In the agile era, an untidy assemblage of commercial software suites, open source apps, and custom-built in-house tools has become the norm for most organizations. A recent survey by DevOps.com and Automic found 69 percent of respondents said their tool chain is steadily growing, and 82 percent said many of those are outside of the officially supported tool stack. Full write-up: https://by.dialexa.com/how-to-contain-test-tool-sprawl-on-agile-teams

1. How to Contain Test Tool Sprawl
on Agile Teams
by Doug Platts
https://by.dialexa.com/how-to-contain-test-tool-sprawl-on-agile-teams

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3. In the agile era, an untidy
assemblage of commercial
software suites, open
source apps, and custom-
built in-house tools has
become the norm for most
organizations. A recent
survey by DevOps.com and
Automic found 69 percent
of respondents said their
tool chain is steadily
growing, and 82 percent
said many of those are
outside of the officially
supported tool stack.
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4. As those numbers reveal, "tool
sprawl" is a significant issue,
and odds are your organization
isn't immune. "It’s getting pretty
widespread," said Kelly Emo,
director of application testing
solutions, product and technical
marketing at Micro Focus. "Just
about any large organization
that has faced a significant
digital disruption in the last few
years is going to run into it."
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5. What's behind this troubling
trend? We talked to the experts
to explain how we got tangled
up in tool sprawl and what we
can do to rein it in.
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6. THE TEMPTATION OF MORE TOOLS
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7. In one sense, tool accumulation is a
fact of agile development life. Teams
use multiple tools out of necessity,
requiring specialized solutions for
their particular domain. It's common
for even small companies to have five
to 10 different tools in use, while
more than half of large enterprises
use a whopping 20 or more,
according to the Automic survey. And
with new options becoming available
all the time, teams find it easy to add
to the toolchain as a project
progresses. Many of these tools are
used to solve a particular problem
once and are never used again.
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8. "Every day dozens of new
applications make their way to
the market and engineers are
tempted to try them
all," said Dmytro Sychevsky, a
DevOps team lead at PDFfiller.
"Each of them aims at a specific
problem: You use Pinba when
searching for bottlenecks, New
Relic to check out how your app
works in the user's browser,
Kibana plus ELK Stack to analyze
the issues in your product, or
Zabbix for system monitoring."
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9. "Eventually, you end up
with a massive pile-up of
apps, half of which were
only used once and now
rest in peace—holding up
precious storage capacity.”
—Dmytro Sychevsky
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10. Just as often, it's fealty to a technology rather
than fickleness that drives the accumulation
of tools, said Nilesh Patel, manager of testing
services at KMS Technology.
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11. "People feel more comfortable and effective
when they use tools they have experience
with," he said. "They will request to work with
those tools just because they're comfortable
and don't want to learn a new tool." When this
happens you end up with multiple tools used
by multiple people in the department to do the
same things.
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12. Mergers and acquisitions
also contribute to the
problem. Emo cites a
common scenario where
disruption drives a company
to take on new developers
and technologies, inheriting
new tools along with them.
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13. "Business teams have to respond," Emo said. "'I've got to get a mobile
app because my competitor has a mobile app out, and if I don't have a
better one, my customers are going to go to my competitor.' And so
they're going to boutique development firms, they're hiring out of
college, they're acquiring small Silicon Valley ISVs or ISVs out of
Eastern Europe—and the tools come along for the ride."
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14. To read more you can find the full article at
https://by.dialexa.com/how-to-contain-test-
tool-sprawl-on-agile-teams

15. MORE TOOLS, MORE PROBLEMS
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16. Using a menagerie of tools can introduce
a host of problems into a testing
environment, from functional overlap to
integration difficulties to reporting
inefficiencies to hidden-costs associated
with tools that get abandoned after limited
use—to name just a few. And there's the
simple fact that the more tools you have,
the more complex it is to manage them.
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17. Using more tools means
you have to learn how
to use each of them. To
compound this issue, it
creates a level of "tribal
knowledge" as expertise
accumulates in just a
few people across
various teams, said Rob
Szumski, product
manager at CoreOS.
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18. "Sprawl incurs a large technical
debt around test orchestration.”
- Rob Szumsk
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19. If those knowledge-
holders leave, it creates a
huge issue when it
comes to bringing a
replacement up to speed.
Yes, there will be artifacts
and scripts left behind,
but the guiding principles
for why are easily lost.
"These skills and
knowledge aren't always
transferrable between
teams, as they may touch
on different levels of your
application's stack,”
he added
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20. Dialexa vice
president and
former QA lead
Luke Gordon
warned of the
ultimate impact this
can have on the
organization as a
whole. "Tool sprawl
is a nightmare for
management.”
— Luke Gordon
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21. That's because you have to deal with
licenses, educate team members on how
to use each tool, define processes around
them, and so on, he said. Each tool a
company introduces to its repertoire
decreases the net business value a
company can create and places the focus
on the approach rather than the problems
the company is trying to solve.
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22. "What happens over time is
the financial aspect comes
into play and the CFO says,
'Why are we spending all this
money on these disparate
tools?'" she added. Maybe
they have a situation where a
line of business developed
part of an application that they
now want to integrate with a
different application to expand
their business value and they
can't get them to integrate. Or
they run into a quality issue
because they don't have end-
to-end visibility.
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23. And the questions
arise: "'Why aren't we
using tools that can
integrate together and
give me a common
view and
governance?' It gets
really expensive with
tool sprawl.”
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25. TAMING THE TOOL BOX
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26. If you’re tackling tool sprawl, resist taking an
authoritarian approach, Emo said. "You’re not
going to be successful as a QA leader going into a
business unit saying, 'I am dictating that you have
to use one of these three tools and we need to rip
out your installation of Atlassian and Selenium.'"
— Kelly Emo
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27. Rather, she suggested, QA leaders should start with a
more holistic approach.
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28. First develop a culture of
quality, which is easier said
than done, she said. "It's
engaging in a collaborative
way with the business
leaders to enable them to
see the benefit of a more
disciplined approach to
quality. It's getting them
thinking, 'How do we
engineer for quality in our
processes' rather than 'We'll
just do lean agile, we'll
push things out fast, and if
we run into a problem we
can roll it back.'"
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29. The experts agree that on a tactical level QA
leaders need to start by getting a handle on
exactly what tools are being used across the
organization and evaluating them in terms of
cost, compatibility, ROI, and how much they're
used. Prioritize the top tools, retire the obsolete
and little-used ones, and look for ways to
automate and standardize processes.
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30. This should be a
collaborative undertaking,
said Gordon. "This needs
to be a team focus rather
than just a specific group.
By making this a
collective effort, teams
introduce a sense of
accountability and
ownership in the direction
they move forward."
— Luke Gordon
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31. A sense of accountability on its
own can go a long way toward
curbing tool sprawl. Making sure
that all tools are owned and
maintained by the developer teams
that introduced them is a good
start, said Truss co-founder and
CTO Mark Ferlatte.
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32. "When teams have to trade between
working on features and doing tool
maintenance, the urge to introduce new
tools that are, at best, marginally better than
existing ones tends to fade.”
- Mark Ferlatte
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33. Controlling tool sprawl can be challenging, but the
benefits - reduced costs, improved efficiency, and an
increase in the value departments deliver - are well
worth the trouble.
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34. PROPERTY OF DIALEXA LLC ©2017 - CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Thank You
Doug Platts
VP of Marketing
marketing@dialexa.com
If you are looking to undertake a
digital transformation initiative,
contact Dialexa today and see how
we can help make your company a
great technology company.
Get the full write up of this slideshare at How to Contain
Test Tool Sprawl on Agile Teams