Enterprise Devops

HIstorical Development

Organisations have a number of competing motivations: speed, delivery, compliance risk, security and stability. An organisation needs to be able to deliver software changes frequently while maintaining availability for the end-user.

Previous approaches to IT deployments emphasise a strict separation between Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops), resulting in a choice between delivery or stability. A business can either focus on delivering consistent software changes but sacrifice stability, or it can preference stability but slow down the implementation of software updates. The process of migrating changes through the development, testing and deployment cycles can further impact delivery and stability.

Traditional Enterpise Development includes long cycles of development, tests, manual test plans, deployment plans and many other artifacts of development that are  manual, error prone and potentially risky.   

The Shift to DevOps

DevOps has been proven to increase the speed, efficiency and quality of software delivery as well as improving staff morale and motivation.

DevOps delivers applications in a consistent fashion and removes the mistakes and anomalies that human beings can create. As the burden of manual work is removed from staff members, they are then able to focus on the core work that delivers real value to an organisation.

ExaOps improves the speed and quality of both development and the development/release cycle by providing tools that make the DevOps functions for Enterprise Software straightforward to deploy and implement, saving months of DevOps implementation time.

The tools provided by ExaOps extract the components of an Enterprise system such as Elite 3E or Aderant Expert: the Forms, Reports, code, XML and JSON configuration.  After extracting these elements, it is then possible to integrate them into a source control management solution or underlying Devops system.

The benefits of ExaOps for Enterprise Devops include:

• Source Governance – A single source control system for all code content regardless of the storage location. While the Enterprise system (such as Elite 3E) stores versions of content, this internal versioning system is not integrated into a standard source control tool such as Git.  ExaOps enables deep extraction of all changes from multiple systems and integrates them into the normal, organisational source control repository.
• Easy views of changes, even binary files – Code is easy to include in a Git repository, however, some of the contents of common Enterprise Systems are binary.  Microsoft Word templates, for example, are translated into multiple textual representations, each of which represents an intuitive view of the Word file.
• Deep Extraction of change contents – Enterprise systems typically store their “software” and definitions using a combination of Microsoft Word documents, Templates, Code, Forms, and Reports. ExaOps’s software extracts all changes and presents them in an easy to follow, step-by-step overview of the modifications.
• Build Automation – Continuous Integration (CI) tools.  Obtain code from Git, or confirm that the Git copy is correct and up-to-date.  Compile this code into a deployable unit
• Unit Test Frameworks – Unit test frameworks covering everything from code unit tests, document generation tests, report tests (Power BI, SSRS, Elite 3E EDG and others), load tests
• Deployment Automation – Continuous Deployment (CD) tools for supported ExaOps Connectors.  Automatically deploy a compiled and built deployment unit to another environment (such as test, production)
• Monitoring – Each ExaOps Connector includes a monitoring capability that periodically monitors the target system and ensures that the System is operating within parameters