We've invested quite some time in our WordPress Micro instance now. It's definitely past the playing-around, prototype phase, so let's get some automated backups in place. But, since we already suffered to get the EC2 API Tools installed, the hard part is actually done. Let's get a couple of weekly cronjobs setup: bitnami@awo:~$ crontab -l … Continue reading Poor Man’s Automated Snapshots for EC2
Devops in a Regulated Mainframe Environment
Striving for real world experiences with agile, kanban, lean, and devops I ran a series of email interviews. Today I want to share the answers of Manu Khronis, NRB, Belgium. Please tell me a little about your current situation, your team and your job I am responsible for IT change management at Network Resource Belgium, … Continue reading Devops in a Regulated Mainframe Environment
Kanban: Changing story acceptance criteria whilst story is ongoing
In Scrum it's clear, a product owner can't change the acceptance criteria of a story in the current sprint without killing the sprint. Do you guys think the same principle should be applied in Kanban? I mean once a story has moved from a planning column and into an in-progress column, should the product owner … Continue reading Kanban: Changing story acceptance criteria whilst story is ongoing
[Question] How to implement Sprint Backlogs and Release cycles?
The company my team is delivering additive value to product in terms of continuous evolution there are two principles which makes me think more about release cycles. The company PO conducts Integration Testing and when it has passed they conduct User Acceptance testing. Without those procedures they are not releasing the release into production. User … Continue reading [Question] How to implement Sprint Backlogs and Release cycles?
[Question] Dealing with bugs in Scrum
Hi, we do Scrum and commit to a sprint goal. Now, if we find bugs during a sprint we don't know what to do with 'em. Shall we include them into the current sprint? Shall we put them onto our backlog? And how shall we deal with estimating them? Any ideas highly appreciated! Find the … Continue reading [Question] Dealing with bugs in Scrum
[Question] online kanban tools?
Hello there, any good tools for distributed Kanban around? Find the answers below in the Comments
The Big-Bang Release Strikes Back
This is how I started off my New Year - merging the completely refactored code branch into the master. Test coverage was pitiful enough that there was no way we could do a release without a full regression test. Another term near and dear to my heart. I believe full regression testing was actually invented … Continue reading The Big-Bang Release Strikes Back
WordPress Caching For High Performance EC2 Micro Instances
For the price, it's hard to beat the EC2 Micro instance. But, if you have even a little bit of traffic, don't expect to run a stock AMI without feeling some performance pain. After migrating this blog, we noticed that being logged in (meaning no wordpress cache hits) literally slowed the server down to a … Continue reading WordPress Caching For High Performance EC2 Micro Instances
How Scrum Induced Sub-Optimization Kills Productivity (And How To Fix It With Kanban)
Quite often, IT managers see Scrum as the solution to increase the speed of software development. Indeed, you can speed up your software development processes dramatically by successfully using Scrum for organizing your engineering department. But, people often forget that they can only create value for their customers if they optimize the whole organization towards … Continue reading How Scrum Induced Sub-Optimization Kills Productivity (And How To Fix It With Kanban)
The Hidden Costs of Technical Debt
Recently, I had the unpleasant responsibility of stopping our development line. And it wasn't just for a day or two. It was for a couple of months. The complexity of the codebase made every simple feature we added take weeks to implement, and I realized we were getting a negative return on our efforts. How … Continue reading The Hidden Costs of Technical Debt
