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 [...]
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.
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 [...]
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:
Scrum is a great framework for organizing projects. It defines exact roles and procedures to structure your work environment. You gain a lot of visibility and you empower your teams. All that is great. But in software development or operations it’s not sufficient. You need an underlying set of values and practices which drive quality [...]
It’s hard to find the right structure for any organization. A lot of existing management wisdom comes from a time when you had to organize a physical work force. However, with today’s “knowledge workers” those structures don’t work as nicely anymore.
A lot of people I meet are interested in agile software development. Either they’ve heard about it or they participate in projects which use Scrum, Kanban, or Extreme Programming. They wonder whether it makes sense to do pair programming, which Kanban tools to use, how to get started with test driven development or how to [...]
Setting a launch date for your new web site is common practice. Even though nobody knows what exactly the site might look like and even less how much effort it will be to launch it, the release date is fixed. This can have positive and negative effects.
It’s amazing to see again and again how teams complicate their lives without any necessity. They dream up features “urgently” required by their imaginary customers and then start a death march to launch them at an arbitrary, self-invented date. Why is it so hard to simplify things and get going? Let’s have a look at [...]
Divide and conquer, Caesar’s strategy to break huge problems down into smaller parts, is an outdated model for structuring teams and organizations. Breaking teams apart by area like development, QA, operations, product management, etc, creates silo like divisions of labor. Unfortunately, these divisions create so many “walls of confusion” between the silos that your speed [...]
