Room
Room F3 - Track 3: Talks
Audience
Testers, Managers, Operations
Key-Learning
- Understand the necessity of having an adoption process for technology.
- Identify the challenges in implementing an adoption process for technology.
- Identify the tools that can help building this process.
- Identify the advantages and real impact of having such a process in place.
- Check a real example on how it was implemented in a company that was growing.
It does not matter if you are adopting agile practices or shaping into devops mentality, at the end of the day you will need tools that support those changes. What most of us forget is that adopting new tools comes with a price (and I'm not talking about money).
Have you stopped to consider if you have the expertise to run and maintain this tool? Have you looked if this tool complies with the best practices and standards your company has defined (security, performance, logging)? Do you know if your company has such standards? Do you know what tools are already being used in your company? Do you know how well it will integrate with your processes and other tools?
I was caught in this avalanche and it was not pretty! New tools adopted from security teams that require knowledge to use and that did not integrate with the rest of the process (a lot of manual steps required), testing tools that did not produce enough details or have visibility over reports to find issues. New frameworks from development teams that did not have official releases and were still buggy and hard to maintain and the list goes on and on…
The company was growing and had to make sure some rules was applied due to PCI compliance requirements, performance was introducing new tools that everyone should use but that implied a lot of manual labor, operations team was not happy to be the last to know about these new tools and now they needed to make sure that they work in production. All this diversity also has increased the maintenance of environments as we needed to ensure that patches and updates were updated in all environments and we all know that more tools means more failure points in your processes. In order to stop it we needed to collaborate and define an adoption process for tools that materialize as a Technology Radar available for everyone.
Who to involve in the effort of creating the Technology Radar? What are the minimal requirements each tool needs to comply with to be accepted into the process? What are the different stages of adoption until the tools are accepted as new and viable for the company? I want to share our approach and answers to all the above questions that we have experienced during the definition/adoption of the process.