Agile Management – Iterative software requirements for flexible project delivery

Of all the current development methodologies, Agile increasingly becomes more popular, and with good reason. From agile testing to agile project management, the trend towards lean processes and customer value is overwhelmingly seeking center stage. Certainly, agile software development makes up a large quota of practitioners, but the trend towards an agile unified process for the entire enterprise looms large.

DevOps – Break Down The Wall

by Matthias Marschall on November 24, 2011 · 0 comments

Instead of escalating wars between departments by driving them to ever more ambitious, local goals, we need to break down the wall between development and operations. Defining overarching goals which resonate for both departments creates an environment where DevOps collaboration may thrive.

How Non-negotiable Features Kill Software Products

by Matthias Marschall on September 22, 2011 · 11 comments

You’ve most probably been there: To win that one ueber-important client, your friendly sales rep sells the farm and his grandmother (well actually he sells features, which he invents right in front of the client to make sure to get the deal, but the effect is nearly the same). And not only does he sell [...]

DevOps Q&A with Kevin Parker

by Matthias Marschall on July 26, 2011 · 1 comment

This is an interview with Kevin Parker (@kevinparkerusa) about DevOps How do you see agile affecting application development and delivery? The biggest impact is that application development teams are using agile to speed up their delivery of software changes and updates. This makes the developers happy as they can get through requests faster. However, releasing [...]

The three essentials of any agile process

by Matthias Marschall on May 24, 2011 · 1 comment

In the heat of introducing agile practices like daily stand-up meetings, retrospectives, unit testing, or defining “Done”, you can get easily overwhelmed by all the new and shiny ideas. It’s a real danger that implementing these new practices creates huge overheads, slows you down, and frustrates the team. They forget why you actually introduced agile [...]

Agile teams often struggle with purely technical tasks. They just don’t know how to translate technical necessity into business value. This makes it difficult to prioritize technical tasks against User Stories. In this article, I want to show you how to transform the hidden value of technical tasks into visible business value to ease prioritization [...]

DevOps Entrenched – Tide Begins to Turn

by Dan Ackerson on April 5, 2011 · 1 comment

I’ve always seen it as a battle. Maybe it’s the soldier in me or just the willingness to fight for my beliefs. Either way, we are winning and the IT industry will never be the same. Developers and Sysadmins are joining forces and forming “Delivery Teams” – working together to ship high quality products to [...]

Stealthily Introducing Agile from the Bottom Up

by Dan Ackerson on March 22, 2011 · 3 comments

Even today, in the 21st century, it’s rare for CEOs to steer their companies into agile waters. Change is hard, scary and leads into the unknown and changing an entire organization compounds all these fears. But, there are subtle, yet significant, ways in which you can organize your own work to be much more agile. [...]

You’re caught in a vicious cycle: The constant need to do fire fighting doesn’t give you any time to avoid fires in the first place. This is a pretty typical scenario not only in operations, but in development as well. Even though you seem to be stuck in a downward spiral and your team is [...]

Bugfixes without Tests are Anti-fixes

by Dan Ackerson on October 5, 2010 · 12 comments

We all make mistakes. But how we go about redressing those mistakes tells a lot about our personality, both our strengths as well as our shortcomings. Bugs are a natural part of software development. Testing not so much. I attribute this to, among other things, general developer laziness and the constant pressure of ‘Getting Things [...]

The 5 Goals Of Agile And DevOps

by Matthias Marschall on September 3, 2010 · 4 comments

If you’re stuck with someone in an elevator and have only a few seconds to explain why introducing agile Methodolgies and DevOps is a good idea, these five goals might help you: