The last year has been an exciting one for Orasi, as we developed and debuted a comprehensive palette of solutions and services around streamlining software delivery — and the DevOps pipeline in particular. This spring, we had the opportunity to share the many insights we gleaned during our research and exploration in this area, beginning… Continue reading Spring 2019 DevOps Shows Proved Most Engaging Yet – And We’re Just Getting Started
Author: Jim Azar
James (Jim) Azar, Orasi Senior VP and Chief Technology Officer
A 29-year veteran of the software and services industry, Jim Azar is charged with oversight of service delivery, technology evaluation, and strategic planning at Orasi. Among his many professional credits, Azar was a co-founder of Technology Builders, Inc. (TBI), where he built the original CaliberRM requirements management tool. Azar earned a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Alabama, College of Engineering, where he was named to the Deans’ Leadership Board. He furthered his education with advanced and continuing studies at Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon, and Auburn University at Montgomery. Azar has been published in both IEEE and ACM.
Quality Engineering Role in Root Cause Analysis
The worst defects are the ones that become incidents in production. You might hear about the cost of defects in various stages of the SDLC, but I’ve seen incidents that cost over $1M an hour in production downtime. Some QE teams might avoid looking at these because the fire is too hot. If you are… Continue reading Quality Engineering Role in Root Cause Analysis
Testing as a Service: a Modern Approach for a Critical Need
The increasing dominance of web and mobile applications is increasing complexity for organizations—and the software teams charged with ensuring application functionality and quality. The number of critical business functions processed via a browser or mobile device is escalating, the pace of updates is accelerating, and inaccurate results, aberrant behaviors, and security flaws can all be… Continue reading Testing as a Service: a Modern Approach for a Critical Need
It’s Late 2016, What’s the New Rule for Performance Test Environments?
This question was passed around internally last week: “Does anyone on this distribution list have a list of good reasons why a test environment should approximate that of production to provide accurate test results in lieu of using a cheaper, smaller test environment and math to estimate production-like results?” In my former career, we had… Continue reading It’s Late 2016, What’s the New Rule for Performance Test Environments?
Performance Assessment – Collaboration
Learn to Collaborate Communication breakdown is not unique to IT. Somehow, most IT organizations create towers. Maybe this happens to reduce the number of status meeting or to allow for a tree-shaped management chain. When leadership creates these separate teams, the intention is not to prevent the individual contributors from collaborating and working efficiently, but… Continue reading Performance Assessment – Collaboration
Performance Assessment – Solution Design
In the book, Continuous Delivery, authors Jez Humble and David Farley described a mindset, process, and ultimately a solution that has transformed the delivery cycle time and level of quality across the IT world. In my opinion, continuous delivery (CD) formed the technical practices that buoy up the DevOps movement. The improvements in tools, automation,… Continue reading Performance Assessment – Solution Design
Data-Focused Test Strategy for New Data Warehouse
As part of a workshop discussion someone posed the following example to our group of test professionals and asked how we would solve the following problems. I am paraphrasing. How do we insure data quality and integrity at the application programming interface (API) level in the new data warehouse? Note that the solution below is… Continue reading Data-Focused Test Strategy for New Data Warehouse
Test Data Management Maturity Assessment
Test data generation has matured beyond the realm of inputs, as it is described on Wikipedia. Test Data practices must consider the overall quality of the digital assets for a business. The data are not only persistent, they are often the most important IT artifacts for these businesses. With the emphasis on software development in… Continue reading Test Data Management Maturity Assessment
Ultrafast Server Side Performance Optimization
When your solution is too slow to meet your business objectives you need to optimize it. This post is primarily based on a recent optimization project we did using AppDynamics to improve their solution. I will note that there were a few browser side optimizations that we did as well, but they were found quickly… Continue reading Ultrafast Server Side Performance Optimization
Documenting Complex Enterprise Apps
Many of the enterprise systems we encounter are very complex. Unfortunately, the IT teams that develop and support these solutions will oftentimes have inaccurate documentation to show all of the elements. The design of the software is handled by one organization whereas the actual implementation onto the underlying components end up within other teams such… Continue reading Documenting Complex Enterprise Apps