AutonomIQ Podcast: The Future of Software Factories: Recent Episodes

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We're excited to bring you today’s episode of Building Software Factories of the Future:

A podcast that interviews the best business and digital transformation leaders and aims to deconstruct, dissect, and teach you how to build the best software teams, processes, and factories of the future.

AutonomIQ’s co-founder, Raj, will be interviewing one of the best in the digital transformation business: Venkat Rangat. This guy’s resume is loaded.

Venkat is the current Head of Business Technology at Aryaka, a global leader in managed software defined WAN—also known SD-WAN—,

and previously led Business Technology delivery at Malware-bytes and VMware, with nearly a decade of experience between those roles.

In this capacity, he’s spent a lot of time thinking about how and why Business Technology teams need to exist and often shares why a company stands to benefit from adding one to their org structure.

And most importantly how the Business Technology team must evolve to meet the business demands in the SaaS world.

Key takeaways

• The business challenges that big multi-billion dollar companies face are similar to those that a company that is about to go public faces. The process to solve these challenges are different, however. The key business processes he’s identified and tries to optimize for include Recruit to Retire, Lead to Cash, Procure to Pay, Record to Report. There’s various SaaS tools that an enterprise will use for each of these key business processes, and it’s important that they are maintained during all types of change management.
• As a business technology leader you have to be evolving and changing consistently and updating your playbook to serve your customers. You also have to be inspiring your team to be constantly changing. Venkat practices what he preaches.
• Different tools serve different operational needs to help the business conduct its daily functions, but CIOs and other C-level executives need a different set of tools that give them a high-level view on how the organization is functioning. All the various tools at the operational level, need to be connected to an overall reporting framework.
• Enterprise software is changing for the better. Companies are able to move faster since they’re able to very quickly scale up with SaaS products. On-premise installations used to take months to implement and now business leaders are able to buy that time back with SaaS tools. However, these SaaS tools need to be battle tested since they all have their own velocity of release cycles and new versions of SaaS products that are adversely disruptive to regular business operations if not managed properly.
• And finally, a shameless plug for AutonomIQ Sauce Labs: Venkat and his team are using AutonomIQ to drive much more value during their sprints by reducing the amount of time it takes to test the multitudes of integrations they have in their overall product.

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Building Software Factories of the Future presented by AutonomIQ

At the centre of every software development shop is the infamous QA team.

They're often viewed as the bottleneck to rapid releases and if their role is done perfectly, QA goes unnoticed. It's a thankless job that allows teams to make frequent releases with delicate, complex systems. As the demand of IT grows and an application throughout becomes more complex, QA is forced to keep up, giving them less time to identify and fix any given defect and risk poor quality releases.

Let's admit it: no one wakes up in the morning and says, I'm going to be the best QA software tester today. However, the role becomes increasingly complex and requires some artistry in the eyes of innovation.

Join us as we deconstruct and interview the best software leaders and teach you how to improve and create the best software factories of the future.

Guest: Mike Heinrich, Managing Director, DevOps Execution & Delivery, Alberta Treasury Branch (ATB)

Host: Raj Rao, Co-Founder & VP, Engineering, AutonomIQ

Bio: Mike is a technology leader over 15 years of experience in all areas of the Solution Delivery Lifecycle focusing on agile delivery. With significant experience in digital and agile transformation, Mike has held leadership roles in several industries including utilities, aviation, financial services, and telecommunications.

Show Notes: "I think that we’re seeing in a couple of places and I think it’s this two-pronged of an approach and it’s going to be a really interesting challenge for all of us to solve. It’s a challenge that we’re working on here at ATB. There’s a shift both in tech and in the product expectation. Holistically there’s an expectation that there’s more frequent delivery in value; we expect more change and the quarterly releases are a thing of the past and even here (at ATB) we’re doing daily and even multiple-times-a-day releases.

What does that mean for some of our technology? Well, we have to build quality —and whether you call it shift left, test automation, devOps— there’s a piece around building quality in from the start. I think some of the other challenges and considerations we have to build in are we’re really moving away from the really monolithic architectures, as well, and towards more distributed systems.

In doing so, the trade-offs that we’re making to create that agility means that we have higher expectations of the engineering quality with which we develop our systems. Things that we didn’t have to concern ourselves with before, or were more or less taken care of before, are now concerns we have to actually bring to bear when building our systems. Things like latency, what happens if a service isn’t available, how do we gracefully handle these kinds of things— performance, security— all of those ‘ilities’ that we like to talk about. All of those things become more and more important as we move to these distributed architectures.

The other piece of that is we also want to get our delivery teams—devs, test, BAs and whoever brings their skills to bear to solve the problem that we’re tackling— we want to get them closer to our customers and to the actual problems. Not only are we expecting more engineering discipline and more technical excellence in the code re-build, we also are asking people who have domain knowledge."

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At the center of every software development shop is the infamous QA team.

They're often viewed as the bottleneck to rapid releases and if their role is done perfectly, QA goes unnoticed. It's a thankless job that allows teams to make frequent releases with delicate, complex systems. As the demand of IT grows and an application throughout becomes more complex, QA is forced to keep up, giving them less time to identify and fix any given defect and risk poor quality releases.

Let's admit it: no one wakes up in the morning and says, I'm going to be the best QA software tester today. However, the role becomes increasingly complex and requires some artistry in the eyes of innovation.

Join us as we deconstruct and interview the best software leaders and teach you how to improve and create the best software factories of the future.

Guest: Nathan Mayer, Business Manager @ AutonomIQ

Nathan Mayer is a Business Manager at AutonomIQ, a company focusing on bringing AI, machine learning, and deep learning innovations to enterprise IT organizations. Most recently, Nathan was the Chief of Staff to the founding CEO at appOrbit. Previously, he spent time working for venture and private equity funds in the US and Israel. In addition to his role at AutonomIQ, Nathan is active in the UC Berkeley community and is a member of the board of directors for the Bowles Hall Foundation, the only residential college on Berkeley's campus.