Posts tagged as:

agile

20 DevOps guys you should follow

by Matthias Marschall on March 4, 2010 · 2 comments

DevOps

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.

Agile Links From The Archives

by Matthias Marschall on March 2, 2010 · 0 comments

picture by Daveybot

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:

Agile Web Operations: What do YOU want it to be?

by Matthias Marschall on February 9, 2010 · 1 comment

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 [...]

Pragmatic Personas: Concrete Examples of Your Users

by Matthias Marschall on February 2, 2010 · 0 comments

by Jeff Patton / InfoQ

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.

Sub-optimization Kills Customer Value

by Matthias Marschall on December 15, 2009 · 0 comments

picture by luckyfly

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 [...]

Agile Is About Feedback, Not About Fancy Practices

by Matthias Marschall on December 9, 2009 · 1 comment

picture by woodleywonderworks

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 [...]

Picture by WolfgangM

Currently, I’m preparing for teaching my next course on Agile Methodology. Again and again, I wonder what is the single most important thing my students should be able to take with them after four full days. One of my core messages is definitely that agile is more about principles than about practices. If you absorb [...]

Pair Programming: Staying within “the zone”

by Matthias Marschall on September 25, 2009 · 1 comment

by a2gemma

Today I spent the whole day debugging an elusive concurrency problem in ruby on rails running on JRuby. We start some threads during the web request and, usually sooner than later, all our database connections are blocked.
Getting deep into the details of multithreading, connection pooling and the like is nothing I enjoy doing. Especially not [...]

A Kanban Board for Features

by Matthias Marschall on September 4, 2009 · 0 comments

Kanban Board for Features

We’re using PivotalTracker as our agile planning tool. It’s great for maintaining a backlog of prioritized user stories and managing the flow of stories within an iteration. We’re really happy with it. But recently a new requirement came up: How can we manage our bigger features? How can we make sure all the stories we [...]

Continuous Improvement and the busyness trap

by Matthias Marschall on August 28, 2009 · 0 comments

Picture by Dan (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ackerson/3825369751/)

You want to be agile. You want to realize value for your customers as fast as possible. And you want to get better every time you do something. Great! But beware! You might get caught in the busyness trap.