The updated versions of HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and HP Performance Center (PC) enable organizations to drive enterprise innovation through the continuous delivery of applications with new Lab Management Automation and Continuous Application Performance Delivery features.
Organizations are under continuous pressure to deliver innovative applications that drive results. At the same time, organizations need their applications to adapt to changing needs throughout their life cycle. For example, application performance may change as users interact with applications in the cloud or on mobile devices.
To achieve the continuous delivery of high-quality applications, organizations are adopting DevOps, a set of software delivery practices that stress better communication and collaboration between application development, testing, infrastructure and operations teams. DevOps helps unify IT silos through a set of common standards and automation practices, enabling continuous delivery of applications and services that adapt to changing enterprise needs.
Better visibility to deliver high-quality applications
To improve executive visibility into the application development life cycle, HP is introducing enhancements to the HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) 11.5 platform. The new offering provides preconfigured reports with ongoing information about application progress. In addition, HP ALM 11.5 is integrated with HP Enterprise Collaboration software, which enables social media style, context-based conversations between key stakeholders across the application life cycle. With this new offering, clients can:
- Make faster and more accurate decisions through better collaboration among application delivery teams. Teams can now work together on requirements, create RSS feed alerts and support progress discussions on development status, test runs and defects.
- Improve developer efficiency with the enhanced HP Application Lifecycle Intelligence 2.6, a key component of HP ALM that adds support for Git—an open-source version control system—and source-code management software, in addition to existing development tools and integrations.
DevOps collaboration to improve application quality
The new HP Performance Center (PC) 11.5 software for application performance testing improves application quality prior to release with Continuous Application Performance Delivery. This new feature enables operations and testing teams to share real-time performance data for use in application performance testing scripts. In addition, clients can:
- Identify and diagnose potential performance bottlenecks by importing production monitoring data from HP Business Service Management software and third-party tools.
- Further accelerate test configuration by importing application monitoring metrics from HP SiteScope.
HP also is introducing HP Lab Management Automation for HP ALM 11.5 and HP PC 11.5. The feature accelerates the deployment of high-quality applications by automating the configuration of testing environments to align with real-world scenarios, such as private and hybrid clouds. This helps ensure the desired performance, functionality and security of applications prior to production.
HP Software Professional Services for Application Lifecycle Management provides consulting, upgrade and implementation services to shorten time to business value for DevOps based on HP ALM 11.5. The new Lab Management Foundation Service enables organizations to accelerate application testing while maintaining application quality. These services automate the deployment and provisioning of test environments and the scheduling of test execution.
“Application innovation is hindered by the silos that exist between development, testing and operations teams, leading to delays, missed opportunities and potential application defects,” said Mike Ng, general manager, Software, HP South-east Asia. “By integrating information and processes from IT operations into application life cycle management, HP provides a critical foundation for DevOps, enabling organizations to drive business results through the continuous delivery of innovative applications.”
Improving application testing through simpler, faster scripting
With new test capabilities designed to support continuous testing to simplify and speed application testing, HP also is introducing enhanced testing solutions:
- Simplified scripting process and reduced time to create load testing scripts with HP LoadRunner 11.5 load testing solution that includes the new Virtual User Generator (VUGen) script editor. In addition, the updated offering supports testing for Internet Explorer 9 browser, HTML5 mark-up language, 64-bit computing environments and IPv6.
- Faster and more efficient manual testing with HP Sprinter manual testing solution that automates recurring test scripts for ongoing use. HP Sprinter delivers new scanning capabilities that eliminate laborious manual activities, such as spell checking and ensuring compliance with localization. This enables testers to focus on new testing methodologies rather than administrative tasks.
“Quickly processing high volumes of mortgage applications is critical to our business success,” said Andy Nightingale, performance automation lead, Fidelity National Financial. “HP LoadRunner’s unmatched load testing scale enables Fidelity National Financial to rapidly identify performance bottlenecks before an application is released into production, preventing costly post-deployment issues.”
HP Application Lifecycle Management solutions are key components of the HP IT Performance Suite, the next-generation enterprise performance software platform that enables IT management to improve performance with operational intelligence.
Additional information about HP DevOps offerings is available at www.hp.com/go/DevOps. Additional information about HP Application Lifecycle Management offerings is available at www.hp.com/go/ALM.