Value Stream Management

IBM UrbanCode Velocity (now DevOps Velocity) is an award-winning DevOps tool that provides management, governance and data for the software development and delivery process. Through the use of artificial intelligence and data analytics, UrbanCode Velocity can improve software delivery speed and quality, acting as a control center for an application development team. Today’s topic is the Value Stream Management capability in IBM UrbanCode Velocity.

DevOps Day-2

UrbanCode Velocity is a DevOps Day-2 tool, which means it’s appropriate to use after Day-1 automation is in place and working well. Day-1 automation consists of the tools and processes that were implemented by most organizations to help with Agile development, a movement that started in the early 2000’s, has seen many iterations (pun intended) and has been adopted by most software development teams today. Alongside the Agile movement, DevOps was spawned, to address rising infrastructure and operations needs due to the speed with which Agile teams were coding. DevOps unites the Development and IT Operations team to get software deployed, tested and released faster. IBM provides several DevOps tools today, which are widely adopted and acknowledged by analysts to be among the best.

Velocity, as a DevOps Day-2 tool, pulls data from the existing automation to generate insights that point to ways for optimizing the software delivery process. Velocity also provides management and governance over the release process.

Value Stream Management

The insights part of what Velocity provides is called Value Stream Management (VSM).  A useful analogy is to imagine that VSM is like a drone flying over a manufacturing floor where multiple teams are working on various parts of a product that ultimately gets assembled and pushed out. Like a car or a computer, or a piece of furniture. Only the drone has a bird’s eye perspective to ingest a lot of visual information that could lead to improvements in speed and quality. The drone can see where work piles up due to inefficient handoffs, too few workers or a problem with the workflow. The drone might also identify efficient and effective workflows that should be shared with other teams on the floor. The data transmitted by a drone would be high-level, with few details.

A smooth-running factory floor will make products faster and better (provided the right quality checks are part of the process). Likewise, a smooth-running software delivery process will have the same benefits: faster, better products. But that’s not all. A smooth-running system has the extra benefit of making life better for workers. In an economy where employee satisfaction is a major concern for most organizations, especially for skilled software developers, a predictable, reliable, smooth running software delivery process will go a long way to ensure employee retention.

The VSM capability in UrbanCode Velocity ingests data from various software development tools in the software delivery pipeline to provide insights into where the delivery process is experiencing bottlenecks,  which code changes are behind schedule, and which teams and devs are overloaded. Armed with this information, a self-organizing appdev team can rebalance, make adjustments and refine handoffs to optimize throughput and maintain a happy team.

The data Velocity uses to provide reports, visualizations and alerts comes from the software delivery work itself. Velocity pulls data from the collaboration, development, build, delivery, test and deployment tools that make up the software delivery toolchain.  The “fly over” Velocity does for the software delivery process provides much more granular data than a drone could. As you will see in the video.

 Demonstration

In the video you are about to see, Daniel Cappon, a DevOps specialist, will take you through the Value Stream Management of IBM UrbanCode Velocity to show how this DevOps tool can be adopted by software delivery teams to optimize what they have already automated.  

Speaker– Daniel Cappon, IBM DevOps Technical Specialist

Learn more here about IBM DevOps Velocity and Value Stream Management. 


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