CA Technologies creates open integration-and-automation backbone for continuous delivery

CA Technologies has announced the availability of CA Release Automation Continuous Delivery Edition, and several new integrations across CA’s DevOps portfolio and third party solutions creating the first integrated, fully automated and open continuous delivery ecosystem. Organisations can now connect and automate the entire app pipeline progression from development, to test, to production, to accelerate deployment times of applications by as much as 20 times* and improve testing efficiency by up to 25%**.

“Continuous delivery is the bedrock of digital transformation and the ability to rapidly and reliably release applications that meet the demands of internal and external customers alike is what makes the difference. However end-to-end automation of continuous delivery can be very challenging and it is critical to have it seamlessly integrate processes and tools especially in today’s application economy,” said Richard Gerdis, VP, DevOps, Asia Pacific & Japan, CA Technologies. 

“Without a purpose-built DevOps integration mainstay, it’s not possible to have the diverse DevOps tools to work together. This results in insufficient visibility in the end-to-end process bottlenecks and wastage of engineering integrations. As such, we’ve created the industry’s first open integration-and-automation backbone for continuous delivery and believe it’s the best solution for accelerating end-to-end DevOps while ensuring effective end-to-end DevOps governance.”

Continuous delivery 

As organisations progress on digital transformation, the volume, velocity and complexity of applications continues to grow. “Businesses no longer have the luxury of time. Rising customer expectations, competitive threats, and increased consumer choice have turned rapid delivery and iteration of software applications into a competitive differentiator. Optimising the delivery value chain has become the new means to better business outcomes,” according to Forrester Research.***

Continuous delivery capabilities can enable organisations to improve release planning and orchestration, use agile testing to test less and cover more, provision data on demand and deploy simulated environments – all with zero-touch workflow. This is accomplished through:

· CA Release Automation Continuous Delivery Edition is a premium module for CA Release Automation that enables zero-touch app progression and deployment. Its analytic capabilities enable DevOps teams to plan, manage, analyse and optimise the continuous delivery pipeline from a single control point.

· CA Agile Requirements Designer (formerly Grid-Tools Agile Designer) integration with CA Agile Central (formerly Rally) automatically creates test cases with maximum test coverage right from the requirements phase.

· CA Test Data Manager (formerly Grid-Tools Data Maker) integration with CA Agile Central reduces test cycle prep time by requesting and reserving test data from within CA Agile Central.

· CA Service Virtualization integration with CA Test Data Manager quickly generates realistic virtual data and injects the data directly into a deployed virtual service to improve the efficiency and quality of testing, while avoiding compliance risks.

· CA Release Automation integration with CA Test Data Manager automates the generation of proper test data based on proper test cases defined for a particular build for a faster, more optimised process.

· CA Application Test integrates with CA Agile Central so that the history of test cases can be viewed by the build number for the pipeline.

· CA Release Automation integration with CA Agile Central takes test results, and based upon the results, deploys to the next environment in the lifecycle.

Integration between CA API Management, CA Service Virtualization and CA Application Test enable development teams to automatically create the virtual services and API tests needed to support the rapid development of composite applications and microservices. Furthermore, to help organisations leverage existing investments, CA’s continuous delivery solutions integrate easily with market tools such as HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Atlassian’s JIRA Software, Jenkins, Docker, Perfecto, Chef and Puppet for an open and fully integrated continuous delivery solution stack.

Interested?

Watch a replay of a recently-held best practices event for application developers titled Automation, Speed and Quality: The Keys to Your Continuous Delivery Journey

*The Total Economic Impact of CA Release Automation, Forrester Research, December 2015

**The Total Economic Impact Of The CA Technologies Test Data Manager Solution, Forrester Research, December 2015

***TechRadar: Continuous Software Delivery, Q2 2015, Forrester Research, May 1, 2015