Among the topics we discussed:

• What is platform engineering?
• Why does platform engineer have a chance of going mainstream?
• How is Percona addressing the needs of its clients?
• The future of database infrastructure? What are some key milestones we can expect in the years ahead?

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The post Percona’s Steve Hoffman on the Ease of Platform Engineering appeared first on eWEEK.

Among the topics we discussed:

What’s your single biggest takeaway from the report?

Okay, let’s discuss some key findings from the report:

• 57% of IT teams are under pressure to reduce SaaS spend. I’m surprised – I thought companies loved SaaS. So SaaS has gone too far?
• 58% of leaders are focused on using automation to drive efficiency. What’s been slowing down the move toward automation?
• 82% of teams reported they are facing higher expectations. So you continue to see a labor shortage in tech?
• How is Workato addressing the automation needs of its clients?

To wrap up: What’s the future of automation in the workplace? What are some key milestones we can expect in the years ahead?

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The post Workato CEO Vijay Tella on Automation Trends appeared first on eWEEK.

• As you survey the market for processors, what major trends are driving progress in 2022?
• What advice do you give to companies, as they consider the processor element of making a hardware purchase decision?
• Let’s talk about AMD’s commercial market strategy – recent announcements and the network of partnerships.
• The future of computer processes in the years ahead? What are some key milestones we can expect in the mid term future?

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The post AMD’s Matt Unangst on Semiconductor Trends in 2022 appeared first on eWEEK.

Among the topics we covered: 

• What trends are driving the data market now, in terms of retail and customer data? Are companies fully aware of how they’re handling customer data?
• What most needs to change about how customer data is handled? How can customers get better control?
• What role can data brokerages play? How does NCR factor into this?
• The future of how retail data is handled? What do you see in the years ahead?

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The post NCR’s Ismail Amla on Trends in Retail Data Management appeared first on eWEEK.

Among the topics we covered: 

• What is your sense of how effectively customer experience (CX) is built into today’s technology offerings?
• As companies shop for solutions in the market, how can they know if the CX of a solution will serve them as they need?
• How is Cisco serving the CX needs of its clients? What’s the Cisco advantage?
• The future of CX as digital transformation progresses? What do you see that needs to happen – or what do you hope happens with CX?

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The post Cisco’s Thimaya Subaiya on Customer Experience in Tech Solutions appeared first on eWEEK.

Among the topics we discussed:

• There is a lot of buzz around the metaverse. What exactly is the metaverse? How will this help us work more collaboratively?
• We now live in a world where “hybrid work” – collaboration between professionals across locations and time zones – is primary and essential. What trends do you see driving this overarching theme?
• What’s the Nvidia advantage when it comes to supporting hybrid work and virtual worlds. Let’s talk about key tools.
• The future of hybrid work? Clearly it will only get more primary. What milestones or major developments do you foresee?

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The post NVIDIA’s Richard Kerris on Hybrid Work and the Omniverse appeared first on eWEEK.

Among the topics we discussed: 

• The concept of observability has really gained steam over the last year or so. What do you see as driving the need for observability?
• Let’s talk about another rising trend, everything as code. Why are companies and developers gravitating toward EaC?
• Recently, Dynatrace announced that it is “delivering software intelligence, including broad and deep observability, application security, and advanced AIOps capabilities as code.” What exactly does this mean, and what’s the value of this to companies?
• Your view on the future of emerging tech, in terms of what you see coming in the next couple of years? How will concepts like EaC and observability change companies’ tech infrastructure?

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• What are a couple of key trends driving the enterprise software market?
• What’s a typical pain point for companies as they grapple with digital transformation? What advice would you give them?
• Let’s talk about the ServiceNow Impact solution. How does it help companies?
• What do you see for the future of digital transformation? What role will AI play?

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The post ServiceNow’s Aaron Fulkerson on Digital Transformation and AI appeared first on eWEEK.

It costs significantly less to write perfect software than to write software of dubious quality. It may cost more initially in terms of time and resources, but your teams will save several times that cost if they get the code right from the start.

The people who make up your software teams are the linchpin of your projects. That’s why continuous improvement for teams and continuous learning for people are the best investments you can make. When your teams don’t have what they need to function efficiently, success becomes less likely.

These are the top efficiency killers for your software teams:

1: No product market fit

It doesn’t matter how efficient or effective your software organization is if you don’t have product market fit. What you produce is only as valuable as your market makes it.

2: Poor quality

Errors in the code cause not just bad customer experiences but rework for the team, which increases labor costs and takes the team away from further progress in building the system.

And an absence of trustable automated tests makes it expensive and risky to make changes to simplify the code, which makes the team move even slower.

3: Cost of change

Unless you take deliberate steps to reduce complexity, adding to a code base naturally increases that complexity. This makes it more and more time-consuming, and therefore expensive, to make subsequent changes to the code. Pressure from stakeholders or management to move on quickly to the next task drives teams to skip the refactoring steps needed to keep the cost of change low.

The effects of this aren’t always detected when they happen, and the ultimate effect is to make system changes unaffordable, and to rob teams of the bandwidth they need to correct the trouble they’ve gotten into. For a small software company, the ability (or lack thereof) to control runaway cost of change can mean life or death.

4: Bad team dynamics

A dysfunctional team can’t function well – it’s that simple. Hiring for qualities that make people good teammates, giving teams time to get through the “forming-storming-norming-performing” curve, and keeping well-functioning teams together for the long term leads to better-performing organizations.

5: Bottlenecks

Organizations can make the mistake of inadequately staffing one or more roles as they define development processes that involve handoffs from one role to another as code moves toward production.

Quality assurance is a frequent victim here. Some organizations set up their teams in such a way that multiple teams depend on the output of other teams, which may not be able to deliver all the things the downstream teams need in a timely fashion. The whole organization is only as fast as the slowest bottleneck along the value chain.

6: Manual, repetitive work

In software, there’s no such thing as standard work. If your team finds any, it must quickly be automated out of existence. Repetitive manual work is error-prone and expensive, and manual processes don’t scale as your system does.

Deployments, system patches and other manual work can quickly eat up time that a team doesn’t have to spare.

7: Unneeded complexity

When it takes a long time to edit, build, test and deploy software, that slows progress. Slow automated tests, written using end-to-end testing tools, adds to a team’s cycle time. So do manual testing, long deployment processes, and code review processes inserted in the middle of the edit-to-deploy cycle.

These days, it’s all about reducing complexity. But organizations need to remember what weakens or even destroys the efficient development of software. The strength, health and cohesion of your teams are what will make or break your projects. People don’t necessarily need to be 100% qualified according to the specified job requirements to succeed in a role -many of those requirements can be taught along the way.

Thinking in terms of soft skills – communication, collaboration and so on – when hiring will help build stronger teams. Providing ongoing training will also help. Keep the seven efficiency killers discussed above top of mind as you create a more efficient and effective software engineering cohort.

About the Author:

Susan Davis is CTO of Certn

The post Avoid These Seven Software Team Efficiency Killers appeared first on eWEEK.

While this addresses applications that are up and running, it begs the question, is there something that developers can do during the development process to optimize the app for the before it goes into production?  This is where the concept of “full stack testing” needs to be understood.

Testing can no longer be done in silos

Historically, testing of the “stack” has been done in silos with network operations testing their domain, developers testing the app, etc. The problem with this is that each team might give their area of responsibility a clean bill of health but when the app goes live problems occur. This is because the application experience traverses the entire stack and that isn’t tested at all.

Enter full stack testing that looks at the end-to-end app performance. This enables developers to fix issues before the app is rolled out in production. This can remove any “blind spots” that might impact user experience.

Solving this challenge is critically important today as delivering a high-quality user experience is core to attracting top talent and customer experience is now the top brand differentiator so good performance for public facing apps is must. Poor performing apps will drive employees away and cause customers to flip to a competing brand.

Live from the lab event helps navigate full stack testing

I understand that most businesses likely have not implemented full stack testing. To help with this, Keysight Technologies is hosting an event, “Live from the lab: Software test automation” on October 28^th, to help organizations make this shift. In some ways, Keysight epitomizes the concept of full stack testing, as it’s a company that has deep roots in network testing but recently jumped into application testing with the acquisition of Eggplant software, one of the leading software testing automation companies.

Keysight Technologies is the premier network testing vendor, whose products are used by almost every network vendor, telco and many large enterprises. The fact that the company is now jumping into software testing is a strong indicator that full stack testing is the future of testing. This is the only way organizations can understand user experience before moving an application into production.

The Woz talks the future of testing

The virtual event is keynoted by Steve Wozniak of Apple fame where he will discuss the future of software automation. I find the Woz to be an excellent choice of speakers as Apple’s competitive advantage comes from the integration of hardware, software and the network. In some sense, Apple has been doing full stack testing since its inception.

The session after Wozniak’s is one worth watching as Gareth Smith, Keysight’s GM for Software Test Automation, will share his vision for full stack testing and discuss how to simplify testing across end user platforms, applications, and integrated systems by using an AI based “digital twin.”

To date, digital twins have been very popular in manufacturing and engineering organizations but not so much in technology circles. The use of them though can help companies test, run “what if?” scenarios and try new things without disrupting production workstreams.

It’s important to note that the event isn’t all vision as Keysight’s Sejal Patel will do a session on how full stack testing can be applied to the widely adopted Salesforce CRM application. Salesforce is the market leader in its category and many organizations run their business off it, so poor performance can be lost dollars.

As I mentioned before, testing is something most companies do in silos, but businesses are changing. The digitization of everything means applications, systems and networks all need to work together to deliver best in class experiences. Full stack testing is the way forward and the Keysight event can help get things kick started.

The post Keysight Event Highlights The Importance of Full Stack Testing appeared first on eWEEK.