“We’d like to offer a poll on our site. How long do you think it would take to create a polling tool?” A good question, and, like any good developer, I thought about how long it would take. A few days for the frontend screens design. A couple days to create the backend “data entry” [...]
March 2009
I really love working in small batches as it ensures timely feedback and fast realization of customer value. Usually, we release two to three times a week – each release featuring only a handful of user stories. While I got used to working in this mode over the last couple of years, it’s really impressive [...]
Agile and ITIL, agile sys admins, why to work in small batches and how to handle bugs in an agile context – the topics for todays four short links. Agile and ITIL: A Powerful Combination (Joe Pearson, PM Hut) – I’ve also given a lot of thought on how to join the lean values of [...]
It’s a sad reality. Most IT departments are drowning in a sea of unresolved trouble tickets. Every staff member does her best to keep afloat by working off issue after issue from the never ending stream of trouble tickets. Motivation and quality plummet because, in such a work mode, people tend to work alone feel [...]
This is a guest post by Patrick Debois, the author of JEDI: Just Enough Developed Infrastructure. I stumbled across Patrick early last year while searching desperately for some relevant topics on “agile operations”. One amusing, yet poignant, hit was the lost use cases of Operations. Agile Web Operations didn’t even exist at the time, but [...]
Today, I want to walk you through one of the ready-made appliance recipes that comes with Carpet. This article assumes you’ve read the getting started with Carpet guide. Appliance recipes are plain Capistrano recipes which enable you to setup a complete server by just using one of the pre-defined ones like apache_lb, rails_22, memcached or [...]
This is a guest post by Thomas Eisenbarth. Thomas studied computer science at the University of Augsburg, currently works at BINconsult GmbH, Berlin and co-founded makandra GmbH in Augsburg. He and his teams develop and operate web applications. As Dan discussed already in Getting a Grip on your Operations with Munin and 10 Seconds A [...]
For some damn reason, your website is slow again. It’s a drag having to pour through logs looking for problems, but if you don’t have any monitoring tools installed you don’t have much choice. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools out there – easy to install, free to use and often make the difference between [...]
Today, I want to share some of my favorite blog posts about agile with you. Without further ado, here they are: How Do Story Points Relate to Hours? – One recurring question I get asked when talking about agile (and specifically when estimating in Story Points) is how those things relate. Mike Cohn does a [...]
