Five Predictions for 2011

As with other flavors of Agile, many organizations will adopt a version of DevOps that is buzzword compliant, but omits the practices that actually deliver the promised value.

Other predictions
The development of automated security testing tools
Security testing is currently a major bottleneck in the adoption of continuous delivery. Specialized consultancies dominate this field, and as with other kinds of testing, nothing can replace a human in the planning of security testing. However there is a real opportunity to create an integrated tool suite for performing automated testing of applications for security, including penetration testing, static analysis of systems, and injection attack detection for both traditional and newer platforms.

Release management gets serious
Many organizations have a release manager or release engineer who has the responsibility to ensure releases go well, but no real power to actually ensure all the correct dependencies are in place, either technically or organizationally. As organizations need to deploy more frequently, they will have to develop this capability, which will entail better co-operation between the various groups involved in delivering software, and the establishment of good practices that are both agile and compliant with frameworks like ITIL and CoBiT.

It’s going to be almost impossible to hire
The market in Silicon Valley is already tight as a drum, and as the economy slowly starts to move out of recession, it will become almost impossible to hire people who understand the new world of release and configuration management. India and China of course never had a recession, so this is business as usual in those places.

Well, that’s it. As always, I’d love to get your feedback on what you think will be hot this year, and where I’ve got it wrong. Meanwhile, a happy and prosperous 2011 to you and your families.