Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) OctaneFrequently Asked QuestionsMarch 2018

Fugitiure rese et ea imporem veruptia is vellatquo?The Digital Economy Is Redefining Business Innovation—An IntroductionOrganizations across the globe are having to transform the way they de-velop and use software to deliver their business value through a highly Agile set of business services, coupled with an amazing digital user experience. The need to provide continuous value and a compelling digital user experience across the Web and mobile is driving businesses to press IT for new levels of speed, quality, and scale in the way they deliver software.

Teams are looking to transform and scale their application delivery faster with quality but the software tools used to manage software de-livery need to adapt to these processes while supporting mature and legacy processes such as waterfall and iterative delivery. We are seeing widespread demand for a new generation of application lifecycle and quality management software optimized for Lean, Agile, and DevOps.

It is here that we introduce the Micro Focus Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Octane solution, and have prepared these top ten questions for you to understand the value and use of ALM Octane.

What is ALM Octane?Micro Focus is announcing a new ALM and quality management soft-ware experience that is provided as part of our ALM and Micro Focus

Quality Center (QC) SKU. This new software is architected to enable teams to deliver software with speed, quality, and scale.

What customer problems does ALM Octane solve?Lean, Agile, and DevOps application delivery processes are proving their ability for application development and testing teams, which de-liver applications faster. But the software tools these teams use today to manage software delivery must also transform to support these pro-cesses. We are seeing widespread demand for a new generation of ap-plication lifecycle and quality management software tools. These tools are not only optimized for Lean, Agile, and DevOps but also support mature and legacy processes such as waterfall and iterative delivery. ALM Octane is purpose-built for this challenge.

Gartner research developed the concept of bimodal IT where teams adopt different application development lifecycle processes to fit the business demands and architectural constraints of their applications. Mode 1 projects tend to run systems of record, change less frequently, and often fall under heavy compliance constraints. Mode 2 projects tend to be fluid in nature, change frequently, and tend to be architected for change using service-oriented approaches. Mode 2 projects are often customer facing and require responsive design.

FAQApplication Development, Test & Delivery

Figure 1. ALM Octane user interface

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ALM Octane Supports Bimodal IT and All Lifecycle Processes from Waterfall to DevOpsIT organizations with a myriad of application development projects are inherently bi-model or even multi-model, as they have a variety of projects with varying business requirements. Some projects demand speed and agility to keep an ever-impatient consumer satisfied with an amazing digital experience. Other projects support the highly reliable backbone of running business operations and they are heavily gov-erned. These different needs drive IT application development and test-ing teams to processes that optimize the outcome. ALM, now powered with ALM Octane, is designed to offer teams the choice and flexibility to manage their traditional waterfall and iterative processes, along with Agile, Lean, and continuous development methodologies aligned to the different modes of IT.

ALM Octane Ensures Continuous Testing and Quality to Deliver an Amazing User ExperienceWhat is unique in the market today? It’s ALM Octane that is designed to support a holistic, quality-driven approach to any lifecycle methodol-ogy. It enables insightful analytics delivered continually by integrating development, testing, and production systems with open RESTful APIs. ALM Octane establishes and manages relationships that help to plan, design, build, test, and deliver throughout the lifecycle.

Modern quality is at the core of ALM Octane. End-to-end quality insights are provided throughout the delivery process, for example, constantly provided during the Continuous Integration (CI) process, starting from developers with unit testing, QA teams with manual, business-driven development (BDD) testing, functional testing, and integration tests.

ALM Octane supports this fully integrated CI and testing pipeline. The capture and availability of continuous insights regarding quality allows customers to deliver applications faster and helps meet the business-driven needs for high quality and an amazing digital user experience.

What Are the Main Benefits of ALM Octane?ALM Octane offers three core customer benefits around speed, qual-ity, and scale. This helps customers deliver amazing apps fast without compromising the quality and digital user experience.

Speed ■ ALM Octane immediately adds value on top of widely adopted

open source developer and collaboration tools. Teams have embraced Agile development practices using powerful Git version control and management as well as Jenkins build and CI systems. ALM Octane expands their value by managing plans, tests, and defect assets and versions, which greatly increases visibility by linking testing and defects organically to Agile backlog priorities and developer activity (source code commits and changes).

Quality ■ ALM Octane implements continuous quality in DevOps software

delivery. It is designed for fast-moving application development and test teams adopting CI for DevOps. Test execution is intrinsically linked to CI and results are automatically available in smart quality and defect management, and tracking capabilities are available in an intuitive user experience. In addition, ALM supports “#ChatOps” via an integration with Slack to support faster resolution of issues.Figure 2. ALM Octane dashboard

Figure 3. ALM Octane backlog

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Scale ■ ALM Octane is designed for transformative hybrid infrastructure.

Organizations are rapidly adopting scalable and highly efficient hybrid cloud, service-oriented, and containerized architectures. ALM Octane is architected for this transformation, provisioned as a service, or as a solution packaged for quick implementation in Docker containers. When you are looking for scale, ALM Octane is designed intrinsically for hybrid cloud—to run as SaaS managed by Micro Focus or on HPE Helion.

What Unique Value Does ALM Octane Bring?ALM Octane is the first and only ALM software suite built to support multimodal IT for speed and quality (Mode 1, Mode 2, and shades in between). With a DevOps-ready approach and a complementary hybrid application lifecycle management capability, ALM Octane leverages quality and testing execution, as well as continuous delivery of insights throughout the lifecycle. Breakthrough and noteworthy innovations in-clude test creation and planning, execution, analytics, and tracking build in and on top of Jenkins. It also leverages management of test and code with an embedded Git at the core. ALM Octane is the industry’s first full realization of continuous quality management in a DevOps pipeline.

In addition, ALM Octane continuously captures, tracks, and manages relationships between application components and their progress through DevOps pipelines—builds, tests and test runs, and defects—while providing an intuitive view to what matters at all times. In a DevOps environment, the sheer speed and scale of lifecycle activities and the impact of change can easily overwhelm manual processes and static reporting. ALM Octane cuts through the noise and delivers insights at all times.

Figure 3. ALM Octane defects

Figure 5. ALM Octane application modules

Figure 6. Micro Focus Transformation Areas

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What Roles Does ALM Octane Play as Part of the Micro Focus Transformation Areas (TA)?ALM Octane’s bimodal approach to application lifecycle management facilitates transformation to a hybrid infrastructure, as customers often need to manage application delivery and application evolution against a spectrum of business demands. Fluid IT systems tend to require elastic infrastructure such as what is available in the public cloud whereas core IT often have rigorous compliance and high availability (HA) demands, requiring a private cloud approach.

ALM Octane is a key enabler when customers transform from tradi-tional IT infrastructure and processes to make use of infrastructure and processes that are fast, nimble, and responsive. Applications are part of this transformation. Testing and application modernization are key requirements to ensure the applications that the business depends on continue to run well and deliver a great user experience. ALM Octane provides application lifecycle management and constant visibility to manage the high-quality transition of applications from traditional to hybrid infrastructure.

ALM Octane extends ALM support to application delivery projects of all styles—from traditional IT sequential and waterfall projects to Agile and DevOps projects that are rapid, lean, and exploratory. As such, ALM Octane is a key toolset to help IT teams migrate application workloads to an automated and orchestrated hybrid IT environment seamlessly.

How Does ALM Octane Support DevOps Today?ALM Octane is designed to promote fast delivery by supporting the work processes and toolsets for Agile, DevOps-ready teams. These tools sets are, for example, a CI tool, CI-embedded test automation tools, an application deployment tool, code analysis tools, and pro-duction monitoring tools. With the open architecture of ALM Octane, integration is enabled and optimized. Easily configured business rules and automation guides the process, as data flows between the tools and is aggregated into insights used by the teams for real-time adjust-ments in the DevOps pipeline.

In this initial release, ALM Octane integrates with Jenkins (triggering CI and testing activities, discovering tests, executing test runs, and report-ing results including defects associated with the pipeline build). ALM Octane also embeds Git for manual test script version management. In addition, as DevOps emphasizes speed, teams are rapidly adopting BDD as a proven testing practice to develop tests earlier in the design and development phases of the lifecycle. ALM Octane supports de-veloping tests in the Gherkin framework and managing the versions of

Gherkin tests aligned with pipelines. Gherkin is a proven way to move rapidly from manual testing to test automation as the tests are more easily converted to automated scripts, and test automation is a critical success factor for DevOps.

Three other key capabilities that are core to Octane and highlight its support of DevOps are:

■ ALM Octane business rules that are vital to enforce enterprise business processes in high-speed DevOps environments.

■ ALM Octane also supports integration with “#ChatOps” tools for team collaboration.

■ It also offers rapid issue resolution, which was initially supported by Slack and Hubot.

How Does ALM Octane Add Value To The Widely Available Open Source Tools That Organizations Are Adopting To Drive Their DevOps Processes?We see the value of open source for driving innovation and the wide-spread use of many useful open source tools in DevOps and Agile im-plementations. We have chosen an open architecture for ALM Octane that naturally integrates with widely adopted open source develop-ment tools and adds value to those tools by managing relationships, turning data and activity into insight, and simplifying user experi-ence. ALM Octane provides a public RESTful API to allow integration with other CI and software configuration management (SCM) tools.

Figure 7. ALM Octane pipeline

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ALM Octane immediately supports teams working with Agile develop-ment practices using Git version control and Jenkins build and CI sys-tems. It leverages these tools and expands their value. In ALM Octane, we have tightly integrated a pipeline view, which represents the build pipeline view, and is built upon CI tools such as Jenkins. Each test ex-ecuted as part of the pipeline is linked to a requirement, user story, or a defect, which facilities a comprehensive quality view for each build.

Here are some additional use cases and examples:

In ALM Octane, we embed Git to manage tests. In addition, the offering has added native support for creating Gherkin-based manual tests, which are relevant for teams adopting BDD as part of their Agile user stories.

Another example is outside of ALM Octane but demonstrative of our strategy, where within Micro Focus LeanFT you can use Selenium and LeanFT tests together. If you already have tests in Selenium, you can continue using them, add new tests in LeanFT, and even combine LeanFT capabilities in your existing Selenium tests.

ALM Octane also has open source elastic search integrated not just for searching entities across the lifecycle but also a build trend visualiza-tion and analytics, which help teams compare build history and helps optimize their DevOps pipeline.

Will ALM Octane Co-Exist With QC And ALM, Or Is This the Only Micro Focus Management Tool Going Forward?Micro Focus is fully invested in ALM for all modes of IT. This means we will continue to invest in traditional ALM and QC along with the ALM Octane experience. And as ALM Octane is available with QC and ALM, both will co-exist for anyone who wants to have a choice to manage projects with different needs. In addition, to gain full visibility across different projects and support enterprise Agile and processes such as SAFe, we offer a synchronizer. This allows ALM Octane and current ALM and QC to synchronize data (e.g., requirements and defects) when needed. Over time, the full Agile functionality will become core to ALM Octane as well.

How Is ALM Octane Priced and Packaged?ALM Octane is available to customers on SaaS now. Support for on-premise installation may be available in July. There is a tech preview available now as a Docker container.

Pricing and licensing structure remain the same as for the existing Micro Focus product sets—ALM 12.5 and Quality Center 12.5. Any existing ALM or Quality Center license (on an active support contract) can be either used on the current experience or rolled over for use on ALM Octane. No conversion is required and the customers just need to download the new version.

Same is applicable to SaaS, the pricing for SaaS delivery is the same whether the customer is using ALM in traditional mode or for the ALM Octane experience.

How Do We Get Started With ALM Octane?Customers today can open a trial and evaluate ALM Octane from https://software.microfocus.com/en-us/products/alm-octane/free-trial-beta. Review the feature set and the capabilities that ALM Octane provides. Define application modules, connect your CI, define business rules, establish a backlog, and create manual or BDD tests, as well as run automated tests in the CI pipeline. Analyze defects and see how ALM Octane manages the relationships between build, test, defect, and user story. Next, start exploring within your organization on adopting an ALM Octane project. At the same time, share your thoughts and questions with the ALM team via ALM Octane University.

Figure 8. ALM Octane application modules

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When ready, ALM Octane can be downloaded as a free upgrade to QC and ALM customers, provided they use their current ALM global licenses that are still under maintenance. ALM Octane will run on Linux and requires a Linux machine to be installed on. Requests to support Windows are in planning. In addition, a series of tools and processes will be on hand to help existing customers migrate data into ALM Octane. Depending on their readiness for Agile and DevOps, customers may choose to initiate new projects in ALM Octane or migrate data from existing projects to start operating in ALM Octane.

Learn More Atwww.microfocus.com/alm-octane

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