I’ve been in the process of introducing agile over at NetDoktor for over a year. I really like the sound of “in the process of introducing agile”. It’s kinda like the permanent Gmail Beta (or Flickr Alpha). It means there will never really be a “final” agile process here and that’s a great thing! Why? Because the whole point of agile is adapting. “Adapt or die” is about the most basic business tenet I can imagine.
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Writing software that doesn’t suck is hard – even for the pros. The problem doesn’t lie in solving a hard problem, but in creating a solution which is easy to understand, robust, and easy to change.
A lot of problems in teams and organizations stem from bad code. Bad code ruins the motivation of your team, slows you down to a crawl and drags you down, deeper and deeper into the fire fighting vicious cycle.
DevOps is an approach to bridge the gap between agile software development and operations. The DevOps tribe is a growing group of people practicing a new way of combining development and system administration for more speed, quality, revenues, and fun.
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One finding from our survey was that a lot of you want to read more about agile basics. As most of you haven’t followed Agile Web Operations since Day One, here’s a list of the top three posts about agile and kanban:
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Throughout the last couple of days, I did a bigger refactoring of our Ruby on Rails application. As I changed quite a few moving parts, I covered everything I did with RSpec. It’s really an incredible feeling to have all your bases covered with automated tests when you finally start the manual regression test. Along the way, I came across a few things I wanted to share with you.
When you’re writing specs you want to bring order to them sooner or later. I really use nested describe-blocks a lot. Let’s look into a Controller spec to see what I do:
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For nearly two years Dan and I have shared our experiences and ideas about agile development and system administration. With every post we hoped to be helpful, and maybe some of them even were…
Now, as we approach 500 subscribers, we would like to ask you, our dear readers, how we could help you to become even more agile and have more fun doing your job.
Please take our short survey at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LJVMRG9 and tell us about your situation, your goals and how you would profit most from our experiences.
We’d love to hear from you!
Dan & Matthias
Jeff Patton’s talk at agile 2009 about Pragmatic Personas is quite interesting. I’ve seen talks about personas way back at agile 2007 already, but, at that time, I found them quite “bulky” to use. In pragmatic personas I see more value.
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After following Dan’s tutorial on installing munin on your servers, you already get the benefits of munin’s default plugins. You have graphs showing your CPU, RAM, I/O, as well as MySQL, Exim, and quite some other stats. But most of the time you run some additional software which you also want to montior.
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When we start optimizing our processes, it happens quite often that we only optimize our area of influence instead of addressing the whole process of creating customer value. When we’re responsible for a software development or an operations team, we tend to optimize the process of our team. We adapt agile practices and our teams performance seems to skyrocket. But even if we’re that successful, it might do more harm than good. We might flood the QA team with features, which they have to sign off, creating overload on their end. Or our operations environment might be the greatest part of our organization, but there are no new features or necessary bug fixes arriving for deployment.
Too often people complain that to become agile they need to start using iterations, fancy story points and time boxes even though it simply does not fit the way they work.
But, that’s not true. Agile is much simpler than that. And much harder. In essence, agile is about fast feedback. But the feedback needs to be relevant.
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