Last week, Tasktop had a wonderful week at IBM Innovate in Orlando. We were honored by the conference organizers who invited us to present, or co-present, in eight sessions. We were delighted to win the IBM Business Partner award for Innovation in IT Development . Were especially proud that this was the second year in a row that we won this award. We had terrific meetings with our customers, potential customers and IBMers.
Aside from the fact that Im responsible for managing Tasktops conference presence, as a former member of the Rational team and later as a former IBMer going to Innovate is a bit like coming home. It was wonderful seeing how many of my former colleagues are still with Rational and better yet, were willing to spend a little time with me to catch up.
The Tasktop Crew at Innovate
Of course we talked about the Good Old Days. But we also talked about the changes in the industry. Yes, I’m a marketing weenie but the reason I love my job so much is that as a former developer (and engineering manager) the act of crafting software has always been, and always will be, near and dear to my heart For me, the Biggest Thing at Innovate was that DevOps has grown up.
In its original incarnation, the idea behind DevOps was that the entire software delivery process would go so much better if, instead of lobbing applications over the wall at Operations, there was some (pre-delivery) collaboration between the Development and the Operations teams. As bad as long waterfalls were, they were made worse by a discontinuity between the team building the software, and the team responsible for its care and feeding in production. Perhaps, I hoped, if the two teams collaborated right from the start, the promise of Agile would flow all the way into Operations. But, I was so very disappointed when the movement seemed to narrow down to only Continuous Delivery/Continuous Integration and the tools required to automate the delivery of code to production. Sure, thats better than just tossing a build at Operations and hoping they can figure out what to do with it, but REALLY what happened to the COLLABORATION between the Development and Operations teams?! Instead, Continuous Delivery seemed to be all about getting the bits into production. But unless two developers are working on the same sub-system, there isn’t all that much collaboration on the code per se.
The real collaboration is around all the development artifacts the requirements/user stories, models, defects, plans and no one seemed to be talking about that. Until now. Finally, DevOps in the broader sense, is coming into its own. Im happy to report that during this Innovate, the notion of DevOps took center stage. The sessions were divided into three streams: · Innovation emerging technologies · Continuous Engineering the delivery of complex and connected products (where products are a combination of software and hardware), and · DevOps!! Oh sure, the words continuous delivery were used during the DevOps stream, but not as the sum-total of the conversation. In this incarnation of DevOps, continuous delivery is an outcome of using lean and Agile principles, of continuous planning, continuous testing and of continuous collaboration! Finally, the DevOps movement is morphing into what it could have been from the start. And speaking of morphing, over the years, Innovate itself has changed and evolved.
Lorsque j'étais chez Rational, notre conférence des utilisateurs s'appelait RUC (the Rational User Conference). Après notre rachat par IBM, elle est devenue RSDUC (Rational Software Development User Conference) et comptait environ 2,500 participants. Cette année, il y avait 4,000 participants à IBM Innovate. Depuis le début, il s'agit d'une conférence d'utilisateurs pour les produits Rational. Mais l'année prochaine, il y a encore une autre évolution. IBM prévoit de fusionner plusieurs de ses conférences. Nous ne connaissons pas encore le nom, nous savons seulement que ce sera en février, à Las Vegas, avec une participation attendue de 20,000. Avec plusieurs de leurs marques Software Group travaillant ensemble (certaines qui se concentrent sur le développement et d'autres sur les opérations), je suis sûr qu'il y aura encore une autre évolution de l'approche DevOps d'IBM. Et j'attends avec impatience une autre semaine formidable.
