The Kitty Hawk Venture: A Novel About Continuous Testing in DevOps to Support Continuous Delivery and Business Success

An airline is supposed to make the experience of booking a flight easy, trouble free, and reliable. But when scheduling software breaks down and flights get canceled, customers will walk, and heads will roll. That’s what Leigh Freemark faces the day she and her team launch a software upgrade that fails spectacularly and hits the media immediately. As Senior Director of Quality Assurance, her job is to make sure that code is market ready. And she’s the one who must face the music when it doesn’t.

Tasked by senior management to find and fix the source of the failure, Leigh discovers just how essential it has become to radically improve the process of software development by introducing a concept called continuous testing. She must quickly learn what it means, how it works, and how to build it into her company’s legacy system.

But she soon discovers that managing change is much more difficult than it first appears. The airline business is changing fast, yet old traditions and loyalties still dominate. As she fights to convince her team to change or perish, she discovers that obstructions and opportunities come in surprising forms.

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In The Kitty Hawk Venture, the authors deliver a sound lesson in the importance of continuous testing while taking the reader inside the world of commercial aviation. Each chapter delivers distinct and vital learning opportunities wrapped inside a fast-moving narrative complete with interesting characters, intriguing situations, and even some humor. The book concludes with a “Flight Plan for Continuous Testing” that stands on its own as a valuable resource guide for digital leaders in their continuous testing journey. The story is immediately relatable to anyone who has worked in software development or for the companies that rely on it.

Who This Book Is For

C-level executives, VPs of apps and quality, VPs of DevOps, architecture and strategy managers, and SMB and enterprise professionals

About the Authors

Jeff Scheaffer is Senior Vice President and GM of the Continuous Delivery and DevOps Business Unit at CA Technologies. His specialties include: DevOps, mobility, SaaS, continuous delivery (CDCI), application performance management (APM), big data and operations analytics, hybrid cloud management, OpenStack, software defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), and server, storage, and network monitoring and management.

Aruna Ravichandran is Vice President of Global Marketing at CA Technologies. She is the author of DevOps for Digital Leaders (Apress) and a frequent keynote speaker on DevOps topics. She has over 20 years of experience in building and marketing products in various markets such as IT operations management (APM, infrastructure management, service management, cloud management, analytics, log management, and data center infrastructure management), continuous delivery, test automation, security, and SDN.

Aruna frequently blogs for various publications such as SYS-CON Media, Wired Insights, Tech Target, Information Week DevOpsDigest.com, DevOps.com Cloud Tweaks, to name a few. She frequently presents at various industry conferences and has presented at Gartner Symposium 2016, Gartner ITOM 2014, Gartner Data Center 2014, DevOps Summit 2014, Cloud Expo 2014, CA World 2014, 2015, and HP Discover (2008-2012). She has authored several articles and other publications. Aruna earned a master's degree in computer engineering and an MBA from Santa Clara University. In 2016, Aruna was named one of Top 100 The Most Influential Women in Silicon Valley by the San Jose Business Journal, and received the 2016 Most Powerful and Influential Woman Award by the National Diversity Council.

Alex Martins is CTO of Continuous Testing at CA Technologies. He has more than 18 years of experience in large-scale application design, development, and testing. For the last 13 years, Alex has been focused on software quality engineering and the testing discipline as the pillars for DevOps transformations. Going through all levels, from tester to practice leader in various technology companies such as EDS, IBM, HP, Cognizant Technology Solutions, and CA Technologies, he built and ran several enterprise testing organizations and centers of enablement in Latin America and the US for multiple clients. He led HP’s global testing innovation capability, creating continuous testing offerings to support digital transformation initiatives and was one of the innovation leaders in Cognizant's mobile and IoT QA practice. Currently, he leads CA Technologies' continuous testing and quality solutions as he works with organizations to accelerate the time-to-value (TTV) from idea-to-release.