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 … Continue reading Scrum alone won’t cut it
Author: Matthias Marschall
The opinions stated here are my own, not those of my company.
Empower Your Team – You Won’t Regret It
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. Everyone needs to prioritize Every developer or devops has to prioritize the current work … Continue reading Empower Your Team – You Won’t Regret It
Size Matters – Why You Should Prefer Small User Stories
If you have a lot of big user stories, your velocity will jump up and down wildly. This makes it extremely difficult to tell when a user story will be done. Breaking down your huge user stories into smaller ones will help you smooth the flow and give you a clearer picture. User Stories Start … Continue reading Size Matters – Why You Should Prefer Small User Stories
How To Estimate User Stories When Using PivotalTracker
For a team new to agile software development, estimating user stories is not easy. The team is used to estimate tasks in hours and days, and know they're never right anyways. So why bother? In agile, estimating user stories relative to each other using story points can give you a fact based idea about what … Continue reading How To Estimate User Stories When Using PivotalTracker
Automated Configuration Management With Opscode Chef: The Basic Moving Parts
The Moving Parts Managing your infrastructure with Opscode Chef involves a few moving parts you need to be aware of. As I found it quite hard to differentiate, I want to share the basics with you: Chef server There you manage all your nodes and roles. The chef server distributes cookbooks to the nodes. Chef … Continue reading Automated Configuration Management With Opscode Chef: The Basic Moving Parts
Scrum What? New Community Edited Q&A Site About Agile, Lean, Kanban and Scurm
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 … Continue reading Scrum What? New Community Edited Q&A Site About Agile, Lean, Kanban and Scurm
Xen: Debian Lenny Dom0 with Ubuntu Lucid Guest
It sounds like a simple thing to do: As Ubuntu does not have support for Xen by default, I wanted to run a Debian Lenny Server as Xen host (Dom0) with Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) LTS as guest (DomU). But there were some obstacles: debootstrap does not support Ubuntu Lucid by default Ubuntu Lucid cannot boot … Continue reading Xen: Debian Lenny Dom0 with Ubuntu Lucid Guest
Why Automated Testing is a Must for DevOps
You've heard a lot about test automation. But why is it so important? It's a lot of additional effort and adds lots of code which needs to be maintained later, right? DevOps Favors Continuous Releases One of the important parts of any DevOps process is the regular release of working software. In Scrum, iterations tend … Continue reading Why Automated Testing is a Must for DevOps
Launch Dates – The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
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. The Good The positive side of having a … Continue reading Launch Dates – The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
Self-brewed complexity is evil – fight it!
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 … Continue reading Self-brewed complexity is evil – fight it!
