IBM has laid out a four stage architecture for dev/ops in response to the needs of increasingly software-driven clients who need to create apps quickly for today’s fast evolving markets, says IBM Director of  Capabilities Marketing Randy Newell. Companies are being rocked by multiple disruptive forces — mobile, Big Data, social media, fast evolving markets driven by shifting customer expectations — that demand blazing fast application development across the IT infrastructure in an increasingly complex technical and market environment. Old methods of application development with cycles that run for months or years are no longer adequate when the company’s future depends on creating new software to exploit fast changing opportunities presented by new technologies like Big Data that were unimagined a few years ago. These forces are driving companies to the dev/ops model of rapid development to create new applications for opportunities that will not wait for packaged apps to appear.

Speaking from IBM Insight 2013 in Orlando, Florida, Newell said IBM sees the dev/ops process as comprised of four Adoption Paths:

1. Plan & measure,
2. Develop & test,
3. Release & deploy,
4. Monitor & Optimize.

IBM has announced new and improved products in all four areas at Innovate, but these are designed to be used in a single framework, and the software lifecycle that the four Adoption Paths define has to be seen as a continuous whole, Newell says. “If you just automate the plan and measure phase, you will start producing a lot of apps very quickly only to have them hit a logjam in the test phase. If you automate that, you just move the logjam on to deployment. And if you can’t monitor performance and provide that information back to development you don’t know if you nailed it or need to fix it.”

IBM is filling in all of these stages in the dev/ops life cycle with internally developed and purchased tools and services and made major strides with a series of announcements at Innovate. For example it announced IBM SmartCloud Log Analytics and SmartCloud Application Insight, that fit into monitoring and optimization.

It announced several major extensions to development tools focused on automating cross-platform development for mobile computing. These include extensions to IBM Rational Test Workbench and Rational Test Virtualization Server which IBM acquired with Green Hat a year ago. This technology is based on the concept of virtual test environments, which allow testing in a virtualization of the full complex environment in which the finished application will need to work. The new extensions have added the mobile device environments, allowing developers to send out finished mobile apps with confidence that they will work as intended across the major mobile platforms.

IBM has extended Worklight to support cross-platform mobile app development and added testing capabilities from Rational Test Workbench to it to provide testing as an integral part of app development. It has also added CICS (Customer Information Constrol Services) services to Rational Developer to make them available for developers to build into mobile apps, allowing apps to access data in background corporate systems of record.

It also announced major extensions to the IBM developerWorks cloud service for developers to expand it from a purely social media service for developers into a full interactive development environment that can support geographically dispersed development teams and public development projects. It also announced upgrades to its JazzHub cloud development site to add fully automated task tracking for agile planning, integrated source control, and continuous delivery. JazzHub is still in beta test and allows free public, and during the beta, private project development. It provides full browser-based development through its built-in Orion Eclypse technology.

Finally, Newell said, IBM is very pleased that last Thursday Oasis announced acceptance of the OSLC set of open standards for integration across development tools and platforms. IBM has been one of the champions of OSLC, and its acceptance by Oasis assures that it will remain fully Open Source.