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True Application Life-cycle Management With Urbancode

The ALM space has been dominated by traditional point solutions focused on specific life-cycle stages, relegating the complete view to custom and costly point-to-point integrations. But that is not the case anymore: Urbancode’s industry-leading AnthillPro (www.anthillpro.com) provides a holistic view of the life-cycle processes (such as build, deploy, test), along with secure, centrally managed automated processes. AnthillPro extracts and correlates the information that is typically locked within point tools.

It starts with automation. AnthillPro allows teams to turn their manual, script-driven processes into reusable services. This way, what used to be error-prone manual processes—accessible to a select few—becomes transparent, repeatable and efficient. Moreover, they are accessible to the entire team via self-service. Imagine, for instance, automated processes that distribute a build across multiple machines to drive down build times; or deploy an n-tiered application across multiple machines (with each tier deployed to a different machine); or distribute tests across multiple machines. Sound complicated? It doesn’t have to be … if you have tools that make it easy.

While its core functionality is automation, AnthillPro is “a full-service tool for building, testing and deploying applications,” according to a Senior Release Engineer at an independent software vendor. AnthillPro’s standardized platform has enabled him to extend ALM practices and achieve real, measurable gains: “In our implementation, we took advantage of AnthillPro’s framework for creating reusable library jobs and workflows, which has proven to significantly shorten the time required to setup new Ruby projects.”

It is typical to find organizations using AnthillPro with a variety of languages and development platforms. “AnthillPro is build-tool and language agnostic. It’s not uncommon for a customer to have 40% of their project on Java, 40% on the Microsoft platform and 20% on every technology introduced since 1960,” explained Urbancode President Maciej Zawadzki.

In addition, to integrations with IDEs, such as Eclipse and Visual Studio, AnthillPro integrates with many ALM tools: including SCM and issue-tracking, test automation systems, change management systems and project management systems. These integrations allow AnthillPro to extract data from traditional point tools and correlate the data in one place—backed by powerful reporting features. For example, imagine that a developer changed five source files to fix two issues. AnthillPro aggregates the source code changes and correlates them with the issues they affected. Additionally, integrations with testing tools allow AnthillPro to point out that the source changes fixed two previously failing tests, but caused one previously passing test to fail.

During the development stage, AnthillPro provides scalable continuous integration for the development team. The payoff: Not only do developers avoid integration hell, but they also get quick feedback on the quality of their code changes. “It is typical for us to see the turnaround time on build requests go from more than 90 minutes to less than 20 minutes after a roll-out,” said Zawadzki.

What makes all this possible is the vision behind AnthillPro. “Most of our customers use AnthillPro to do much more than simply automate a continuous integration build for their development teams,” Zawadzki said. “In addition to automating the build, they automate unit testing, deployments to a test environment, orchestration of the functional tests, and deployments to production. AnthillPro enables them to extend the benefits of continuous integration into the entire application development life cycle.”

From the ground up, AnthillPro scales to enterprise levels. “Many of our customers use globally distributed development teams with thousands of developers. Having features that make this efficient is very important,” explained Zawadzki. Issues of security, while important in all enterprise-scale deployments, are essential with globally distributed development. AnthillPro provides a secure system that plugs into existing security infrastructure investments such as LDAP or Active Directory for authentication and fine-grained, role-based permissions.

Such strong security features and support for automated testing and deployment are a natural fit for organizations engaged in offshore development. Consider a common situation, where development teams are offshore with a contractor, but your company’s QA servers are located in the United States and off limits to the contractor. If the contractor’s development teams can’t directly access the QA servers, they need to ask someone in the U.S. to deploy the artifacts onto the server, run the automated test suite, and then communicate the results back. The turnaround from request to test result is typically a minimum of 24 hours—and can be considerably longer if there’s a problem with the build. Using AnthillPro, the integrity of your QA servers is maintained even while automated processes deploy the contractor’s build artifacts to the appropriate QA server, run automated test suites, and provide results. The benefit: A process taking 24 hours is often reduced to under an hour (depending on the duration of the automated tests).

Although other process automation tools exist, they don’t provide the traceability that AnthillPro guarantees. AnthillPro’s first-class representation of a software project’s movement through the life cycle guarantees traceability, a holistic view of the life cycle, and correlated information extracted from point tools. No other single system (SCM, test, issue tracking, etc.) can provide the end-to-end traceability of Urbancode’s AnthillPro.