Esta es una propuesta para la mejora en la eficiencia del desarrollo de software:
Summary
Even today, environments dedicated entirely to support projects during its development and/or testing phases are under-utilised during non-working hours. No matter the use of those servers they’re always consuming energy for its operation, resulting in infrastructure operating costs for the company. Adapting software development processes in such a way that can only consume resources(servers) on demand during development and testing phases can significantly reduce costs and prevents information loss for an application.
Problem/Opportunity
The process to create and configure environments is traditionally assigned to a single person and managed through a ticketing system whereby time and effort are estimated. In other words, the operator or responsible will only have predefined period of time for setting up an environment requested by an end user(e. g. developer, tester). This is why provisioning activities are made only once and usually at the beginning of a project. But the working environment creation can be the easiest way to do a sanity check of the whole project and verify its correct functionality, this process must not have workarounds or undocumented steps. Additionally, the earlier detection of defects can simplify its resolution and reduce costs for the software development process. Therefore, creating working environments periodically can help to detect defects no matter the stage of the project.
Development and Testing environments are mainly used during working hours, meaning that almost two-thirds of their time the servers are in a state of inactivity. Simple acts such as turning servers off when they are not used can reduce infrastructure operating costs. In order to make this a new habit, these actions must be done on a regular basis.
Solution
Vagrant provides easy to configure, reproducible, and portable work environments built on top of industry-standard technology and controlled by a single consistent workflow to help maximize the productivity and flexibility of you and your team. Vagrant has the ability to manage virtual machines such as VirtualBox, VMware, KVM, and others. Lastly, boxes are the package format for Vagrant environments.
A base box is created from a minimal Operative System with the minimum set of software required for Vagrant to function. Vagrant uses industry-standard provisioning tools such as shells scripts, Chef or Puppet to automatically install and configure software on the machine. As result, developers, testers and operators are able to create disposable and consistent environments for development and testing.
Agile methodologies promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, continuous improvement, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. The main goal for short iterations is to release working item(s) to product owners and communicate the progress on the project with stakeholders and project sponsors.
This document suggests doing changes into day-to-day activities of developer and tester, in a way that at the beginning of the day they must recreate a work environment for getting the latest changes. Having completed their work, only those desired changes should be backed up to proceed to release resources used (i. e. destroy the work environment created at the beginning). If those actions are performed daily by the team, anyone can be joined and start working on the project without assistance, since anytime can request the creation of an work environment and it will have latest changes of the project setup and the project itself. Furthermore, those changes that were not backing up previously are going to reflect malfunctioning the next time that someone creates a work environment, as consequence, this new process helps to fail fast and quickly realize that something is not working.
In order to demonstrate how this methodology works, I’ll take the OpenStack development as an example. OpenStack is an open source infrastructure as a service (IaaS) initiative for creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers in a data center. According to their activity reports during the last 7 days 553 commits have been submitted, resulting in around 80 commits per day. That is why an OpenStack developer can get different results of the work environment based on the day that was created.
The devstack-vagrant project allows to setup an OpenStack work environment and retrieve latest changes of each OpenStack component using Vagrant boxes. Using Cloud-Driven Development, an OpenStack developer must recreate an OpenStack work environment with devstack-vagrant project at the beginning of the day. This new work environment will remain active until all changes have been tested and verified properly. Once all desired changes have been submitted to the OpenStack repositories, before ending the day, the work environment must be destroyed to release any resource.
Results
Adapting agile methodologies to consume only the resources that are needed can results in:
- By using cloud computing model of «pay as you go» only during working hours can reduce infrastructure costs for development and test teams.
- Every time a work environment is created there is an opportunity to early detect failures in the project.
- Performing regular backups of the project reduces time for recovering and impact caused by a disaster.
- New members can quickly start contributing into the project.