Articles

Value Stream Management Meets Engineering Analytics

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Value Stream Management (VSM) is about empowering delivery organizations to measure, mitigate, and monitor complexity. Simply put, it aims at improving the flow of value in your organization. The VSM Consortium recently released their highly anticipated report on The State of Value Stream Management Report 2022.  

In this article, we recap some of the findings and look at it specifically from a software engineering and DevOps point of view. Can we capture some key lessons that lead to healthier and more productive engineering teams? What has worked and what has not? Can we simplify and adapt ideas of organizational change to create a thriving engineering organization?

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Adobe Has Acquired You

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There were mixed reactions on Thursday morning when Adobe announced it had acquired Figma.

Excited press releases extolling the benefits of the “collaboration” followed the news. Dylan Field, founder and CEO of Figma, said: “There is a huge opportunity for us to accelerate the growth and innovation of the Figma platform with access to Adobe’s technology…”

The reaction from the design community has been a little less enthusiastic.

The problem for the design industry is that we’ve been here before. The acquisition of Macromedia followed a period in which Adobe tried to compete, failed to update its legacy code, lost the battle, and purchased the victor. You only need to look at the number of former Macromedia products in Adobe’s stable (zero) to see where Figma’s heading.

Figma has grown faster than any of its rivals in the last eight years. It is, of course, easier to grow when you start at zero. But there’s no denying Figma is a well-managed business and probably a good investment — if not worth the $20bn that Adobe reportedly paid.

Figma’s technology will give Adobe a leg-up in the collaborative design stakes, where it is clearly lacking. And Adobe’s resources will iron out some of the kinks in Figma, especially around typography, which is, if we’re honest, a bit hacky in places.

Adobe will provide a good home (we hope) for the Figma team, who will have the opportunity for career advancement in a much wider pool of development teams.

And, of course, Figma’s annual revenue will begin to trickle into Adobe’s vault — although it may be some time before it makes a dent in that $20bn hole.

But Adobe didn’t buy Figma for its business model, collaborative technology, team, or revenue stream. Adobe bought Figma’s users, all four million of them.

Adobe‘s approach to design software is upselling. It lures you in with free apps, and when you’re engaged, it integrates them with other parts of its ecosystem until suddenly, without meaning to, you’ve agreed to a Creative Cloud subscription.

Adobe was losing customers to a competitor. And more importantly, due to Figma’s free-use approach for individuals, it was losing young customers to a competitor. If it hadn’t bought Figma, Adobe would have needed to invest heavily in its own products while providing them to freelancers for free; that isn’t viable for a company with as many commitments as Adobe.

Yes, it is entirely accurate to say that competition drives innovation, and with fewer competing apps, there is less need for companies like Adobe to build high-quality, reliable products. However, it is also true to say that a lack of competition creates opportunities for new apps.

Somewhere out there, in a dorm room, or a basement, or on a kitchen table, someone is working on Adobe’s next big acquisition. It’s probably an AR design app; we need a few more of those.

For Figma, the next 12 months will be bright as Adobe works to retain the customers it’s bought. Within five years, you’ll probably need an Adobe Fonts subscription and a Photoshop plugin to use Figma. In ten years, it will be stored in a code archive next to Freehand.

Some designers will turn to Sketch; others will turn to Affinity; some will shrug and keep using Figma; others will shrug and keep using XD.

If an app is intrinsic to your design work, it’s probably time to switch apps. Your skills are transferable. I’ve switched apps many times; some I loved, some I just needed. I’ve never encountered an app that improved my work, although plenty have improved my mood while working.

Figma took a great approach and will continue to be great until it isn’t. Tools come and go, Adobe’s acquisitions team, it appears, is eternal.

 

 

Featured image uses photos by Afrika ufundi, Andrea Piacquadio, Andrea Piacquadio, Anna Tarazevich, cottonbro, fauxels, Ketut Subiyanto, Mikhail Nilov, Moose Photos, Pavel Danilyuk, Pavel Danilyuk, Polina Tankilevitch, Tima Miroshnichenko.

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Compliance Automated Standard Solution (COMPASS), Part 2: Trestle SDK

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In part 1 of this multi-part blog series on continuous compliance, we detailed the personas and their role in the compliance processes. We concluded that the key to achieving compliance automation and hence continuous compliance is the compliance artifacts programmatic representation, as code, expressed in generic and standard security language terms.

In this blog post, we introduce Trestle, our open-source implementation of the NIST Open Security Control Assessment Language (OSCAL) standard framework adopted as a workflow automation of compliance artifacts managed as compliance as code. Trestle enables those diverse personas to collaboratively author the compliance artifacts and offers a platform and OSCAL SDK for teams to automate their specific native processes and formats. Trestle implicitly provides a core opinionated workflow driven by its pipeline to allow standardized interlocks with other compliance tooling platforms.

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SAP innove et accompagne les entreprises vers le travail du futur

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Les avancées de la suite SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management transforment le développement des talents pour le travail de demain.

A Paris, le 14 septembre 2022 – A l’occasion du salon SuccessConnect, SAP SE (NYSE : SAP) a annoncé de nouvelles avancées dans les fondements de la suite SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) afin de permettre aux entreprises de mettre en œuvre une stratégie intégrée de développement des talents et de créer une force active prête pour l’avenir.

Les entreprises prospèrent lorsque leurs employés sont engagés dans leur carrière et leur entreprise, qu’ils sont correctement qualifiés, qu’ils perçoivent des perspectives d’évolution adaptées à leur profil et qu’ils ont un fort sentiment d’appartenance. Cependant, de nombreuses organisations ont du mal à avoir une vision d’ensemble des compétences présentes au sein de leurs effectifs ou des ambitions de leurs collaborateurs. Les dernières avancées de la suite SAP SuccessFactors HXM réunissent les données, l’apprentissage automatique et l’IA pour offrir aux organisations une meilleure compréhension des capacités de leur personnel et une intelligence des talents exploitable pour aligner leurs employés sur les besoins de l’organisation.

Les innovations suivantes seront disponibles au deuxième semestre 2022 :

  • Skills ontology utilise le machine learning et l’automatisation pour identifier en permanence les compétences d’un employé en fonction de son poste, de ses responsabilités, de ses expériences et de ses réalisations, offrant ainsi une vision globale des compétences d’une organisation à l’échelle mondiale.
  • Growth portfolio est une source d’information dynamique rassemblant les spécificités de chaque employé : ses compétences, ses points forts, sa manière de travailler, mais aussi ses passions et aspirations.
  • Dynamic teams est une nouvelle fonctionnalité qui permet aux entreprises de créer, de suivre, de mesurer et d’optimiser les résultats de leurs équipes. Les entreprises qui utilisent SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals peuvent ajouter des résultats clés objectifs (OKR) à Dynamic teams afin de suivre les progrès et de mesurer la réussite. Dans Dynamic Teams, les employés sont rassemblés selon leurs compétences et non selon leurs affinités. Ainsi, grâce au machine learning et à l’IA, SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace rend l’évolution des employés au sein de l’entreprise plus équitable.

Associées à SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace, ces innovations apportent les connaissances et l’adaptabilité nécessaires à la constitution d’une force active plus qualifiée, plus souple et plus équitable. Growth portfolio et Skills ontology permettent une individualisation des recommandations au sein de SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace, qui reflètent l’ensemble des personnalités des individus, et pas seulement leurs compétences. L’introduction de Dynamic teams transcende les structures traditionnelles pour favoriser un travail basé sur les compétences plutôt que sur les descriptions de poste. Les entreprises peuvent ainsi constituer des équipes diversifiées, capables d’obtenir de meilleurs résultats, tout en accélérant l’évolution de carrière et le développement personnel grâce à des cas pratiques.

“En nous appuyant sur notre héritage en matière de gestion des talents, nous réimaginons la manière dont les entreprises assurent la gestion et le développement professionnel de leurs collaborateurs pour répondre aux exigences émergentes du travail de demain”, explique Meg Bear, Présidente et Chef de Produit de SAP SuccessFactors. “Lorsque les gens ont la possibilité de travailler sur ce qui les passionne, ils sont plus engagés, plus performants et permettent à leur entreprise d’obtenir des résultats commerciaux hors normes.”

“SAP a créé un système permettant de gérer l’organisation du travail de demain, dès aujourd’hui”, a déclaré Josh Bersin, analyste industriel. “La nouvelle architecture et les nouvelles fonctionnalités de SAP SuccessFactors sont un bon en avant sur ce que les organisations ont besoin pour gérer, développer et habiliter leur personnel et leurs équipes.”

Ces nouvelles applications RH de la suite SAP SuccessFactors HXM sont des innovations essentielles qui fournissent un système complet de développement des talents et conçues spécialement pour les organisations afin de les aider à créer une force active durable et prête pour l’avenir.

Pour que le développement des talents soit durable et efficace, les organisations doivent favoriser un sentiment d’appartenance. Donner aux gens les moyens de s’épanouir au travail commence par l’identité. Les utilisateurs de SAP SuccessFactors peuvent désormais indiquer le nom et les pronoms personnels de leur choix sur leur profil public, ce qui leur permet de s’approprier la manière dont ils se présentent et d’être reconnus comme leur véritable personnalité au travail.

Les noms choisis et les pronoms personnels seront généralement disponibles pour tous les clients SAP SuccessFactors au quatrième trimestre 2022. Skills ontology, Growth portfolio et Dynamic teams seront également disponibles dès le quatrième trimestre 2022.

Pour en savoir plus, rendez-vous à l’événement virtuel SuccessConnect. Suivez SAP sur Twitter @SAPNews.

The post SAP innove et accompagne les entreprises vers le travail du futur appeared first on SAP France News.

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Observability Maturity Model

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Modern systems and applications span numerous architectures and technologies — they are also becoming increasingly more dynamic, distributed, and modular in nature. In order to support the availability and performance of their systems, IT operations and SRE teams need advanced monitoring capabilities. This Refcard reviews the four distinct levels of observability maturity, key functionality at each stage, and next steps organizations should take to enhance their monitoring practices.
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Reverse Pull-Requests

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In a fast-paced world, more teams have microservices architectures and are making the shift to Continuous Deployment and Trunk-Based Development. For one of our client’s teams, that meant no feature branches, pairs always committing to main, pushing frequently (multiple times per hour, as often as every 1–4 commits) and those changes landing in production 20–30 minutes later.

With pair programming, no feature branches, and such continuous change, code reviews would seem redundant or extremely difficult with little in the way of tooling support. How on earth would you use GitHub’s Pull Request review features in this setting when there’s no feature branch to diff?

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Top 5 Datadog Integrations To Improve the Efficiency of Tech Teams

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Datadog is an exceptional tool for DevOps teams, developers, and SREs. It’s suitable for a broad range of cloud applications of every size. However, despite its powerful capabilities, most businesses aren’t making the most of Datadog. Are you?

  • Can you see how newly launched features are affecting user experience?
  • Can you immediately see the root cause of an issue on your dashboard – without digging around? 
  • Are you managing Jira tickets directly in Datadog?

Datadog’s integrations help make the platform stand out, but using them to make Datadog more powerful can be confusing, as there are over 500 interesting tools to consider.

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The Open Source Way to Rightsize Kubernetes With One Click

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Rightsizing resource requests is an increasing challenge for teams using Kubernetes—and especially critical as they scale their environments. Overprovisioning CPU and memory lead to costly overspending, but underprovisioning risks CPU throttling and out-of-memory errors if requested resources aren’t sufficient. Dev and engineering teams that don’t thoroughly understand the live performance profile of their containers will usually play it safe and request vastly more CPU and memory resources than required, often with significant budget waste.

The open source Kubecost tool (https://github.com/kubecost) has had a Request Sizing dashboard to help Kubernetes users bring more cost efficiency to their resource requests. One of the tool’s most popular optimization features, the dashboard identifies over-requested resources, offers recommendations for appropriate per-container resource requests, and estimates the cost-savings impact of implementing those recommendations. The dashboard utilizes actual usage data from live containers to provide accurate recommendations. However, leveraging the dashboard has included some hurdles, requiring users to manually update YAML requests to align resource requests with Kubecost recommendations or introduce integrations using a CD tool. 

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Regression Testing in CI/CD and Its Challenges

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The introduction of the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) process has strengthened the software release mechanism, helping products go to market faster than ever before and allowing application development teams to deliver code changes more frequently and reliably. Regression testing ensures no new mistakes have been introduced to a software application by testing newly modified code as well as any parts of the software that could potentially be affected. The software testing market size is projected to reach $40 billion in 2020 with a 7% growth rate by 2027. Regression testing accounted for more than 8.5% of market share and is expected to rise at an annual pace of over 8% through 2027, as per reports from the Global Market Insights group.

The Importance of Regression Testing

Regression testing is a must for large-sized software development teams following an agile model. When many developers are making multiple commits frequently, regression testing is required to identify any unexpected outcome in overall functionality caused by each commit. The CI/CD setup identifies that and notifies the developers as soon as the failure occurs and makes sure the faulty commit doesn’t get shipped into the deployment. 

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3 Best Website Uptime Monitoring Tools 

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An unreliable, semi-broken and unresponsive website is an excellent way to lose leads and visitors — regardless of how aesthetically pleasing or well-designed, the visual elements are.

Over the past decade, we’ve seen more initiative to deliver faster internet to regions of the world that were previously devoid of it. With online communities expanding and more people becoming receptive to online shopping, ensuring your site’s dependability is now more important than ever. 

One way to achieve this is by employing uptime and downtime monitoring tools. This guide will examine the best ways to get alerts when something goes wrong and your website falters.

Why Is Website Uptime Monitoring Important?

Downtime is bound to occur occasionally. Nonetheless, the goal is to minimize it. The longer the downtime occurs, the more traffic and potential clients you lose. A dysfunctional website is also detrimental to your credibility and reputation. People may associate your website’s unreliability with your real-world products or services.

With web developers charging an average of $200 per hour, high-quality websites can be expensive to build and maintain. Nevertheless, it’s often worth the investment. However, an unreliable website can backfire on you. Instead of attracting more customers, it could potentially repel them. This can result in lost revenue.

An uptime monitoring solution can help you prevent or reduce these losses. It verifies if your website is up and functional and notifies you if it’s not. This allows you to troubleshoot the issue and get your website back up and running as soon as you’re alerted. The most common issues behind your website’s downtime include: 

  • Server faults;
  • Network outages;
  • Power outage;
  • Traffic spikes;
  • Cyberattacks;
  • Domain name issues;
  • An erroneous web application deployment;
  • Increased server loads;
  • DNS Resolve issues;
  • Human error.

Thus, you must employ a dependable tool that detects downtime or any interruptions related to your website as soon as they occur. They are must-have tools for web designers, developers, and network administrators. However, not all of them are built the same. So how do you identify the best uptime monitoring tools?

Essential Features of Uptime Monitoring Tools

Uptime monitoring tools typically detect interruptions by running network tests such as pings and trace routes. You could practically monitor your website’s uptime by constantly running these tests yourself. 

However, this isn’t an efficient way to monitor your website’s uptime. A comprehensive uptime monitoring tool will automatically monitor your website’s uptime in the background. It will then alert you through various channels as soon as it senses that your website may be down. 

Furthermore, high-quality uptime monitoring solutions tend to offer additional information regarding your website’s uptime/downtime and its performance. These tools commonly feature dashboards, status pages, badges, exportable records, etc., to help you keep track of your site’s overall health.

9 Best Features of an Uptime Monitoring Solution

The ideal uptime monitoring tool or service should feature: 

  1. Website security features that notify of and repel potential cyber attacks;
  2. 24/7 uninterrupted background website monitoring;
  3. Multi-channel alerts (email, SMS, push notifications, instant messages, social media, etc.);
  4. Report generation;
  5. 24/7 customer support available through different channels (email, phone, chat, etc.);
  6. Be capable of monitoring multiple websites and proxies at the same time;
  7. Offer insights and suggestions to improve your website’s performance;
  8. Be affordable;
  9. High customizability should allow you to choose which features to enable and disable.

Another optional feature to look out for is public status pages that your clients can access to determine if all your services are up and running. GetWeave is an excellent example of this. The website features a well-organized systems status page where customers can check if all of Weave’s services are functional. 

Nevertheless, you can use the above information as a buying guide when assessing potential uptime monitoring tools. The rest of this guide will supply a few suggestions as to which tools you should use for your website.

3 Best Website Uptime Monitoring Tools 

Some of the best uptime monitoring tools for website downtime alerts include:

1. Uptrends

Uptrends isn’t just a downtime detection tool; it’s a complete web performance monitoring solution. It will notify you as soon as it detects any disturbance in your website’s performance. It features highly customizable checks. For instance, you can set performance check limits for load times. Uptrends will notify you instantly if your website takes too long to load.

You can also configure from which locations you want it to monitor your website. Uptrends will then point you to where your website usually suffers performance dips in the real world. 

The service uses multiple communication channels to send users notifications: email, phone calls, and SMS. Alternatively, you can download one of Uptrend’s mobile applications and receive push notifications. Additionally, you can integrate Uptrends with messaging and communication applications such as PagerDuty, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.   

Another impressive Uptrend feature is its ability to emulate your website’s performance on different browsers. It runs Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge on its servers. Thus, you can compare how your website runs on these web browsers without installing them on your servers or computer. 

Uptrends supplies users with various charts, reports, and graphs to help identify sudden spikes or dips. Waterfall reports display the complete page-load from the initial request to the last download. This allows you to compare the history of your website’s performance element by element. It comes with three price plans whose costs depend on the number of monitors you would like. Starting at $16.21 (at the time of writing) the Starter Plan is the most affordable.

2. Oh Dear

Oh Dear is a slightly cheaper option than Uptrends, with the most affordable plan starting at $12 per month (at the time of writing). However, while Uptrends offers a 30-day free trial, Oh Dear only provides a 12-day trial period. Nevertheless, Oh Dear’s interface is a lot cleaner and more minimal. 

Since Oh Dear runs servers in different locations across the globe, it can track how your website performs in various regions. Oh Dear will scan through your website and index all the pages. If it detects any issues, it will alert you immediately. 

Oh Dear also features a continuous certificate monitoring function. Site owners who are concerned with their website’s security may find this feature to be especially useful. It will verify your SSL certificate expiration dates and alert you of any changes.  

Oh Dear’s public status page enables your clients to keep track of your website’s availability.

Oh Dear uses email and SMS text messages to alert site owners of any issues. It also features integrations with communications and social media applications such as Telegram, Discord, Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc. Oh Dear ensures that messages are as detailed and user-friendly. This makes it easier to troubleshoot and find the origin of your problem. Oh Dear is more than a worthy alternative to Uptrends. 

3. WP Umbrella

WP Umbrella is a little different from the previous entries. It’s intended to help users manage and monitor multiple WordPress sites. Thus, it is far more particularized in its approach to website uptime monitoring. Again, as is the primary function of the uptime monitoring tool, it offers a real-time alert system that will contact you through email, SMS, Slack, etc. 

WP Umbrella employs a simple minimal UI. Its main screen consists of a dashboard that allows you to view all your WordPress websites. By default, this dashboard features four columns: Site, Uptime, Speed, and Issues.

WP Umbrella will alert you of any outdated or erroneous plugins or themes. While it doesn’t offer dedicated public status pages, it does have a client report generation feature. You can automatically send these reports to your various subscribers or clients when your website is down. 

WP Umbrella is the most affordable option on this list. Users are charged $1.99 per month (at the time of writing) for each website monitored. In addition, WP Umbrella offers a 14-day trial and does not require your credit card details. It’s an excellent option for anyone running a WordPress website or two.

Conclusion

This guide has only explored three possible uptime monitoring solutions. They won’t only assist you in detecting downtimes, they can also help you find the reason your site may be slow.

These solutions are an excellent place to start. But there are many other options coming to market all the time. You may find that this is the first step to converting more leads and reducing your bounce rate. 

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