In this interview, Naga Jayadev of CA Technologies digs into continuous delivery, continuous testing, DevOps, and virtualization. He explains what he does at CA Technologies, the trends when it comes to testing, and the value of velocity within your development lifecycle.
Jennifer Bonine: All right. We are back with another virtual interview, and we have Naga with us. Naga, thank you for joining us.
Naga Jayadev: Welcome.
Jennifer Bonine: You come to us from CA, correct?
Naga Jayadev: I do.
Jennifer Bonine: Perfect. For those out there aren't familiar with your background, maybe give them a little context around your background and then we can maybe dive into that world of service virtualization, because I know a lot of people want to hear about that and where it's at. Tell us a little bit about your background.
Naga Jayadev: Yeah. I am the chief technologist for our continuous delivery business unit at CA. My goal is to help organizations on their digital transformation. This is about how can we lead into DevOps and make things more efficient, better quality, more resilient, and so on. We have ways we can plug-ins to the continuous delivery pipeline and look into things like continuous quality, continuous testing, continuous virtualization and so on. How does that manifest itself across the supply chain of your daily delivery cycle. That's my goal.
Jennifer Bonine: Interesting question for you. We hear about continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment, right? You talked about continuous delivery. How are you seeing the adoption, or are you seeing the adoption and where, maybe, for a continuous deployment?
Naga Jayadev: Yup. There is. There is continuous deployment, just to separate that from continuous release. Deployment could be dev to test, test to stage, and so and so. The idea is how do you deploy frequently what are the inhibitors for you to stopping you from making sure that you have a continuous integration and continuous deployments cycles, right? Which is why service virtualization fits in.
The idea is how I can make sure ... If you look at a pipeline. I look at a manufacturing line and things move along and you don't want the line to stop. We're looking at things that are saying, "What are the big rocks that are making my line to stop?" What is stopping this manufacturing line from tuning out things at an efficient way?
When you look at deployment and the frequent releases that go on, virtualization is addressing a part of what is saying is if something stops me from doing my daily job, how can I make sure that that keeps moving on a day-to-day basis?
Jennifer Bonine: Do you think it's a good idea for organizations out there as one of the starting points, to take a look just at that pipeline and understand what those rocks are? If they have rocks and where they exist, just to map it out and understand that, and understand then how you plug in some of the things like service virtualization to maybe remove or speedup that whole entire process.
Naga Jayadev: I get asked this questions quite a lot: "Where do I start? How do I get into this journey?" Some of it you absolutely have to take a look at, because there's many things that can help you accelerate your development and testing. You want to take a look back and say, "What are my ..." There's a low-hanging fruit, or the biggest pain you have, or what's going to make the biggest impact? It could be test automation, it could deployments. It could be any one of those things.
It's a very good idea to take a look at your pipeline, or your manufacturing line, and see where those hurdles are and which one you need to address first.
Jennifer Bonine: Yeah. Would you say in terms of ... Here at the conference, you guys are obviously talking to a lot of people, lots of different organizations. If you were to say these industries are bleeding edge, get this concept, and then where we're seeing folks just starting to pick it up. Are there any trends around where companies are at, or organizations based on what they focus on, or what their area of expertise is?
Naga Jayadev: I think there's always a trend in anything you do today. There is a trend, but I think that trend is narrowing. I think it's getting more generic across different verticals. There used to be a time, I think, six, seven years ago, when we talked about service virtualization. It was the more financial based companies and so on. As time went by, you're now starting to see even manufacturing smaller organizations take this adoption off. How do I make sure ... Where do I fit into DevOps? How does testing and virtualization and all fit in? I think it's getting more cohesive as time goes by, but there's definitely a trend in the industry.
Jennifer Bonine: I think that's interesting to hear you say that too. We talked to another individual yesterday that was saying something similar, which was in the last two years, the question was, "Ooh! Should I do this? Do I need to do DevOps? Do I need to do service virtualization," and some of those organization still say, "Is this something I need?" This year, it seems like it's starting to turn where people are going, "I need this. I need that." No matter the size, no matter what industry I'm in, they've turned the corner and said, "This is now something we need, and then I need to figure out how to interject that into what I'm doing today and how it fits in for me."
Naga Jayadev: Yeah. I'll give you an example, and I use this analogy quite a lot. When ... How Boeing builds a plane.
Jennifer Bonine: Yes.
Naga Jayadev: Imagine if Boeing built a plane like the way we build software today. If we build the fuselage, the wings, the engine, and we say, "We got to test it out." Would you want to be the pilot on that first flight when we've not tested anything and we try to fly the plane? You don't, right? We can't fly the plane and say, "Let's go replace the pilot if it failed."
We, unfortunately, do that in software today. One of the ways to look at a small piece of the puzzle is to say, "Let's take a look at how Boeing is building the plane." They build the fuselage, they test it in a wind tunnel. The fuselage is tested in isolation in a wind tunnel to make sure that that performs very well against the specifications it’s got.
It's got integrations with the wings, and the engines, and all that, but each of these components are tested individually, put together, and then you run the test. What are the chances of failing that first time? It's very low. You don't see Boeing's flights fail in their first test. There might be some problems, but those problems are discovered in that isolation testing.
Our goal is to decouple all of these components and test everything in isolation in a wind tunnel. That is where service virtualization fits in. Again, this is one of the small pillars of continuous delivery in DevOps to say, "How do I bring this in into my strategy of making sure my software is of high quality and I can deliver it faster?"
Jennifer Bonine: Right. Really shifting that mindset of now, in that wind tunnel, so to speak, if we're using that analogy. You're finding the big rocks. You're finding the big things that are going to be hurdles to success.
Naga Jayadev: Exactly. Yes.
Jennifer Bonine: Where it used to be, when we would, like you said, assemble the whole thing together, at the end we test it. You don't want to find those big hurdles once you're in the air. You want to find those upfront.
Naga Jayadev: Absolutely.
Jennifer Bonine: Shifting everything farther to that left side, finding the big things in your integration, last test, you should be finding very small things by that time. It should be minor tweaks that you're having to make.
Naga Jayadev: Exactly. Right. The whole concept is you get asked this at many time, "If you have a super power, what do you want to be?" Most people would say, "I want to be invisible." Correct? I think of service virtualization as an invisible morphing ability, because you say, "I can be anything, and I can do anything." It can mimic that behavior and be anything anywhere.
Whether you're putting your applications in the cloud, whether you have an on-print solution, you basically have an invisible morphing ability to mimic anything you want that helps you, again, accelerate all of your development and testing cycles.
Jennifer Bonine: Yeah, that capability. We're almost out of time. For folks out there who are saying, "This sounds awesome. I'm getting it." Because I think one of the hurdles sometimes is the conceptual, taking it from conceptual to practice and how do I take it from, "I get that it sounds good in theory, but how do I actually put it in my organization."
If people are struggling with how to get started, want some more information on how this would work in their organization, what's the best way to contact you guys, get in touch, and get more information on how to do this?
Naga Jayadev: Absolutely. I think if they go to ca.com and search for continuous delivery, there's the whole ... Our cookbook on how we can help you make successful over there. Another great website is also servicevirtualization.com. It's got a lot of information about how to get started, how to increase adoption, how to go across these roadblocks, and so on.
Jennifer Bonine: Great. A couple of good resources for the folks out there to take a look at. Thank you so much for being here with us, and I hope you all reach out and get some more information.
Naga Jayadev: All right. Thank you.
Jennifer Bonine: Thank you.
Naga is the chief technologist for the Continuous Delivery and Advisory Services Sales teams at CA Technologies, across the Western United States. He leads his organization with the vision of DevOps and continuous delivery for help transforming enterprise businesses in their digital transformation journey. Helping large enterprises embrace innovative software philosophies into their process to gain efficiency, quality and stability, and helping them understand the business value and its ROI.
