Automate (re)provisioning for development and test
This month included yet another trade show visit, the StarEast 2007 show. For those of you who I was not lucky enough to meet there, this show attracts and educates software testing professionals through speaker sessions while providing the opportunity to interact with contemporaries and vendors. It was our first time at this show, and the customer interaction was great.
As with many people whose job involves the use of technology, a lot of effort is being spent on context as opposed to core activities. As a primer, this model was outlined in Living on the Fault Line by Geoffrey Moore and adopted by a number of organizations. Simply put, core activities add real value, context is everything else. Context is important (perhaps even critical) to get right, it's just not what adds economic value to the organization.
Back to software testing. I heard over and over again confirmation from folks that they spend more time building up and tearing down their test/dev environments than they do running their actual tests. From my perspective, testing = core, infrastructure set-up = context. These organizations are allocating fewer resources to bottom-line value-add activities which differentiate them than they are to activities which simply must be done, but don't really drive value.
One way which test/dev has compensated is through the over-provisioning of resources (servers and such) which are wired up and left to idle waiting for the occasional test, but never re-deployed when not being used. Sure, this strategy leaves resources available when needed, but with the increased costs of hardware, software, power, space, and opportunity. This is essentially a shift from people cost to hardware associated costs, but not a shift from context to core value-add activities.
At Scalent we've taken a hard look at development and test internally. Our software builds are run multiple times throughout the day in an automated fashion, and incorporate the deployment of servers to support a given test along with the automated release of this hardware when no longer needed. One of our customers is leveraging Scalent to build out a shared multi-thousand server enterprise test lab for their organization, saving them $Millions.
Don't spend more time on context. Come chat with us.
-- Brian Korn, Director Marketing, May 2007
As with many people whose job involves the use of technology, a lot of effort is being spent on context as opposed to core activities. As a primer, this model was outlined in Living on the Fault Line by Geoffrey Moore and adopted by a number of organizations. Simply put, core activities add real value, context is everything else. Context is important (perhaps even critical) to get right, it's just not what adds economic value to the organization.
Back to software testing. I heard over and over again confirmation from folks that they spend more time building up and tearing down their test/dev environments than they do running their actual tests. From my perspective, testing = core, infrastructure set-up = context. These organizations are allocating fewer resources to bottom-line value-add activities which differentiate them than they are to activities which simply must be done, but don't really drive value.
One way which test/dev has compensated is through the over-provisioning of resources (servers and such) which are wired up and left to idle waiting for the occasional test, but never re-deployed when not being used. Sure, this strategy leaves resources available when needed, but with the increased costs of hardware, software, power, space, and opportunity. This is essentially a shift from people cost to hardware associated costs, but not a shift from context to core value-add activities.
At Scalent we've taken a hard look at development and test internally. Our software builds are run multiple times throughout the day in an automated fashion, and incorporate the deployment of servers to support a given test along with the automated release of this hardware when no longer needed. One of our customers is leveraging Scalent to build out a shared multi-thousand server enterprise test lab for their organization, saving them $Millions.
Don't spend more time on context. Come chat with us.
-- Brian Korn, Director Marketing, May 2007
posted by Scalent Systems at 12:27 PM
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