Harness announced this week that it has acquired Propelo, a provider of analytics tools that identify bottlenecks in software engineering processes. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Propelo’s offering will be available as a module called Harness Software Engineering Insights, which organizations can choose within their company-wide continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.
Scott Sanchez, chief marketing officer at Harness, says Propel is unique in that the tool already has all the necessary integrations to collect data from a wide range of DevOps platforms. As a result, the DevOps team can instantly collect telemetry data not only from the Harness platform, but also from his CI/CD platforms such as Jenkins, GitLab and Azure. Plus, there are integrations with over 40 third-party tools, including Atlassian’s Jira project management software.
These integrations enable the Harness Software Engineering Insights module to surface insights aligned with Google’s DevOps Readiness Assessment (DORA) metrics and Satisfaction, Performance, Activity, Communication, and Efficiency (SPACE) framework. .
In an uncertain global economy, making DevOps teams more productive is more important than ever, Sanchez said. As more organizations are reluctant to hire as many full-time employees as they once did, more attention will be paid to maximizing existing investments, he said. added.
A focus on productivity naturally leads to a re-examination of workflows and identifying bottlenecks in DevOps workflows. Once the bottlenecks are removed, the pace of software development will accelerate, he said. In some cases, he noted, the software development lifecycle (SDLC) processes companies use are 20 years old.
The acquisition of Propelo is the latest addition to its portfolio of DevOps tools designed to deploy alongside its existing platform, Sanchez said. Organizations that have used platforms such as Jenkins aren’t going to rip and replace them overnight, he added. The Harness portfolio is designed to deploy alongside existing platforms, allowing organizations to modernize their DevOps workflows in a far less disruptive way than competing DevOps platforms, he said. says.
Harness first developed the CD platform before acquiring Drone to add complementary CI capabilities. He then acquired ChaosNative to add chaos engineering tools based on the LitmusChaos open source tools. This is currently under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
It’s not clear how quickly organizations will modernize their traditional DevOps platforms. Yet, workflows and pipelines designed for different eras of application development are often unable to keep up with the pace at which modern cloud-native applications are being developed. Of course, it’s up to each DevOps team to decide if adding DevOps tools and platforms makes economic sense. Application developers naturally tend to gravitate toward organizations that reduce development friction as much as possible.
In an era where organizations rely on developers to drive digital transformation initiatives, the underlying DevOps tools and platforms used to build applications can easily make the difference between success and failure.
