Today was a great day. I helped import our entire "roadmap" of functional requirements from an Excel spreadsheet into Pivotal Tracker. Even though we allocated almost a half-day to accomplish this, it was done in less than two hours (including in-depth descriptions and backgrounds on many features I hadn't yet seen). The product manager's eyes … Continue reading Why Excel Spreadsheets Hurt Project Management
Author: Dan Ackerson
Stabilizing Application Architectures Through Simplification
Consider the following: People are complicated and companies are run by a lot of people. A relationship between two people is complicated. Relationships between companies? Well, you see where I'm going. Outsource a software development project requiring 10 developers, an on-site team of 3 managers and 4 developers, involving a total of 4 external companies. … Continue reading Stabilizing Application Architectures Through Simplification
Ground Zero: Starting Agile Development from Scratch
One of the most challenging things about introducing Agile in the workplace is that it's not very widespread. People have heard mixed reviews about it's implementations, and are hesitant to exchange the known (no matter how bad it may be), for the unknown. More and more companies, however, are adopting Scrum for their project management. … Continue reading Ground Zero: Starting Agile Development from Scratch
State of Development: Annual Address on How We Ship Software
It's been a while since I talked about how we develop and deploy software at my current job. It's come a long way from the "Good Ole Days", when cowboy coders manually FTP'd their changes to the master server and rsync came along 5 minutes later to replicate the changes to the slaves *shudder*. Keep … Continue reading State of Development: Annual Address on How We Ship Software
Top Three Traits of Successful Engineers
You know it within an hour of working with them. A special kind of sysadmin or developer that not only knows how to do their job, but really cares about doing it right. This is the person that makes you refactor that duplicate method or add that one last test. The kind of engineer that … Continue reading Top Three Traits of Successful Engineers
DevOps Driven Demand
This is a guest post from John Willis (@botchagalupe) What if DevOps created more defects, tickets, requests, and more overall work? Would that be a good thing or bad. Let’s take a look. Information Technology Asymmetry Let’s face it, IT has historically had an asymmetric relationship between it’s suppliers and consumers. In fact one of … Continue reading DevOps Driven Demand
Prerequisites for Continuous Deployment
Although we've skirted around the edges of Continuous Deployment on this blog, we haven't really gone into any details. The main reason for this is simply that neither Matthias nor myself have ever continuously deployed to our production environments. How hard could it be? Well, like with most engineering endeavors, it's about 99% preparation and … Continue reading Prerequisites for Continuous Deployment
Free Cloudkick Monitoring for EC2
For my final post in freely acquiring, maintaining and monitoring a virtual root server, I'd like to introduce you to Cloudkick. They've had a major marketing campaign going on after being acquired by the folks from Rackspace. I actually clicked through one of their ads while browsing some headlines on Slashdot. Besides free basic checks … Continue reading Free Cloudkick Monitoring for EC2
DevOps Entrenched – Tide Begins to Turn
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 … Continue reading DevOps Entrenched – Tide Begins to Turn
Stealthily Introducing Agile from the Bottom Up
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. … Continue reading Stealthily Introducing Agile from the Bottom Up
