What is Azure Dev Test and Why Should You Care?

Azure Dev Test allows you to develop and test applications faster at lower costs. As organizations face increasing pressure to develop, test and deliver more software faster, organizations are seeking new and innovative ways to shorten time to market (or production). Agile development and XP practices are stretching traditional tooling and forcing ALM vendors to catch-up. The best solutions not only provide infrastructure on demand, but also allow you to reduce development time, increase quality --- all at minimal cost. Enter Microsoft Visual Studio and Azure Dev Test.

What is Dev Test Anyway?

With the adoption of agile, engineering teams are shifting from tightly siloed discipline based teams towards highly collaborative teams following rapid iterative development cycles and practices. By adopting established agile processes (e.g., parallel work, continuous integration, ATDD, etc.), software engineers, test engineers, and QA engineers are able to deliver software much faster. A key to success of this process change is access to self-service production-like virtualized environments that are available “on-demand” and are easy to manage. The result helps teams minimize time to value.

Hmm… How Does Azure Support Dev Test?

First, Azure IaaS gives you access to scalable, on demand infrastructure to quickly create secured development and test environments composed of one or more Azure based virtual machines. These virtual machines can be created from an image template or uploading an existing VHD.

Second, the Azure VM Gallery provides many options for creating preconfigured Windows based virtual machines but also includes Linux based images. If this is not enough to meet your needs browse the VM Depot Azure Gallery where there is over 400 Virtual Machine images of open source software stacks.

Finally, the Azure Dev Test provides the ability to provision and configure servers/client machines necessary for directly executing load and performance tests created in Visual Studio Ultimate 2013. Once you have defined the testing criteria and scale you are targeting, you can let Azure dynamically provide the resources necessary to simulate the testing load.

Dev Test supported by Azure and Visual Studio:

Why Should you Care?

While dev test can have a significant impact on operations, we elected to point out three areas. They are as follows:

1. Increased Focus - Environment management automation provided with Azure will significantly reduce the costs associated with managing physical or virtualized environment. The result liberates software engineering teams from IT administrative efforts. Moreover, development teams can equally maintain their focus on software development directly related to business needs --- rather than developing tools or utilities to manage environments. An effective implementation of Dev Test supported by automated deployment and continuous delivery initiatives could reduce deployment resources by 50%.
2. Speed and Risk Reduction - From a release perspective, it reduces system downtime related to moving an application into production. Working with production-like environments and deploying to them in the same consistent way validates the deployment process early increasing reliability of application hand-off between engineering teams and operations. Companies that applied a Dev Test strategy combined with deployment automation can increase the number of weekly deployments by 300% as well as the software quality by 20%.
3. Cost - Decrease or eliminate the need for computer asset management associated with having to acquire the necessary physical hardware to support software engineering teams. Cost savings of adding/removing hardware in a datacenter and disposal fees of out dated end of life hardware. By implementing Azure for development and Test environments, a large US insurance company decreased by 30% its Cost of Ownership (COS = pay for what you use).

Last but not least, you may already have “use rights” to Windows Azure. If you are an MSDN subscriber and have Visual Studio Ultimate, you are eligible for $160 on monthly credit! For more information, see the Windows Azure site and the Visual Studio and MSDN Licensing white paper.

Conclusion

Software is consumed more and more every day. Your firm’s ability to deliver is increasingly a source of competitive advantage. Exposed by agile adoption and practices, traditional infrastructure and tools that support dev test are significant obstacles and costly bottlenecks that impede value flow. A sound dev test strategy coupled with Azure’s on-demand infrastructure not only removes common barriers to continuous flow, but also reduces infrastructure administration and allows your teams to realize the merits of true enterprise agility.
Looking for a way to implement Azure Dev Test in your organization? Read the one-pager description or check the Azure Dev Test engagement offer, currently available until April, 30th 2014.