The Future of IBM i+ CI/CD: Process Discovery

July 26, 2023

This is the second post in a series titled The Future of IBM i+ CI/CD. (Read the first post here).

Modern DevOps is here to stay—and that’s a good thing. It reduces time to market, increases enterprise agility, and makes businesses more resilient. CI/CD takes organizations to the next evolutionary step by empowering them with the freedom to innovate and experiment with processes, technology, and tools, thereby setting them up to be more competitive in the market.

But to make CI/CD work you need automated testing. Without it, the cycle slows down, and the potential for errors entering production increases. Can you get quality code released to the market quickly so teams can get the feedback they need and fine-tune their applications to fit what the market wants?

In a 2021 Github survey, 57% of developers said they release code twice as fast as before, up from 25% faster just two years prior. And 75% said they use or are planning to use artificial intelligence (AI) or bots for test code review, and nearly 25% of respondents claimed full test automation. While IBM i development trends tend to lag behind the rest of the market, the writing is on the walls—companies are moving faster and leveraging test automation to do it. It’s only a matter of time before the expectation is there for IBM i teams.

Once automated testing is table stakes, the speed at which an organization can test becomes a competitive factor. There are tool technologies that enable this speed: AI and its precursor, process discovery.

Process Discovery is the Precursor to AI

We are in the early stages of a trend around process discovery. Process discovery is the practice by which organizations understand how users engage an application and dataset, including the specific steps they take in workflows, such as what data are accessed when, how long they spend at certain points in the workflow, steps skipped, shortcuts used, and more. Process discovery takes the guesswork out of what is needed to develop and test, accelerating the execution of automated testing. Testing and process discovery are evolving into more than standard steps in the DevOps process.

There has been a lot of conversation around process discovery in the context of modernization projects, and for good reason. Process discovery is a great tool to understand how a business engages applications and data on IBM i, giving them the insight needed to decide how modernization should look. Process discovery is also key for DevOps processes, e.g., how to modernize. It can provide insights into how to update the code (e.g., move this field, automate this part of the workflow, etc.) and what and how to test the code.

There is a strong push for automated or “shift left testing” to enable agility, speed, and quality, essentially achieving true CI/CD. The beauty of automated testing is the ability to free up resources and shift timing, enabling faster time to market and more innovative development. With automation, the options for where, when, and what DevOps teams can test are expanded. Before, most testing happened after most of the development was done, right before it was pushed to production; now, developers can test during development. Automated testing also makes doing specific tests like integration and regression easier. And, if you are truly agile, your release to users is, in and of itself, a test of feature/function/UX.

The future of DevOps is a combination of new and established technologies to accelerate innovation even more. This is not just for IBM i, but it is critical to IBM i teams.

Trends like process discovery and AI can sound overwhelming to a team still relying on linear development and deployment processes. But if an IBM i team knows what’s coming, and how to prepare, they can set up an approach to DevOps in a way that ensures the sky is the limit for innovation and experimentation.

In the next post of the series, we’ll discuss AI and its impact on the evolution of testing.

Learn more about the future of IBM i+ CI/CD and read our whitepaper or talk to an expert today.