This is a guest post by Boris Gloger (@borisgloger) A couple of days ago I commented on Matthias' post about the myth that Scrum forces a team to release new functionality only after a sprint is finished while Kanban would is more flexible. I wanted to know the difference between Scrum and Kanban, and why … Continue reading Scrum or Kanban – It does not matter
The three essentials of any agile process
In the heat of introducing agile practices like daily stand-up meetings, retrospectives, unit testing, or defining "Done", you can get easily overwhelmed by all the new and shiny ideas. It's a real danger that implementing these new practices creates huge overheads, slows you down, and frustrates the team. They forget why you actually introduced agile … Continue reading The three essentials of any agile process
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
Scrum vs Continuous Deployment or why Scrum falls short for web applications
Product development needs consistency The basic idea of Scrum is to create a safe and change-free environment to enable a team to concentrate on the planned development tasks. The team plans out a sprint of typically two weeks and the idea is that they work uninterrupted during this period. This process really helps to get … Continue reading Scrum vs Continuous Deployment or why Scrum falls short for web applications
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
How to translate “business value” of things that are technically important
Agile teams often struggle with purely technical tasks. They just don't know how to translate technical necessity into business value. This makes it difficult to prioritize technical tasks against User Stories. In this article, I want to show you how to transform the hidden value of technical tasks into visible business value to ease prioritization … Continue reading How to translate “business value” of things that are technically important
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
How Digital Agile Management Tools Make You Blind (And How A Physical Kanban Board Can Help You See Again)
We've been using PivotalTracker for years to manage our agile software development process. It works like a charm for us. Whenever an idea comes up, we enter it into Tracker as an Epic (no matter how rough and abstract it might be). When the time comes to start implementing it, we usually break it down … Continue reading How Digital Agile Management Tools Make You Blind (And How A Physical Kanban Board Can Help You See Again)
