Automation in the software development value chain involves the automation of tasks that were in the past performed manually.
This slowed down the software development and release process and introduced multiple points of failure due to the potential for human error. Automating this process involves using automation tools to replace manual processes with automated ‘machine driven’ processing to better test new software releases and enable faster delivery. This eliminates the possibility of human error from the value chain and enables an exponentially larger amount of testing to be done prior to software being released.
The Value to the Business
The business is continually frustrated with the delay in translating a new business idea into IT deliverables. This tends to be prone to delays and quality problems such that in this fast-moving world, once the software is delivered, the business need has moved on. Automation can help the business:
- Realistic prototyping of new applications.
- Faster delivery of new applications.
- More frequent releases of existing applications.
- Better quality releases overall.
All at lower cost
How Ostia can Help
The main bottleneck in the automation process is the availability of back office, legacy systems. These are generally large, complex and rare as they are expensive to set up and maintain. Using Ostia’s Portus EVS technology, organizations create sandbox simulations of back office systems. These simulations replicate the functionality of the back-office systems eliminating the bottleneck described above:
- Exact simulation of your back-office systems.
- Full process simulation for testing of individual systems and the full value chain.
- Synthetic data that is real but relates to no real person and is thus fully GDPR compliant.
- Persona based data generation so real account activity can be simulated in the sandbox.
The sandboxes facilitate all of the automation concepts discussed today including ‘shift left’, ‘continuous integration, ‘continuous testing’.The sandboxes contain no production data and no connectivity to real systems. This means they can safely be run in the Cloud offering further savings that Cloud usage brings.
