 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of DevOps Virtual Forum brought to you by Broadcom. Welcome to Broadcom's DevOps Virtual Forum. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm joined by another Martin, very socially distanced from me, all the way coming from Birmingham, England, is Glen Martin, the head of QA transformation at BT. Glen, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you, Lisa, I'm looking forward to it. As we said before, we went live, two Martins for the price of one in one segment. So this is going to be an interesting segment, guys, is what we're going to do is Glen's going to give us a really kind of deep inside out view of DevOps from an evolution perspective. So, Glen, let's start. Transformation is at the heart of what you do. It's obviously been a very transformative year. How have the events of this year affected the transformation that you are so responsible for driving? Yeah, thank you, Lisa. I mean, yeah, it has been a difficult year. And although working for BT, which is a global telecommunications company, and relatively resilient, I suppose, as an industry through COVID, it obviously still has been affected and has got its challenges. And if anything, it's actually caused us to accelerate our transformation journey. You know, we've had to do some great things during this time around, you know, in the UK for our emergency and health workers, give them unlimited data and for vulnerable people to support them. And that's meant that we've had to deliver changes quickly. But what we want to be able to do is deliver those kind of changes quickly, but sustainably for everything that we do, not just because there's an emergency. So we were already on the kind of journey to agile, but ever more important now that we are able to do that kind of work, do it more quickly and that it works because the implications of it not working is can be terrible in terms of, we've been supporting testing centres, new hospitals to treat COVID patients. So we need to get it right. And therefore the coverage of what we do, the quality of what we do and how quickly we do it really has taken on a new scale and what was already a very competitive market within the telco industry within the UK. You know, what I would say is that, you know, we are under pressure to deliver more value, but we have some more cost challenges. We have to obviously deal with the fact that, you know, COVID-19 has hit most industries kind of revenues and profits. So we've got this kind of paradox between having less cost but having to deliver more value quicker and, you know, to a higher quality. So, yeah, certainly the finances is on our minds and that's why we need flexible models, cost models that allow us to kind of do growth but we get that growth by showing that we're delivering value, especially in, you know, these times when there are financial challenges on companies. So one of the things that I want to ask you about, again, looking at DevOps from the inside out and the evolution that you've seen, you talked about the speed of things really accelerating in this last nine months or so. When we think DevOps, we think speed but one of the things I'd love to get your perspective on, we've talked about in a number of the segments that we've done for this event is cultural change. What are some of the things that you've seen there as needing to get, as you said, get things right but done so quickly to support essential businesses, essential workers. How have you seen that cultural shift? Yeah, I think, you know, before, you know, test teams saw themselves as this part of the software delivery cycle and actually now really our customers are expecting that quality and to deliver for our customers what they want, quality has to be ingrained throughout the lifecycle obviously, there's lots of buzzwords like shift left how to do shift left testing but for me, that's really instilling quality and given capabilities, shared capabilities throughout the lifecycle that drive automation, drive improvements. I always say that, you know, you're only as good as your lowest common denominator and one thing that we were finding on our DevOps journey was that we were, you know, we would be trying to do certain things a bit when we had automated build, automated tests but if we were taking weeks to create test scripts or we were taking weeks to manually craft data and even then when we had taken so long to do it that the coverage was quite poor and that led to lots of defects later on the lifecycle or even in our production environment we just couldn't afford to do that and actually, you know, focusing on continuous testing over the last nine to 12 months has really given us the ability to, you know, deliver quickly across the whole lifecycle and therefore actually go from doing a kind of semi-agile kind of thing where we did the user stories we did a few of the kind of, you know, agile ceremonies but we weren't really deploying any quicker into production because, you know, our stakeholders were scared that we didn't have the same control that we had when we had more water for releases and, you know, when we did think ourselves so we've done a lot of work on every aspect especially from a testing point of view every aspect of every activity rather than just looking at automated tests, you know whether it is actually creating the test in the first place whether it's doing security testing earlier in the line and performance testing in the lifecycle, et cetera. So, yeah, it's been a real key thing for CT for us to drive DevOps. Talk to me a little bit about your team what are some of the shifts in terms of expectations that you're experiencing and how your team interacts with the internal folks from pipeline through lifecycle? Yeah, we've done a lot of work on this. You know, there's a thing that I think people are probably called a customer experience gap and it reminds me of a Gilbert cartoon where, you know we start with the requirements here and, you know, we almost like a Chinese whisper effects and what we deliver is completely different. So we think the testing team or the delivery team, you know, in IT think they've done a great job. This is what it said in the acceptance criteria but then our customers are saying, well actually that's not working, this isn't working, you know and there's this kind of gap. We had a great launch this year of agile requirements design and one of the board com tools and that was for the first time, you know since I remember actually working within B2T I had customers saying to me, wow, you know we want more of this, we want more projects to have a actual requirements design on it because it allowed us to actually work with the business collaboratively. I mean, we talk about collaboration but how do we actually, you know, do that and have something that both the business and technical people can understand and we've actually been working with the business using agile requirements designer to, you know, really look at what the requirements are tease out requirements that they hadn't even thought of and making sure that we've got high levels of test coverage and so what we actually deliver at the end of it not only have we been able to generate tests more quickly but we've got much higher test coverage and also can, you know, more smartly using the kind of AI within the tool and within some of the other kind of pipeline tools actually deliver to choose the right tests and still actually doing a risk-based testing approach. So that's been a great launch this year but just the start of many kinds of things that we're doing. What I hear in that Gwynn is a lot of positives that have come out of a very challenging situation. Talk to me about, and I like that perspective this is a very challenging time for everybody in the world but it sounds like from a collaboration perspective as you're right, we talk about that a lot critical with DevOps but those challenges there you guys were able to overcome those pretty quickly. What other challenges did you face and figure out quickly enough to be able to pivot so fast? I mean, you talked about culture. I mean, you know, BT is like most countries, companies so it's very siloed. You know, we're still trying to work to become a closer as a company. So I think there's a lot of challenges around how do you integrate with other tools? How do you integrate with, you know the various different technologies in BT? We have 58 different IT stacks. That's not systems, that stacks. All of those stacks can have hundreds of systems and we're trying to, we've got to drive at the moment a simplified program where we're trying to, you know reduce that number to 14 stacks and even then there'll be complexity behind the scenes that we will be challenged more and more as we go forward. How do we actually hide that to our users? And as an IT organization, how do we make ourselves leaner so that even when we've, you know we've still got some of that legacy and we'll never fully get rid of it. And that's the kind of trade-off that we have to make. How do we actually deal with that and hide that from our users, as I say and drive those programs so we can, as I say accelerate change. So we take, you know, reduce that kind of waste and that kind of legacy cost out of our business. You know, the other thing as well, BT and I'm sure, you know, telecoms probably no difference to insurance or finance. We've got, you know when you take the number of products that we do and then you combine them the permutations are tens and hundreds of thousands of products. So we as a business are trying to simplify we are trying to, you know do that in an agile way and having tried to do agile in the proper way you know and really actually work at pace really deliver value. So I think what we're looking more and more at the moment is actually is more value-focused before we used to deliver changes sometimes into production. Someone had a great idea or it was a great idea nine months ago or 12 months ago but actually then we ended up deploying it and then we look at the users the usage of that part of that application or whatever it is and it's not been used for six months. So we're getting much we haven't got, you know because of the last 12 months we certainly haven't got room for that kind of waste and you know, for not really understanding the value of changes that we are doing. So I think that's the most important thing at the moment is really taking that waste out. You know, there's lots of focus on things like flow management. What bits of the process are actually taking too long? And we've started on that journey but we've got a hell of a long way to go, you know but that involves looking at every aspect of the kind of software delivery cycle. What are some, because that going from what 58 IT stacks down to 14 or whatever it's going to be simplifying is sounds magical to everybody. It's a big challenge. What are some of the core technology capabilities that you see really as kind of essential for enabling that with this new way that you're working? Yeah, I mean, I think we've started on a continuous testing journey and I think that's just the start. I mean, that's really, as I say looking at every aspect of, you know from a QA point of view is every aspect of what we do. But it's also looking at, you know we're starting to branch into more like AI ops and you know, really the full life cycle. That's just a stepping stone on to, you know I think autonomics is the way forward, right? You know, all of this kind of stuff that happens monitoring, you know, monitoring the systems what's happening in production how do we feed that back? How do we get to a point where actually we think about a change and then suddenly it's in production safely or if it's not going in safely it's automatically backing out. So, you know, it's a very, very long journey but if we want to, you know in a world where the pace is ever increasing and the demands of the team and you know, with the pressures on at the moment where we're being asked to do things, you know more efficiently and as lean as possible we need to be, you know thinking about every part of the process and how do we put the kind of stepping stones in place to lead us to a more automated kind of, you know their future. Do you feel that that planned outcomes are starting to align with what's delivered given this massive shift that you're experiencing? I think it's starting to and I think, you know, as I say as we look at more of a value-based approach and you know, as I say principles of kind of flow management I think that will become ever more important. So, I think it's starting to people certainly realize that, you know teams need to work together, you know the kind of the cousin between business and IT especially as we go to more kind of SaaS based solutions, low code solutions you know, there's not such a gap anymore. Actually, some of our business partners that expects to be much more tech savvy. So, I think, you know this is what we have to kind of appreciate. What is IT's role? How do we give the capabilities become more for centers of excellence rather than actually doing mounds and mounds of work? And for me, and from a testing point of view you know, mounds and mounds of testing actually how do we automate that? How do we actually generate that instead of create it? I think that's the kind of challenge going forward. What are some, as we look forward what are some of the things that you would like to see implemented or deployed in the next say six to 12 months as we hopefully round a corner with this pandemic? Yeah, I think, you know certainly for where we are as a company from a QA perspective we are in the certain bits that we do well you know, we've started creating continuous delivery and a couple of DevOps pipelines. There's still manual aspects of that. So, you know, certainly for me I've challenged my team with saying, how do we do an automated journey? So if I, you know I put a requirement in JIRA or Vali or wherever it is and I then click a button and you know, we've either zero touch or one touch then put that into production and have confidence that that has been done safely and that it works and what happens if it doesn't work? So, you know, that's the next few months that's what our concentration is about but it's also about decision-making, you know how do we actually understand those value judgments? And I think there's lots of things, DevOps, AIOps kind of all these aspects of business operations I think it's about having the information in one place to make those kind of decisions how does it all tie together? As I say, even still with kind of DevOps we've still got elements within my company where we've got lots of different organizations doing similar kind of things but they're all kind of working in silos still. So I think having AIOps as it comes more and more to the fore as we go to the cloud and that's what we need to, you know we're still very early on in our cloud journey, you know so we need to make sure the technologies work with cloud as well as your kind of legacy systems but it's about bringing that all together and having a full visible pipeline that everybody can see and make decisions against. You said the word confidence which jumped out at me right away because absolutely you've got to be able to have confidence in what your team is delivering and how it's impacting the business and those customers. Last question then for you is how would you advise your peers in a similar situation to leverage technology automation, for example, DevOps to be able to gain the confidence that they're making the right decisions for their business? Yeah, I mean, I think that the approach that we've taken actually is not started with technology. We've actually taken a human sense of design as a core principle of what we do within the IT part of BT. So by using human sense of design that means we talk to our customers, we understand their pain points, we map out their current processes and then when we mapped out those processes and also understand their aspirations as well, you know and where do they want to be in six months? You know, do they want to be more agile and you know, or do they want to, you know is this a part of their business that they want to run better? We have to then look at why that's not running well and then see what solutions are out there. We've been lucky that, you know with our partnership with Broadcom within the PLA a lot of the tools in the PLA have directly answered some of the business's problems. But I think by having those conversations and actually engaging with the business, you know especially if the business hold the purse strings which in some companies, including ours, they do. There is that kind of, you know almost by understanding their pain points and then showing this is how we can solve your problem. We've tends to be much more successful than trying to impose something and say well here's a technology that they don't quite understand doesn't really understand how it kind of resonates with their problem. So I think that's the heart of it. It's really about, you know getting, looking at the data, looking at the processes looking at where the kind of waste is and then actually then looking at the right solutions and as I say, you know continuous testing is massive for us. We've also got a good relationship with Apple tools looking at visual AI and actually there's a common theme through that and AI is becoming more and more prevalent. And I know sometimes what is AI and people have kind of the semantics of is it true AI or not? But certainly AI and machine learning is becoming more and more prevalent in the way that we work and it's allowing us to be much more effective, be quicker in what we do and be more accurate in whether it's finding defects running the right tests or being able to anticipate problems before they're happening in a production environment. Well, Coon, thank you so much for giving us this sort of insight outlook at DevOps sharing the successes that you're having taking those challenges, converting them to opportunities and forgiving folks who might be in your shoes or maybe slightly behind advice and sure they appreciate it. We appreciate your time. That's been an absolute pleasure. Really, thank you for inviting me. I've extremely enjoyed it. So thank you ever so much. Excellent, me too. I've learned a lot for Glenn Martin and Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE.