Site Logo

Agile Web Development & Operations

Shaping and Evangelizing DevOps since 2008

Technical Debt

by on September 30, 2015 · 1 comment

scary debt monster by Frank Hebbert
Creative Commons LicenseFrank Hebbert


You have to make that release date. You need more time to get the structure of your modules right, but you don’t have it. Hitting the release date is more important than cleaning your code, so you defer the cleanup to make the deadline. You agree to take on technical debt which you’ll have to pay back later. Speeding up now to hit this release date will make you slower hitting the next one. If you’re not careful, over time, development slows down to a crawl and every feature takes weeks instead of days.

To be able to manage technical debt in agile software development, we need to fully understand tech debt. Otherwise, we’ll ruin our software. Some questions to find a technical debt definition are:

  • What is technical debt (and what isn’t)?
  • Where does technical debt come from?
  • When is it ok to create technical debt?
  • How does technical debt hurt development?
  • Technical debt management: how can I measure technical debt?
  • How can I reduce technical debt?
  • How can I avoid technical debt?

[Read more…]

Kanban vs Scrum vs Agile

by on July 27, 2015 · 27 comments

Creative Commons License raaphorst

When inflexible and wasteful software development processes are making your organization inefficient, it’s time to introduce an agile methodology. Kanban vs Scrum then becomes an essential question: Which agile software development methodology is better suited for my own situation? And is Kanban agile? What about Scrum vs agile? Confusion is spreading… Let’s have a look how to sort out all those questions.
[Read more…]

3 Reasons Why Your Team Needs Rituals

by on July 10, 2014 · 1 comment

Morning ritual by Nathan Borror
Creative Commons LicenseNathan Borror

It’s the same every morning: you get up and grab your morning coffee. No matter whether you brew it at home or fetch it on the road, your morning coffee is a ritual you never want to miss.

A ritual is a practice everyone knows how to do. It’s conducted regularly or on well defined occasions. Rituals help to create an identity for a group of people: nations, sports clubs or teams. How can rituals help form a high performing team?
[Read more…]

Why you need to customize your agile methods

by on September 19, 2013 · 2 comments

Windows XP desktop by coolskierguy
Creative Commons Licensecoolskierguy

You’re starting off with a new laptop. The OS is installed, but using it feels awkward. Nothing looks like it used to on your previous one. You’re really frustrated how slow you move around just because you’re missing your beloved customizations.

A few days later you feel the flow again. You’ve tweaked your OS and apps to best fit your workflow.

Your agile process also needs to fit your workflow

[Read more…]

Leadership In the Online Age: A Reflection On Team-Building

by on July 18, 2013 · 0 comments

:p by MR.SWITCH? CRS FERc
Creative Commons LicenseMR.SWITCH? CRS FERc

In the last decade of my career, I’ve been extremely fortunate to have worked with some of the best people I’ve ever known. A big contributing factor to this is the tech-savvy, expatriate culture that exists here in Munich as well as the type of people you typically find abroad who have left their home countries to pursue their dreams. It’s a dynamic that provides an immediate and powerful bond: we have to learn an a lot of things in a short timeframe and sometimes we’re terribly homesick, but we’re not alone. When we combine our strengths and help each other, we achieve something great.

For as many teams as I’ve had the privilege of leading, I’ve often been asked how I did it? How did I take six or seven individuals from different countries and turn them into a team? The question always catches me a bit off-guard because I don’t consciously do this – and I think that’s key. You can’t force anyone to work together as a real team and the harder you try the faster you’ll push them apart. Plus, it’s currently a developers’ market. They can work wherever they want to and they know it! How do you walk this tight-rope and successfully lead a team of rockstar developers?
[Read more…]

Why Teaching Developers To Test Is A Good Investment

by on July 11, 2013 · 1 comment

Doc Tarpon by sierrasportsmen
Creative Commons Licensesierrasportsmen

Test a developer’s software and you’ll find bugs.
Teach a developer to test and they can release their software.

A bit of a twist on the old fish and eating maxim, but the same idea: teaching a skill enables self-reliance and self-confidence. And, while it’s harder than quickly doing someone a big favor, teaching is scaleable in a way that quickly refutes another old adage: we have so many bugs because we don’t have enough testers!
[Read more…]

Stop Scaring Your Customers and Speed Up Releases

by on May 16, 2013 · 0 comments

Roar by Tom Check
Creative Commons LicenseTom Check

“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 who the hell has time for all that?

Monthly, bite-size updates will have fewer features requiring less support (pro-tip: less code == less bugs). Speeding up your release cycle also allows quicker response to customers’ feedback. You’ll finally feel your company moving in the right direction again.

Of course, it’s easy to say. But how can you actually achieve this positive flow? Follow these key points and you’ll be well on your way.
[Read more…]

Where Agile Starts

by on October 2, 2012 · 4 comments

respect your work collegues by atomicjeep
Creative Commons Licenseatomicjeep

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 your success with agile.
[Read more…]

Code Inventory and Tracking Releases

by on August 30, 2012 · 0 comments

Lettuce seeds by photofarmer
Creative Commons LicenseDwight Sipler

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 released within a day of pushing to the repository.

A couple of years ago, I showed you how to Visualize Small Batch Sizes with Git by plotting day-to-day the amount of changed source code lines that hadn’t yet been released to production. While this graph gave immediate feedback about the “drift” of development from operations (live), it’s not something easily digested by upper management. What do these guys really care about? It’s all about the releases silly!
[Read more…]