization and IT Nowadays

Transcription

1 A CA TECHNOLOGIES SURVEY JULY 2011 INITIAL STUDY: UK, France, Germany The Business Benefits of Service Virtualization July 2012 Service Virtualization Unleashing the power of the agile enterprise Justin Vaughan-Brown Service Virtualization, CA Technologies EMEA #svworks 1

2 Contents Executive summary...3 Section 1: Challenge What businesses want from the IT department...4 Increasing pressure on development teams...5 Software development challenges...7 Consequences...8 Section 2: Opportunity The need for improved development processes...10 Section 3: Benefits Service virtualization addressing the challenges for the constrained enterprise...11 Section 4: Conclusion...12 Section 5: References and further reading Resources related to service virtualization...13 Case studies...13 About Coleman Parkes Research...13 About CA Technologies...13 Join the conversation...13 Section 6: About the author

3 Executive summary Challenge Today, business leaders expect the IT function to reduce costs, increase operational efficiency, drive revenues and maximise competitiveness while also fuelling innovation. The extent to which IT departments can do this is often determined by their ability to deliver software projects on time, on budget and to specification. One of the primary obstacles is the ability to test applications in real time and to understand exactly how they will behave in a real-world environment a daunting task given limited resources for testing and lack of available infrastructure. How do the needs and expectations of the business affect software development and testing projects? To find out, CA Technologies has commissioned The Business Benefits of Service Virtualization study in the summer of Conducted by Coleman Parkes, this is the first piece of research of its type and includes feedback from 301 in-house software development managers from large enterprises with revenues of more than $1 billion or equivalent in the UK, France and Germany. Opportunity All of these pressures and challenges point towards the need for improved development processes, coupled with faster, better and more effective testing. The research suggests that organisations are taking steps to address these issues, with nearly half of the respondents indicating they are moving to a cloud-based development and test environment (44%) and a similar percentage switching to agile development methods (49%). The potential benefits of solving the development and test problems highlighted by this research are significant, yet few are aware of additional approaches that can resolve these problems. Benefits Service virtualization has emerged as a real solution to these challenges, allowing testers to remove constraints from the software development lifecycle process. It enables developers, testers and more to test an application on a virtual infrastructure that has been configured to imitate a real production environment, while giving teams the ability to change the variables to prepare for different scenarios. Service virtualization is a fundamentally new technique in software development and complements existing technologies and methodologies. Advanced development and testing solutions can resolve the most common challenges in the software development lifecycle. Respondents to the study said that this kind of technology would help them reduce costs (76%), increase quality (70%) and shorten development cycles (57%). Doing so would deliver significant benefits to the business. 3

4 Section 1: Challenge What businesses want from the IT department CIOs today understand that they serve the needs of the business as customers for their service and react accordingly. This is obvious, but at the same time, the label customer (rather than user ) provides us with a useful lens through which to view the software development process. Therefore, it is crucial to start any conversation about software development with a discussion about what the business actually wants. It is also important to understand the increasing pressures on development teams. As enterprises demand innovative software and solutions, the operations, development and quality assurance (QA) teams responsible for development continue to face countless challenges. Chief among these is the need to test applications in real time and to understand how they will perform in a real-world environment. Faced with limited resources and lack of available infrastructure, service virtualization has emerged as a viable solution to address these challenges, providing testers with the functionality to remove constraints from the software development lifecycle process. In essence, service virtualization enables developers and testers to test an application using virtual infrastructure that has been configured to imitate a real production environment, while giving teams the ability to change the variables to test different scenarios. To understand this more clearly, CA Technologies has commissioned The Business Benefits of Service Virtualization study in the northern summer of Conducted by Coleman Parkes, this is the first piece of research of its type and includes feedback from 301 in-house software development managers from large enterprises with revenues of more than $1 billion or equivalent in the UK, France and Germany. One of the key areas highlighted in the study is that development managers are under massive pressure to deliver a large number of releases each year. While the average is 6.4 releases a year, almost one-third (29%) expect to deliver 10 or more. How many releases are you expected to deliver/manage per year? % of respondents 4

5 More than half (55%) of survey respondents noted that reduced application development budgets were a top challenge this year, suggesting that budget constraints continue to plague IT departments and are applying additional pressure on software development in particular. The need from the business is clear. Leaders now expect the IT function to deliver greater operational efficiency, reduce time to market, minimise costs, increase revenues and, to some extent, build and sustain competitive advantage and be a driver for innovation. The extent to which IT departments can operate more strategically is often determined by their success at delivering software projects on time, on budget and to specification. Confidence increases and success often attracts increased budget for future projects. The realities of existing IT infrastructure and processes within many enterprises result in many new enterprise applications being built in modern, distributed environments, supported by multiple service teams and delivery partners, making development and testing extremely complex and expensive. Increasing pressure on development teams How do these business needs and expectations affect software projects? The Business Benefits of Service Virtualization study reveals the top five pressures on development teams in large companies: the need for more releases per year with more functionality and less time for development, along with expectations to address changing requirements while sticking to flat or decreasing budgets. This study explores each of these pressures. Increasing release frequency: Development managers are expected to deliver a large number of releases each year. While the average was 6.4 releases a year or one release every other month, nearly one-third (29%) expect to deliver 10 or more releases or close to one a month. For large, complex applications in major enterprises, this is a relentless pace and it is not slowing down. Nearly half (45%) of respondents expected a greater number of releases in 2012 compared with Compared to 2011, do you expect the number of releases you will be participating in this year to: % of respondents 5

6 Demands for ever more functionality: Not only are IT departments expecting to deliver more releases at a faster pace, but two-thirds of respondents also expect the functionality in each release to improve (see chart below). Increased functionality means more code, more potential bugs and more testing. Whether reactively responding to customers or proactively seeking a competitive advantage, development teams are tasked with delivering a far more enriched user experience across multiple devices and channels, adding to the complexity. Compared to 2011, do you expect the functionality of this year s releases to: % of respondents Less time for development: Teams get less than six months to develop, test and deploy the majority of their projects, with an average development time of five months, but 28% of projects must be delivered within three months. Clearly, businesses expect their developers to be responsive and to deliver rapid returns on investment. To achieve this kind of turnaround, developers must build on existing resources and code, making thorough testing even more important. Even though quick projects are likely to be small in themselves, they connect with and depend on a larger software ecosystem in most enterprises, representing significant risk for poorly tested or evaluated applications. Responding to changing requirements: As if to underline the need for responsiveness, survey respondents reported that changing customer requirements was the top issue causing the greatest challenge this year, beating out the remaining options by upwards of percentage points, depending on the region (see chart below). Changing needs from senior management also presents challenges for respondents, showing up as a top concern in the survey. Decreasing budgets: CFOs have never written the IT department a blank cheque, but this presents even more challenges for IT departments today given the increasing demands on IT. Reduced application development budgets also appeared at the top of respondents concerns this year, as noted in the chart below. As in other areas of the business, there is an increased pressure to do more with less the new normal for IT. 6

7 What of the following potential changes will cause you the greatest challenges this year? % of respondents Software development challenges In addition to the pressures from outside the IT department, developers also face difficulties imposed by complex applications, system availability and the cost and difficulty of testing. These challenges make development harder still. Typical issues include: Unavailable or inaccessible data and systems: Systems, and the critical data within them, become constrained due to conflicting development schedules, limited access, security restrictions and difficult data scenario maintenance issues. Poor performance in test environments: Downstream systems and mockups may not provide the functional behaviour or performance response needed, and end-user performance suffers. Hardware-based virtualization doesn t work: Systems are either too difficult (e.g. legacy systems like mainframes) or remote (e.g. provided by a third party) to clone via traditional hardware-based virtualization approaches. Costly third-party access fees: Developing or testing against cloud-based or other shared services can result in costly usage fees. This is backed up by the study, with the vast majority of respondents (90%) stating that they had problems with availability of systems and applications, such as databases or mainframes, for development and test purposes. To compound this, 25% experienced delays frequently or very frequently due to this problem. Respondents reported a range of challenges with test environments, including the need for manual data (69%), high maintenance requirements (56%), the expense of creating them (55%) and their lack of realism (43%). 7

8 Which of the following are your typical main challenges with test environments? % of respondents These constraints make it harder to test new applications against live data or in conjunction with already running systems. This limits test coverage and increases the risk that code releases have unexpected bugs or unintended interactions with other systems. Even a short delay or minor bugs can have a significant cost; therefore, finding a way to access or simulate restricted assets could be a real opportunity for developers to accelerate their development cycle and improve code quality. The result is that best-practice development for large complex projects, such as composite business applications, is expensive and time-consuming. The alternative, even with more flexible and adaptable agile development methods, is to cut corners on testing in the hope that everything will work out as it should. Consequences These preliminary findings across the UK, France and Germany are a wake-up call to organisations that are taking a conventional approach to software development. They are spending money unnecessarily, and it is hurting the bottom line. Project delays add more direct costs, defer potential revenues and impact customer service improvements. Respondents were painfully aware of the direct business consequences of these problems, reporting: Loss of reputation in the market (56%) Loss of customers to competitors (48%) Late delivery of new customer offerings (45%) Reduced functionality (39%) Increased calls to customer support (32%) 8

9 To make things worse, respondents also highlighted the adverse effects on the IT department: Additional budget for extra staff has to be found (71%), affecting the bottom line. Key customer-facing applications are delivered late (68%), damaging the brand and reputation of the business, resulting in reducing growth. Releases go into production with reduced functionality (62%), compromising competitive advantage. IT department s reputation is tarnished (55%), negatively impacting team morale and motivation. Lack of confidence in the new release (51%) creates uncertainty from internal business partners. The issues with cost, quality and time to market are more pronounced in the later stages of the development cycle. The greatest issues occurred at one of the latest stage integration testing with 48% identifying this as the biggest problem area. This suggests that earlier testing when bugs are easier and cheaper to fix is not as effective as it could be and that testing at later stages, such as integration, performance and regression testing, is more problematic than it needs to be. At what single stage does your company experience the greatest issues with costs, quality and time to market? % of respondents These survey results suggest that development managers often bring new applications or services from testing environments into full production without complete insight into how their integrated applications might fail. For engineers, understanding failure modes is a critical part of the job; yet, according to this study, 67% did not have this insight on a consistent basis. This is an alarming prospect for any board giving the green light for new software projects. 9

10 Section 2: Opportunity The need for improved development processes The pressures and challenges highlighted by software development experts in this survey point towards the need for improved development processes and faster, better and more effective testing. On a positive note, it seems that many developers are already looking to address these issues. Nearly half of the survey respondents were moving to a cloud-based development and test environment (44%), and a similar proportion were switching to agile development methods (49%). The potential benefits of solving the development and test problems highlighted by participants in this survey are significant. They include: Reduced costs (76%), maximising development budgets and releasing funds for additional projects Increased quality (70%), reducing cost of testing and the risk of bugs in a production environment Shorter development cycles (57%), speeding time to market and responsiveness to changing business needs Underlining the link between improvements in the development and test process on the one hand and business outcomes on the other, respondents identified significant benefits, including: Greater customer satisfaction (80%) Improved market reputation (72%) Increased revenue (72%) More competitive products (71%) If development managers could achieve these goals, the result would be a better relationship with the rest of the business (71%) and an increase in stakeholder satisfaction (65%). If you could remove current constraints, which of the following would impact you? % of respondents 10

11 Section 3: Benefits Service virtualization addressing the challenges for the constrained enterprise In simple terms, service virtualization is a capability that allows testers to remove constraints from the software development lifecycle. It enables teams to test an application using virtual infrastructure that has been configured to imitate a real production environment. Service virtualization enables testing teams to change the variables easily in order to test different scenarios. Despite these benefits, it does not require a large upfront capital investment in infrastructure to create an adequate test environment. It also does not force those testing an application to choose between the three critical criteria in application development and testing: cost, quality or schedule. The key value to the business Time to market: Accelerate custom application development and get new functionality to market faster than previously possible. According to the study organisations commonly experience 25 50% shorter development cycles, often by doing previously serial activities in parallel, without sacrificing quality. Cost of development: Simplify the hardware and software required for development and test labs to support software development. IT organisations benefit by deferring significant investments in hardware even tens of millions of dollars along with software licence savings on test instances. With budgets tightening, CIOs can take scarce resources and apply them to high-impact projects or to fund innovation. Quality of applications: Increase the number of bugs found in testing earlier in the software development lifecycle where it is cheaper and less disruptive to fix them. By moving testing and regression cycles earlier in the development lifecycle often as soon as code check-in developers can spot defects earlier and disruptive code is less likely to make it into production. To understand more clearly how various large organisations, from financial institutions to retail and travel, are using service virtualization, please visit 11

12 Section 4: Conclusion Today, every large enterprise needs to be as good at software development as they are at marketing, customer service, finance and all the other management disciplines. Findings from The Business Benefits of Service Virtualization study should be seen as a wake-up call to businesses to acknowledge that conventional approaches to software development and testing is costing money and impacting the organisation s bottom line. In summary and as a result of this new study we conclude: Software development is a business-critical activity. Delays and bugs have real business costs. Developers are under constant pressure from the business to increase functionality, shorten the development cycle, deal with changing requirements and reduce costs. Technical constraints during the development process, particularly around testing, cause further problems. However, advanced service virtualization development and test tools can help developers do more, better for less. Underlining the link between improvements in the development and test process on the one hand and business outcomes on the other, respondents identified significant benefits: Greater customer satisfaction (80%) Increased revenue (72%) Improved market reputation (72%) More competitive products (71%) If development managers could achieve their goals, the result would be a better relationship with the rest of the business (71%) and an increase in stakeholder satisfaction (65%). This is where advanced service virtualization development and test tools can help developers do more, better for less. Service virtualization, dev/test cloud support and continuous integration together can help heads of application development, QA, testing and environments optimise the development and testing of complex, composite applications. Service virtualization directly addresses many of the issues highlighted in this survey and contributes to the improvements that development managers value most. This initial study will be expanded to include additional regions and a global market comparison over the coming months. To learn more, visit ca.com/us/service-virtualization.aspx and join the open community at 12

13 Section 5: References and further reading Resources related to service virtualization To find out more about the benefits of service virtualization from an online community featuring content from leading services and software firms, please visit Case studies To understand more clearly how various large organisations, from financial institutions to retail and travel, are using service virtualization, please visit About Coleman Parkes Research Coleman Parkes Research Ltd, formed in 2000, provides action-focused marketing research on a global scale. The company offers a full research and consultancy service across all markets, while specialising in business-to-business research with a focus on IT, technology and communications research. For more information, please visit About CA Technologies CA Technologies is an IT management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments from mainframe and distributed, to virtual and cloud. CA Technologies manages and secures IT environments and enables customers to deliver more flexible IT services. CA Technologies innovative products and services provide the insight and control essential for IT organisations to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500 relies on CA Technologies to manage evolving IT ecosystems. For more information, please visit CA Technologies at ca.com. Join the conversation #svworks LinkedIn: Participate in the CA Service Virtualization Group Blog: YouTube: 13

14 Section 6: About the author Justin Vaughan-Brown As Strategic Relationships Director for CA Technologies Service Virtualization business in EMEA, Justin is responsible for raising awareness of a truly transformative approach to delivering high-quality applications faster, yet cheaper. Justin leverages his 15+ years in the software industry to evangelise this new approach to both enterprises themselves and the consulting partners who can assist them in implementing this. Before joining CA Technologies in February 2012, Justin held various marketing and alliances positions with major industry names such as Microsoft, Software AG, BusinessObjects and SAS. He has also held senior European marketing roles with data integration, document security and high-performance database vendors. This background has brought a solid understanding of many leading areas of IT including CRM, analytics, service management, mainframes and middleware. Justin has presented at industry events around the world, including a business intelligence summit in Johannesburg and security conference in Hong Kong. Based in Germany, Justin is a native of England and received a bachelor s degree in European Modern History from the University of Warwick. Justin s early career in account planning and management at several well-known London advertising agencies has proven invaluable in translating technical capabilities into customer benefits that can be easily understood. 14

15 CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) is an IT management software and solutions company with expertise across all IT environments from mainframe and distributed, to virtual and cloud. Our products enable customers to manage and secure IT environments and deliver more flexible IT services. Our innovative products and services provide the insight and control essential for IT organisations to power business agility. The majority of the Global Fortune 500 relies on CA Technologies to manage evolving IT ecosystems. Copyright 2012 CA Technologies. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only. CA Technologies assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA TECHNOLOGIES provides this document as is without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement. In no event will CA Technologies be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA Technologies is expressly advised in advance of the possibility of such damages CS2600_0712