Do Annual Budgets Hurt Agility?

~ Dan Ackerson ~ 2 Comments

Desktop application development is traditionally done in waterfall development mode. Specifications and requirements are gathered over a period of months before being unleashed upon a "pool" of developers for implementation. Development times run into thousands of man days after which a "beta" product is released to the QA team (or perhaps some very brave customers). … Continue reading Do Annual Budgets Hurt Agility?

Initial Test Points for Getting Your Environment Under Control

~ Dan Ackerson ~ Leave a comment

Starting a job with a running system and real users is a nice "problem" to have but it presents some unique challenges as well. Especially if server monitoring isn't robust and there are absolutely zero automated tests. Without these two critical components, you're both operating and developing completely blind. Without monitoring, server changes can't be … Continue reading Initial Test Points for Getting Your Environment Under Control

DevOps Q&A with Kevin Parker

~ Matthias Marschall ~ 1 Comment

This is an interview with Kevin Parker (@kevinparkerusa) about DevOps How do you see agile affecting application development and delivery? The biggest impact is that application development teams are using agile to speed up their delivery of software changes and updates. This makes the developers happy as they can get through requests faster. However, releasing … Continue reading DevOps Q&A with Kevin Parker

Why Excel Spreadsheets Hurt Project Management

~ Dan Ackerson ~ 5 Comments

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

Stabilizing Application Architectures Through Simplification

~ Dan Ackerson ~ Leave a comment

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

~ Dan Ackerson ~ Leave a comment

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

Scrum Meetings – Relief or Burden?

~ Matthias Marschall ~ 1 Comment

Scrum defines a set of required meetings: Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Scrum Review, and Scrum Retrospective. Additionally, there might be a Scrum of Scrums, if you're running multiple Scrum teams in parallel. If you're doing two week sprints you spend at least half-a-day per week in Scrum meetings. Isn't that a lot of additional overhead? … Continue reading Scrum Meetings – Relief or Burden?