DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration and Continuous Testing are no longer just methodologies and development strategies — they’re all a part of a growing economy within the tech industry.
Great Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies such as Chef, Docker and New Relic have done an amazing job of spotting the trends early and building their tools and services around a new wave of development processes. Chef and Docker alone have reportedly raised nearly $250 million, and New Relic went public in 2014.
In fact, this very website is another example of how impactful these new development practices are — as several specialized news outlets have been born out of these revolutionary development strategies. So, not only has the DevOps methodology helped developers create better products, faster; but the process has opened opportunities for technical experts to share their experiences on sites like this, e-books, webinars, conferences and any other way people communicate.
On DevOps.com, you’ll see the best articles on the web discussing how DevOps is defined in different organizations, why Fortune-500 companies are shifting old practices toward CD and the best practices of CI from industry experts.
In the race to be the most DevOps-friendly solution — no matter the niche — hundreds of startups have been founded and funded, which has only enhanced the toolboxes of thousands of developers. You’d be hard-pressed to find a good SaaS company that doesn’t offer integration with Jenkins CI, TeamCity or Chef, and that’s because not only should a SaaS product solve an important problem, but it should have minimum disruption of your current development process.
With all that in mind, Continuous Testing is one of the most exciting spaces in technology today. Continuous Testing is a process that aims to synchronize testing and QA with dev and ops, which ultimately yields better products more quickly.
There are several factors that make Continuous Testing successful in a team’s software development lifecycle — such as open-source collaboration solutions, test automation APIs and tools to track the historic performance of applications .
With the release of Load Impact Version 3.0, the global performance and load testing SaaS company has announced its latest feature that fits right in with the DevOps mindset: Performance trending.
Performance trending allows users to plot runs of the same test over time. That gives companies a clear view into data that locates patterns of performance degradation or improvement in order to easily validate code and infrastructure changes.
In the spirit of Continuous Testing, DevOps, CD and CI — performance trending improves users’ ability to gain both a low-level and high-level view into the performance of their systems. And with the increased number of tests run by DevOps professionals, performance trending yields valuable information for companies concerned with their application performance — which should be everyone.
Between DevOps.com and plenty of great conferences and meetups around the world, it’s safe to say this economy of DevOps-minded tools will only continue to grow in the coming years.
