HP has poured additional resources into its Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Performance Center products with a strong emphasis on DevOps collaboration. With a call to each of the development, testing, infrastructure, and operations teams, HP's message is continuous application delivery but with a caveat for continuous application performance monitoring.
Application performance may change as users interact with applications in the cloud or on mobile devices, says the company. The recently coined portmanteau term of DevOps (development and operations) is used here to explain why we need to move away from old school "IT silos" and start to develop a set of common standards and automation practices.
The HP Application Lifecycle Management 11.5 platform now comes with preconfigured reports to detail ongoing information about application progress. The product is also integrated with HP Enterprise Collaboration software, once again emphasizing the teamwork theme with social media style context-based conversations between key stakeholders across the application lifecycle.
Teams can now work together on requirements, create RSS feed alerts and support progress discussions on development status, test runs and defects says the company. Yet more product updates are seen in HP Application Lifecycle Intelligence 2.6 (a component of the company’s wider ALM suite), which now adds support for the Git open-source version control system.
HP Performance Center 11.5 is boosted with continuous application performance tools to provide real-time performance data for use in application performance testing scripts. Developers can further accelerate test configuration by importing application monitoring metrics from HP SiteScope software.
HP also is introducing HP Lab Management Automation for HP ALM 11.5 and HP PC 11.5. "The feature accelerates the deployment of high-quality applications by automating the configuration of testing environments to align with real-world scenarios, such as private and hybrid clouds. This helps ensure the desired performance, functionality, and security of applications prior to production," said Subbu Iyer, vice president, product and strategy, applications, software, HP.
"By integrating information and processes from IT operations into application lifecycle management, HP provides a critical foundation for DevOps, enabling organizations to drive business results through the continuous delivery of innovative applications," he added.
Additionally, HP is introducing enhanced testing solutions to support continuous testing in the form of HP LoadRunner 11.5, which now supports testing for Internet Explorer 9 browser, HTML5 mark-up language, 64-bit computing environments, and IPv6. Also in this category is HP Sprinter, a manual testing solution that automates recurring test scripts for ongoing use.
