CA Technologies announced the availability of CA Release Automation Continuous Delivery Edition

OREANDA-NEWS. CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) today announced the availability of CA Release Automation Continuous Delivery Edition, and several new integrations across CA’s DevOps portfolio and third party solutions creating the first integrated, fully automated and open continuous delivery ecosystem. Organizations can now connect and automate the entire app pipeline progression from development, to test, to production, to accelerate deployment times of applications by as much as 20 times and improve testing efficiency by up to 25 percent.

“To thrive in the application economy, digital transformation must be driven by continuous delivery—the ability to rapidly and reliably release applications that meet the demands of external and internal customers alike,” said Jeff Scheaffer, general manager, Continuous Delivery, CA Technologies. “CA is the only DevOps solution provider that currently bridges development, testing, release management and operations in an open, seamless tool chain that helps organizations achieve entirely new levels of application delivery speed and quality.”

Develop Swiftly, Test Agilely and Release Reliably 

As organizations progress on their digital transformation journey, the volume, velocity and complexity of applications continues to grow. “Businesses no longer have the luxury of time. Rising customer expectations, competitive threats, and increased consumer choice have turned rapid delivery and iteration of software applications into a competitive differentiator. Optimizing the delivery value chain has become the new means to better business outcomes,” according to Forrester Research.

For application owners tasked with rapidly delivering innovative and inspiring applications, but struggling with constraints and dependencies across the software development lifecycle, CA helps eliminate these challenges by providing continuous delivery capabilities that enable organizations to improve release planning and orchestration, use agile testing to test less and cover more, provision data on demand and deploy simulated environments – all with zero touch workflow.

This is accomplished through:

• CA Release Automation Continuous Delivery Edition is a premium module for CA Release Automation that enables zero-touch app progression and deployment. Its analytic capabilities enable DevOps teams to plan, manage, analyze and optimize the continuous delivery pipeline from a single control point.
• CA Agile Requirements Designer (formerly Grid-Tools Agile Designer) integration with CA Agile Central (formerly Rally) automatically creates test cases with maximum test coverage right from the requirements phase.
• CA Test Data Manager (formerly Grid-Tools Data Maker) integration with CA Agile Central reduces test cycle prep time by requesting and reserving test data from within CA Agile Central.
• CA Service Virtualization integration with CA Test Data Manager quickly generates realistic virtual data and injects the data directly into a deployed virtual service to improve the efficiency and quality of testing, while avoiding compliance risks.
• CA Release Automation integration with CA Test Data Manager automates the generation of proper test data based on proper test cases defined for a particular build for a faster, more optimized process.
• CA Application Test integrates with CA Agile Central so that the history of test cases can be viewed by the build number for the pipeline.
• CA Release Automation integration with CA Agile Central takes test results, and based upon the results, deploys to the next environment in the lifecycle.
• Integrations between CA API Management, CA Service Virtualization and CA Application Test enable development teams to automatically create the virtual services and API tests needed to support the rapid development of composite applications and microservices.

“With CA’s continuous delivery solutions we’re standardizing our application products, achieving consistency between server environment platforms and are able to easily integrate CA Release Automation with other continuous integration applications such as Jenkins,” said Matt McComas, AVP Critical Applications, GM Financial. “As a result, we are quickly identifying and resolving inconsistencies in our application environments and have been able to cut deployment times down to two and a half minutes for a 98% reduction in deployment time.”

Furthermore, to help organizations leverage existing investments, CA’s continuous delivery solutions integrate easily with market tools such as HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Atlassian’s JIRA Software, Jenkins, Docker, Perfecto, Chef and Puppet for an open and fully integrated continuous delivery solution stack.

“By using different CA tools as part of the software development lifecycle, testing is no longer a gatekeeper, but rather an operational quality door opener that helps simplify the development of new releases,” said, Arnold Hoogerwerf, IT strategy advisor at KPN, a leading telecommunications company in the Netherlands. “The tools we use from CA’s set of continuous delivery solutions have allowed us to reduce our investment and increase our agility in testing and helped us discover defects earlier so we can continually improve the quality of our applications in a shorter timeframe.”

Release automation goes hand-in-hand with DevOps practices and Cloud technologies to ensure that organizations can deliver apps that provide the very best customer experiences and drive competitive advantage in today’s app-driven, cloud-connected, mobile-everything world. The open and flexible architecture of CA’s continuous delivery solutions can help organizations deploy applications to modern Cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Skytap as a standard part of their app delivery practices.