Doing DevOps? Start with the mainframe, suggests Compuware CEO Chris O'Malley

The mainframe is here to stay because it does things better than other platforms in terms of transactions, efficiency, reliability, and security, says O'Malley

Smart CIOs kick-off their DevOps initiatives and adoption of Agile methodologies in the data centre with the mainframe, says Compuware CEO Chris O'Malley, rather than leaving it until last - or ignoring it entirely.

"If you're a savvy CIO, it's the mainframe where you want to do DevOps first; it's the mainframe where you want to do Agile first, and I think the market is starting to reflect that," O'Malley told Computing in an interview.

Even in mainframe environments, O'Malley added, "12-month development cycles and sequential work just doesn't work". But even mainframe stalwarts in the banking and insurance sectors are concerned about competition from nimble start-ups, or the prospect for widespread car-sharing undermining the market for vehicle insurance, for example.

If you're a savvy CIO, it's the mainframe where you want to do DevOps first

As a result, said O'Malley, the mainframe environment also needs to shift from Waterfall to Agile and to dramatically speed-up development and release cycles.

"In the mainframe world, traditionally they worked in Waterfall. The way it worked is that I would go into the backlog, the backlog would be comprised of maintenance and defects - it wouldn't be features. Nobody really cared how fast the work got done. So I'd pull it in, write some code, finish it and send it to someone else, and they would do the testing, possibly a week later.

"Meanwhile, I'd take another defect out of the backlog and start work on that. So I'm piling up work without any feedback on what I've done for long periods of time. Finally, my test results come back, but I can barely remember what I've done. So it's working in fits and starts, and constant re-work," said O'Malley.

Focusing on DevOps in the mainframe has been core to O'Malley's turnaround strategy at Compuware, following the acquisition of the company by private equity firm Thoma Bravo. It immediately spliced-off the Dynatrace application performance management tools half of the company, leaving O'Malley in charge of the mainframe tools business that he had been appointed to run six months earlier, prior to the Thoma Bravo acquisition.

We have created a technology that helps mainframe developers to keep up with the sprint cycle

Part of the strategy, says O'Malley, has been the implementation of DevOps-style working practices in-house, using open-source tools where applicable, but fleshing out toolsets for the mainframe where open source and commercial software either fall short or is non-existent.

"We have created a technology that helps mainframe developers to keep up with the sprint cycle, helping with their day-to-day productive work… on the mainframe, we've got to go from Waterfall to Agile, so you need a way to be able to do branched work and have multiple people working on systems at the same time, and then re-constitute work. We have new tools that facilitate this," said O'Malley.

"You also need to be able to do automated testing, that's never happened on the mainframe before. People on the mainframe, historically, have written their own programming to test programs and they have don it based really on instinct…

The mainframe is not going to go away

"You are trying to drive more and more features out of the system [but] you have got to have a higher and higher degree of quality as well, and that quality control has got to be more automated, too. So, we have had to build new technologies within that space," said O'Malley.

At the same time, though, Compuware's developers internally use a range of other tools to facilitate their own DevOps-style working arrangements.

"Internally, in terms of driving things like build and deployment, we use Jenkins. All of our automation, our automated testing, our build and deploys are done through that; and, we use XebiaLabs as a release automation tool, as a method of basically orchestrating the work," said O'Malley. Other tools include SonarSource's SonarQube and Omniframe, used in conjunction with Compuware's own IDE.

The mainframe is going to stay for the right business reasons, because it does things better than other platforms in terms of transactions, efficiency, reliability, and security

"We use Jira as a means of managing the work that we do - the backlog of features and defects [to fix], technical debt and maintenance. All of those things are logged in that technology. We also use Atlassian Confluence to share ideas… and Slack, of course."

In addition to the 19^th consecutive quarter of new feature and function releases, Compuware's recent growth has also been driven by a reinvigorated IBM System Z mainframe platform - one of the few consistently positive features of IBM's recent performance.

One of the drivers of this isn't necessarily technical, said O'Malley, but simply down to a more customer-friendly method of charging by IBM. "They have gone from the concept of rolling four-hour averages, which is difficult for customers to manage, but that's historically how they have charged.

"They would find a peak workload then the amount you consumed within that four-hour window is what customers would be charged. Customers would therefore do really weird things to try to manage that," said O'Malley.

Now, IBM has adopted a "true cloud pricing model [for the mainframe] whereby you just pay for what you consume. They work out over the course of the year how much you have consumed. You licence for a certain ‘water mark' and if you use more, you pay more. But if you use less, you get a rebate for the next year".

As a result, customers are seeing that its "virtues are really important in the digital age and now customers are certain to reinvest in it and starting to think about it in a different way".

Therefore, O'Malley has no plans to expand from mainframe software into the mainstream: as almost all of the world's biggest organisations run mainframes for key mission critical applications, O'Malley believes that not only is there plenty of life in the venerable platform - IBM only - but plenty of growth, too.

"The mainframe is not going to go away. The mainframe is going to stay for the right business reasons, because it does things better than other platforms in terms of transactions, efficiency, reliability, and security," said O'Malley.