An airline is supposed to make the experience of booking a flight easy, trouble free, and reliable. But when scheduling software breaks down and flights get canceled, customers will walk, and heads will roll. That's what Leigh Freemark faces the day she and her team launch a software upgrade that fails spectacularly and hits the media immediately. As Senior Director of Quality Assurance, her job is to make sure that code is market ready. And she's the one who must face the music when it doesn't. Tasked by senior management to find and fix the source of the failure, Leigh discovers just how essential it has become to radically improve the process of software development by introducing a concept called continuous testing. She must quickly learn what it means, how it works, and how to build it into her company's legacy system. But she soon discovers that managing change is much more difficult than it first appears. The airline business is changing fast, yet old traditions and loyalties still dominate. As she fights to convince her team to change or perish, she discovers that obstructions and opportunities come in surprising forms. *** In The Kitty Hawk Venture, the authors deliver a sound lesson in the importance of continuous testing while taking the reader inside the world of commercial aviation. Each chapter delivers distinct and vital learning opportunities wrapped inside a fast-moving narrative complete with interesting characters, intriguing situations, and even some humor. The book concludes with a "Flight Plan for Continuous Testing" that stands on its own as a valuable resource guide for digital leaders in their continuous testing journey. The story is immediately relatable to anyone who has worked in software development or for the companies that rely on it. Who This Book Is For C-level executives, VPs of apps and quality, VPs of DevOps, architecture and strategy managers, and SMB and enterprise professionals

Learn to design, implement, measure, and improve DevOps programs that are tailored to your organization. This concise guide assists leaders who are accountable for the rapid development of high-quality software applications. In DevOps for Digital Leaders, deep collective experience on both sides of the dev-ops divide informs the global thought leadership and penetrating insights of the authors, all three of whom are cross-portfolio DevOps leaders at CA Technologies. Aruna Ravichandran, Kieran Taylor, and Peter Waterhouse analyze the organizational benefits, costs, freedoms, and constraints of DevOps. They chart the coordinated strategy of organizational change, metrics, lean thinking, and investment that an enterprise must undertake to realize the full potential of DevOps and reach the sweet spot where accelerating code deployments drive increasing customer satisfaction, revenue, and profitability. Digital leaders are charged to bridge the dev-ops disconnect if their organizations are to survive and flourish in a business world increasingly differentiated by the degree to which dynamic application software development harmonizes with operational resilience and reliability. This short book applies the DevOps perspective to the competitive challenge, faced by every high-performance IT organization today, of integrating and automating open source, cloud, and enterprise tools, processes, and techniques across the software development life cycle from requirements to release. What You Will Learn: Remove dependencies and constraints so that parallel practices can accelerate the development of defect-free software Automate continuous delivery across the software life cycle to eliminate release bottlenecks, manual labor waste, and technical debt accumulation Generate virtualized production-style testing of applications through real-time behavioral analytics Adopt agile practices so operations teams can support developer productivity with automated feedback, streamline infrastructure monitoring, spot and resolve operations issues before they impact production, and improve customer experience Identify the DevOps metrics appropriate to your organization and integrate DevOps with your existing best practices and investment Who This Book Is For: IT leaders in large companies and government agencies who have any level of responsibility for the rapid development of high-quality software applications. The secondary readership is members of development and operations teams, security professionals, and service managers.