With the widespread adoption of DevOps and agile processes in the R&D teams of cutting-edge Internet companies, the efficiency of software R&D and iteration has been rapidly improved, and more and more industries have begun to realize the great value brought by digital transformation. However, for most non-Internet leading companies, expensive development costs have always been an inescapable topic, not to mention the various costs brought by a team of senior engineers proficient in DevOps agile processes.
Development supply and demand imbalance
According to a research report by Gartner, a professional market research organization, professional IT personnel can only meet 6% of the IT needs of enterprises. The intensified contradiction between supply and demand of developers has brought high development costs to companies other than leading Internet manufacturers.
In the past, most of the non-Internet informatization reforms were in the form of software procurement, which had many limitations. The procurement cycle of software for enterprises is very long, and the mode of centralized procurement and deployment is usually adopted, and the cost remains high. For small and medium-sized enterprises with relatively insufficient funds, the difficulties encountered in the process of informatization are even greater; at the same time, traditional The coverage of ERP and CRM software purchased by enterprises is very limited, and the individual needs of most enterprises are difficult to meet.
All in all, the imbalance of development supply and demand has brought high costs and huge challenges to the informatization process of enterprises. On the one hand, the market environment is changing and developing at a high speed, and the internal system also needs to respond quickly and iteratively. However, the traditional development efficiency cannot meet the market demand, and the rising labor cost and time cost make it difficult for many enterprises to afford; on the other hand, if you give up your own If you choose to develop software and choose to purchase the formed software, it is difficult to carry out in-depth personalized adaptation according to your own business, and it will not create value at all.
DevOps demand sinks
While the traditional industry is undergoing a difficult informatization transformation, the development model of the Internet industry is also undergoing changes under the leadership of some elite developers.
In order to meet the needs of users who are using software all the time in the era of mobile Internet, advanced developers have introduced agile models to make products iterate faster and deliver them to users. Agile development takes the evolution of users' needs as the core, and adopts an iterative and step-by-step approach to software development.
In recent years, thanks to the vigorous development of container technology and microservice architecture, based on the agile model, the DevOps model in which development and operation and maintenance work together came into being. DevOps is a series of software development practices, emphasizing the communication and cooperation between developers (Dev) and operation and maintenance personnel (Ops), through automated processes, to make software construction, testing, and delivery faster, more frequent and more reliable. The characteristic of this development model is that each iteration of the product, or each time a bug is fixed on the line, can be deployed to the production environment immediately, so that developers can quickly get feedback from users and respond quickly.
The DevOps model was the first to be widely adopted within the leading Internet manufacturers, and brought faster and more efficient software iteration and delivery efficiency to these manufacturers. Gartner predicts that by 2022, at least 30% of enterprises will implement DevOps practices with a standard set of toolchains. In 2018, the proportion was less than 10%.
The emergence of the DevOps model has greatly improved the software R&D iteration efficiency of advanced Internet manufacturers, but it also means that traditional industries or small and medium-sized enterprises that are already in the stage of informatization transformation pose greater technical challenges. After all, the original developers were in short supply. , it is more expensive to recruit elite developers who are proficient in the DevOps development process.
Take software testing as an example. As an important link in the R&D process, whether software testing can achieve the goals of rapid response, effective measurement, process automation and system integration will have a profound impact on the R&D efficiency and product quality of the entire organization. After the rise of the DevOps model, the industry's demand for automated testing is also increasing, which puts forward higher requirements for the professional ability of software testers. Software testers desperately need tools to aid their daily testing, be it desktop or web testing, browser testing, regression testing, web services and API testing, and more.
Lower the threshold for development
In order to solve the problems caused by the imbalance of development supply and demand in the process of enterprise informatization transformation, major Internet manufacturers have begun to launch SaaS services to provide a cloud service platform that shields the underlying infrastructure for the majority of small and medium-sized enterprises, and only requires users to focus on their own business development. At the same time, all kinds of applications to lower the development threshold and reduce the workload also ushered in rapid development, quickly covering all walks of life.
In China, cloud service providers represented by leading manufacturers such as Baidu, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and Huawei Cloud have launched their own cloud service platforms to provide DevOps development tool kits and automated cloud testing services for domestic SME developers. Help enterprises embrace DevOps in the process of informatization transformation to reduce costs and increase efficiency. On this basis, Feishu Technology, which takes "making software development possible for everyone" as its product mission, has gone a step further and launched SoFlu, a fully automatic software engineering platform that is easier for beginners to use.
SoFlu fully automatic software engineering platform consists of three parts: fully automatic development platform, fully automatic testing platform and fully automatic operation and maintenance platform. Its core automation development platform provides visual configuration capabilities based on interface design, and interfaces are developed in the form of drag and drop through the component visual window interface. The platform also provides a large number of ready-made component libraries, including SQL components, transaction components, upload/download components and other common components of enterprise business. For enterprises with personalized development needs, the platform also supports users to develop custom components to further improve development efficiency. Relying on the automated and visual development capabilities provided by the platform, the development threshold can be greatly reduced, and the configuration is flexible, and non-senior developers can easily get started.
Feishuan SoFlu automatic test platform has several major features: First, test life cycle management. It provides test lifecycle management related functions such as test case management, test case review, test plan tracking, and test report generation. The second is test data management. The fully automatic test platform is based on the idea of separating test scripts and test data, which facilitates R&D test collaboration, facilitates the use of test data in automated testing, and supports rapid and repeatable use in automation tools such as UI and interfaces. The third is accurate regression testing. During project testing, it can automatically identify all changed interfaces, automatically find all test cases associated with the interface, and perform accurate regression testing.
Chen Dingwei, President of Feishuan Yunzhi, said, "We first launch the development platform, and then launch the test platform. Only by standardizing the development actions first, the subsequent tests are really useful. The real core is development. Therefore, problems and problems are found during the development process. To solve problems, put actions in advance, such as embedding technologies related to operation and maintenance in development, such as link tracking, service discovery, etc., and intervene during development, rather than finding and solving problems in the operation and maintenance environment.”
Granted, "making software accessible to everyone" may still be a distant goal, but as Chen Dingwei said on the day of the SoFlu product launch: "It's a very 'grand' long-term goal. More realistically, , Only by continuously lowering the threshold of software development and the platform assisting more practitioners to shoulder the jobs that may not be fully competent in the past, can the 'productivity' of the entire industry be greatly improved, which will help China's information industry run better in global competition faster."