“But our customers don’t want 10 new versions a year. The last release alone had over 600 bugs!” retorts the hotline manager. “How about a small update with just a handful of bugs?” Your big-bang release is scary. It’s full of issues and weird, new features that nobody understands. It requires documentation and training and [...]
Kanban & Agile
“What is agile?” or “What is kanban?” are questions a lot of people are asking. They wonder whether applying extreme programming techniques or managing user requirements with User Stories is of any value. This area shows you why agile practices are worthwhile software development methods. How can you improve your requirement gathering? What is agile testing? And how do we measure success using agile web development? Read through the articles in this section and find out for yourself!
Investing into code improvement is a dual edged sword: on the one hand you know that if you don’t improve your code you’ll get slower over time. On the other hand improving your code does not deliver tangible value to your users. So how do you know whether you’re on track?
In most enterprises, employees are referred to as resources. Heck, it’s even worse. There’s a whole department dealing with human resources. This, my friend, is bad. It’s bad because it kills the most basic ingredient for agile success: Respect. Respect for your employees. Let’s have a look and see how respect builds the foundation for [...]
You know by now that Code Inventory is something of an obsession with me. Like it or not, most of us, whether developers or sysadmins, work in a service industry. It’s fast and furious, and we don’t have time to build features that nobody wants. With sufficient test coverage, there’s no code that can’t be [...]
This is a guest post by Kevin Parker, VP and Evangelist, Serena Software For those that have to deal with release management, release train is a well-understood term. It refers to a software development schedule where multiple products are released as a part of a single ‘train’ on a regular, pre-planned schedule. But just as [...]
In the past decade we’ve seen thousands of companies introducing agile methodologies. A lot of teams started introducing scrum, re-structuring the way they work, and … getting stuck after a couple of months. Why do most agile introductions come to a screeching halt? Why do so many teams either fall back into old habits or [...]
This is a story about merging two teams. One was using a physical Kanban board and the other was using an electronic one. Of course we were discussing the pros and cons of electronic versus physical boards. My role in the discussion was pretty funny: I used to be a very strong fan of physical [...]
You hear a lot about various agile approaches. Things like Lean, Scrum, Kanban, and Devops seem to be important but it’s hard to sort them out. How do they relate to each other and where to start? Let me try to structure these ideas for you.
Implementing Scrum helps your development department but breaks the old way of doing things, so the overall process actually slows down. Everyone was bashing your development department. You were too slow, you were the bottleneck – if only development would be faster, we could earn so much more money … you know what I’m talking [...]
Imagine you’re driving your car through uncharted territory to a destination only vaguely described by “That Guy” who told you to go there. “That Guy” was kind enough to give you an absolutely non-negotiable deadline too. With that in mind, you race to the first waypoint – you should already be able to see it [...]
