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INSIGHTS / Articles

Moving Beyond QC for Better ALM

 29 May 2019 
Moving Beyond QC for Better ALM Moving Beyond QC for Better ALM
Moving Beyond QC for Better ALM
INSIGHTS / Articles

Moving Beyond QC for Better ALM

 29 May 2019 

Quality Centre (QC) has been a foundation of application lifecycle management (ALM) governance and compliance for many years. But how do we leverage these traditional ALM assets, practices and frameworks to align with today’s business demands, Agile methods, new ways of working (NWOW), and diverse toolsets?

Digital transformation is here. Meeting business commitments for faster delivery of reliable, performant, and secure high-quality software is a mandate.

Enterprises that depend on ALM quality management have typically used mature, predictable methods to ensure compliance, traceability and visibility of the software delivery process. QC has been a bedrock for these quality management, assurance, and compliance practices.

However, business demands are driving digital transformation and organisational change to accelerate quality and delivery of new software and features. These demands must be balanced with internal and regulatory compliance needs in value streams where Agile and new ways of working have been adopted.

It is clear that business agility and NWOW bring different challenges in managing quality and compliance. But embedding enterprise compliance frameworks and quality gates into each Agile stream and different toolsets is wasted effort. The potential for omission also increases when outcome driven initiatives are prioritised to drive faster software feature delivery.

Transformation from traditional and predictable methods to exploratory frameworks and optimised quality management practices is the essence of digital transformation. New methods and frameworks must support organisational change that drive new business value and accelerate delivery.

However, the digital transformation journey must also retain legacy compliance assets, practices and traceability processes while enabling and supporting faster feature deployments as BAU. Because business demands won’t wait.

Working at enterprise scale

QC is a component of the rich Micro Focus solution suite, has been around for generations, and has expertly supported Quality Management and compliance for legacy systems and traditional delivery processes. QC has grown and evolved to become a market dominant solution, and it’s not a stretch to suggest it was once close to monopolising the ALM market. Continued reliance on QC’s product life and business capabilities is quite remarkable given today’s rapidly evolving technology market.

More recently a plethora of open source, Agile-friendly, and cost-effective toolsets entered the market. These solutions disrupted the traditional software model in the same way Uber and Airbnb disrupted their markets. Not only are these tools in many cases nimbler to plan Agile projects, capture, track, and resolve bugs and issues, they are also relatively inexpensive, purchased online, and individually licensed for smaller Agile teams in horizontal value streams.

However, open toolsets can limit the depth of compliance capability, restrict enterprise visibility, and constrain reuse and re-integration of compliance frameworks. These limitations may present substantial rework, particularly in regulatory environments such as banking, insurance, healthcare, mining, airlines, government or transportation.

Micro Focus Octane ALM meets our need to bridge the gap between Agile development and asset retention of traditional ALM practices.

These quality management and compliance capabilities are inherent in QC. Today, businesses need a path to align quality management with DevOps at enterprise scale and continue to provide the necessary visibility, control, and traceability needed for governance and compliance standards.

So how do we manage traditional enterprise risk, and retain assurance and compliance, without impacting the different methods, tools, and processes adopted in unique value streams? And how do we retain the knowledge practices built into QC while transforming to these Agile, new ways of working?

A hi-octane solution

Micro Focus Octane is a solution path from QC to manage current and future regulatory compliance needs, retain traditional legacy assets, integrate with open tools out-of-the-box, and support a wide range of Agile methods and frameworks.

Designed to be a low-risk solution, it contains a migration path from QC to Octane for existing assets, integration with CI/CD processes such as Jira, Git, Jenkins and test automation tools. It also has a software-as-a-service (SaaS) capability that eliminates future software upgrades, or can be deployed on-premise or in a hybrid on/off premise setup.

Octane provides the necessary enterprise visibility required by QA Managers, aligns with Agile methods in value streams, and enables the necessary levels of governance across the delivery lifecycle. Quality management, security, and audit functions must have the assurance of end-to-end compliance, up- and down-stream traceability, visibility, and real-time dashboard aggregation and reporting, regardless of methods, frameworks and toolsets employed.

Octane delivers all of this and more at enterprise scale.

Octane tracks the status and health of the delivery pipeline across value streams, including changes and code vulnerabilities, and commits to user stories and defects. It connects Agile (optimised) and non-Agile (traditional) teams in one unified view, supporting roles and permissions for stakeholders, product owners, Scrum Masters, QA managers, and team members.

Micro Focus and Planit, global leaders in quality engineering and assurance, provide a customer-centric, bimodal transformation solution from QC to Octane. This partnership enables customers to retain and reuse traditional ALM and compliance practices, while evolving to Micro Focus Octane for newer, Agile methods and frameworks, enterprise level governance and migration of assets across landscapes.

As shown in Gartner’s Bimodal IT diagram, organisations are transforming from horizontal (predictable) to vertical (Agile)

As shown in Gartner’s Bimodal IT diagram, organisations are transforming from horizontal (predictable) to vertical (Agile). This means each team must have the tools they need to deliver quality software. Octane offers one place where results from all test types are visible and traceable, regardless of tools employed.

Micro Focus Octane, together with Planit’s global reputation for quality leadership and excellence, deliver enterprise visibility, continued regulatory compliance, and improved capability. This low risk, low cost, proven solution also supports NWOW required to deliver software at speed and scale without constraining value stream software delivery.

To request a demo or risk-free trial, contact us today.

Steve Norton

Practice Director - DevOps

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