The product team has been busy delivering a DevOps product release every month. This is a roll-up of the key items introduced between Orlando and Paris.
For those that may be new to the ServiceNow DevOps product, DevOps connects what customers are doing in their development tools with the work that’s in ServiceNow. Customers develop their own products and apps in tools like Jenkins and Azure DevOps so we integrate with those tools to make them more productive.
Companies are adopting DevOps to improve agility, and DevOps projects are often critical in delivering resiliency, but many organizations are challenged to make DevOps deliver value at scale.
In the Paris timeframe we are extending the reach for the product with new integrations and focusing on making it easier to get started in terms of connecting to the tools that those development teams are using.
GitLab Integration
We start this update with a new integration with a common development toolset known as GitLab. We automatically pick up information when developers check code into a repository and then use the GitLab Continuous Integration capability to integrate with the build-and-test procedures. By connecting in this way we can automatically create a change ticket when their code is ready to be pushed into a system that we care about, and we can pick up information from the development tools that we can use against change policies to automatically approve the change request, to save the time of it going through a manual change process.
Most organizations have different teams that each use different tools so adding this set means they can manage and compare across teams even if one is using GitLab and the other is using something else like Azure DevOps.
New capabilities with Azure DevOps
The next set of enhancements are around an existing integration with Azure DevOps. We’re extending the integration from build pipelines into YAML and Release Pipelines as well as supporting more types of planning information coming from their Azure Boards. This is all data that we can use to automate change, even for complex releases with lots of components. We also use it to provide unique insights into the development process and, as with the information coming from GitLab, we can normalize that information and compare it across teams.
Test tool connectivity
We’ve added direct connectivity to testing tools like Selenium and over time we’ll add others. We’re also making it easy for our customers and partners to build their own integrations to other test tools. In the past, we’ve relied on the pipeline tool like Jenkins to provide us with test results. These new direct connections mean we can get more detailed information about testing which can make the change policies more sophisticated, potentially allowing for more changes to be completely automated. All this also improves the information we can share in our reporting dashboards, for audit activities and for troubleshooting.
Extended Insights
Finally, we’re leveraging all that information to provide insights that would otherwise be very difficult to obtain. There are so many development tools that could be in use across different teams, and understanding team performance, finding bottlenecks, or finding data for audits can be very complicated. Some are starting to refer to this kind of oversight as Value Stream Management, which is why ServiceNow was recently listed as a leader in the Forrester Value Stream Management tools Wave Report which you can find here.
Our approach is to provide out-of-the box views of key metrics and to continue to add to those dashboards. With the releases up to, and including, Paris we’re making more use of information that is elsewhere in ServiceNow such as in ITOM – information that speaks to the stability or reliability of a product once it is in production. So, for example, you could automate a change for a team that always puts out reliable code, but add additional checks, or a manual step, for a team that has had issues with their code in production.
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