It's been a while since we were using Thoughtworks Mingle as our agile project management tool. We liked their Kanban style Card Walls View a lot. Nevertheless, we switched to PivotalTracker because of its superior support of prioritizing stories in a backlog and automated iteration planning. Unfortunately, PivotalTracker does not offer any Kanban style card … Continue reading Agile Project Management Tools Evolving: Kanban FTW
The 12 principles behind the agile manifesto adapted to web operations
Walking once again through the twelve principles behind the Agile Manifesto, I realized how tailored they are for software development projects. Yet experience has shown that agile practices are not strictly limited to development projects, but to all areas involved in bringing a software product to the users. Here is my version of the twelve … Continue reading The 12 principles behind the agile manifesto adapted to web operations
Optimizing Site Performance: Cookieless Domains
We all like eating cookies, but only so many. Some websites, though, force too many down our throat and I have to say mine was one of those guilty ones. Google's Page Speed tool (and site) gives you an incredible amount of website optimization info. Analyzing my page's performance showed that all the static content … Continue reading Optimizing Site Performance: Cookieless Domains
Real World Example: Using factory_girl to simplify our test setup
When you do integration testing in a ruby on rails application, you don't want to stub out all involved models. Rails' built in approach of using fixtures is considered to be sub-optimal and the way to go today is to use factories. Homegrown Factories In our application we used to write our own factories, one … Continue reading Real World Example: Using factory_girl to simplify our test setup
New Conference On Agile System Administration: Devopsdays 2009
Devopsdays 2009 After years of advocating, @patrickdebois's dream came true: He created the Devopsdays. Quoting his announcement from the Agile System Administration Google Group: Devopsdays '09, the conference that tries to get the best of both dev and ops world. Two days of fun and interesting talks. So if you are a developer with a … Continue reading New Conference On Agile System Administration: Devopsdays 2009
Kanban for Lean Project Management with agilezen.com
Zen is a brand new Kanban tool for lean project management. In contrast to PivotalTracker, which concentrates on automating iteration management for SCRUM like projects, Zen's main view is a story board. The funny thing is, that I preferred the stroy board view in Mingle over the list view provided by PivotalTracker before I started … Continue reading Kanban for Lean Project Management with agilezen.com
Dev and Ops Cooperation
John Allspaw and Paul Hammond did a great presentation at Velocity 2009 about the tools and culture at Flickr, which enable them to do 10+ deploys per day. My favorite quote is: Ops' job is NOT to keep the site stable and fast [but] Ops' job is it to enable the business (this is the … Continue reading Dev and Ops Cooperation
Aegis: Role-based Permissions for your Ruby on Rails application
This is a guest post by our friends over at makandra, a cool Ruby on Rails development shop. Today they announce a great new Ruby gem for dealing with role-based permissions. You know the game! Each time you start a new application the same procedure starts over again: You set up your tools like git, … Continue reading Aegis: Role-based Permissions for your Ruby on Rails application
Monitoring OpenSolaris Zones with Nagios
We're running separate zones for web, app, and db servers. To be able to know the health of our application and our servers, we rely on pnp4nagios for graphing performance data like CPU utilization, memory usage, etc. Using OpenSolaris zones, there is only one OS kernel running. This is different in e.g. XEN, where every … Continue reading Monitoring OpenSolaris Zones with Nagios
Behavior Driven Ops, Kanban vs. Scrum and a new upcoming Monitoring and Trending Tool
Testing Dash Metrics with Cucumber (Bradley Taylor) - A short article showing off a Cucumber feature for monitoring with Nagios. Kanban vs. Scrum (Henrik Kniberg) - A great, 26 page long PDF about the similarities and differences between Scrum and Kanban. Absolutely worth reading! Reconnoiter (Theo Schlossnagle) - Theo and his OmniTI Labs are working … Continue reading Behavior Driven Ops, Kanban vs. Scrum and a new upcoming Monitoring and Trending Tool
