Try the new HCL Accelerate on HCL SoFY!!

As a DevOps practitioner, one of our key goals (apart from automation) is to ensure that our product teams continuously improve and evolve. And to achieve this goal, we define, track and monitor different types of metrics across the product lifecycle. Not only this, we also build a variety of reports and dashboards to view the status and progress. Every tool in the DevOps chain, for example, if in our toolchain we are leveraging an integrated set of basic tools like Atlassian Jira, Git/GitHub, Jenkins, SonarQube, HCL AppScan, HCL DevOps Deploy; we build and extract reports in each of these tools. At times, we end up building wrappers that extracts information from all these tools and displays in one single tool; tools like Grafana, Kibana, Tableau are really useful here (click to know more these visualization tools).

So far so good!! But as we evolve in the DevOps discipline, monitoring metrics is not the only thing we are looking for. Building useful products and delivering them at lightning speed is our key mission. We always are in search for ‘VALUE“, that will help us further in our decision making process!! In my last blog on value stream management, we looked at why product teams should adopt Value Stream Management (VSM). Summarizing the key elements in VSM-

VALUE (Benefits) -> VALUE STREAM (activities) -> VALUE STREAM MANAGEMENT (Methodology)

While there are several platforms available today to adopt and practice VSM, one tool that stands apart is the HCL Accelerate (latest version v 4.0.x). I have been exploring this tool for a while and found that the capabilities it offers are excellent. Once you integrate and configure this tool with your DevOps toolset, you get to monitor every aspect of your value stream. It helps you monitor data points that in turn will empower you in take the right decisions ahead. After all, HCL Accelerate is a VSM tool!! I was surprised to look at the list of integrations that it offers; this includes Atlassian Jira, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, Apache JMeter, Cucumber, GitHub/GitLab, Rally, ServiceNow, SAP Charm, SonarQube, TwistLock, Synk, …. the list is huge. So, it pulls the information from all the configured tools and displays the flow of value across the life cycle, including the key metrics like cycle time, lead time, code coverage, etc. It is lot more than just a simple report – it is a tool for tracking value, a tool for managing releases, a tool to gather insights to your DevOps processes – one tool and many benefits!!

Interestingly, the orchestration feature in HCL Accelerate is worth it; in simple words managing releases is now made very easy. You just build your checklist of items that includes approvals, automated tasks, may be a few manual tasks; and schedule them or trigger them when ready. So, one powerful enterprise tool that streamlines and standardizes VSM practices with many benefits. One gets to visually observe the state of value flowing from inception to production, double-click on each state to view details/ insights across different environments and tools, view showstoppers and orchestrate releases.

If you are still thinking about HCL Accelerate, try it out for yourself. The HCL’s SoFY platform offers a ready to use sandbox to explore HCL Accelerate. In fact, HCL SoFY offers many tools for quick exploration. Just search for “Value Stream Management for DevOps” in HCL SoFY, register for the tool and launch the sandbox. It is easy and quick!!

Once the sandbox goes live, access the sandbox and login into HCL Accelerate with the credentials provided. The first thing to do is to integrate and configure the tools (from the settings) and then start building your value streams and releases. Most of the tools would require tokens, so there is some initial work that needs to be done. Post the configurations, you can then start exploring the tool capabilities. You can keep this simple as well, like first integrate one tool, test it and then add on more tools to visualize the flow step by step. Of course, include what is relevant and build up your streams and then later construct the release pipelines.

Exploring HCL Accelerate on the HCL SoFY platform is definitely a quick win. Try it out for yourself and do share your comments about this tool. I do plan to write on few integrations with HCL Accelerate and on how to resolve common errors. But, if there are topics of interest that you would like to explore, just share them in the comments section in this blog.

Happy Exploring HCL Accelerate!!