Imagine you’re driving your car through uncharted territory to a destination only vaguely described by "That Guy" who told you to go there. "That Guy" was kind enough to give you an absolutely non-negotiable deadline too. With that in mind, you race to the first waypoint - you should already be able to see it … Continue reading Why projects fail and how to make them succeed with more transparency
Tag: agile
Stop missing out on collaboration opportunities by creating situation awareness
Yesterday, I was waiting for the train to arrive for my daily commute. After it pulled up to the station, a mother with a baby carriage tried to disembark. She struggled with the carriage while carrying a heavy bag, a second child pulling her arm. Naturally, I jumped in to help out and she was … Continue reading Stop missing out on collaboration opportunities by creating situation awareness
How over-capacity hurts your scalability
You’re a lucky guy. Your web app runs on the biggest server available. It takes a mere 10% CPU and has tons of free memory available. Everything is great. Well, not everything… One tiny, little detail might jump out of the darkness at the worst possible moment… That tiny, little detail is a collection of … Continue reading How over-capacity hurts your scalability
The Daily Standup: One step closer to the goal
Almost 9:30am. Time for our stand-up. What did I finish yesterday? What do I plan on finishing today? What's stopping me? The daily routine of the morning stand-up is so ingrained, I go through the above liturgy without conscious thought. For me, the stand-up provides a focused center for the team, our morning huddle. We … Continue reading The Daily Standup: One step closer to the goal
DevOps – Break Down The Wall
Instead of escalating wars between departments by driving them to ever more ambitious, local goals, we need to break down the wall between development and operations. Defining overarching goals which resonate for both departments creates an environment where DevOps collaboration may thrive. Dev and Ops are separate departments Organizations typically divide their teams by type … Continue reading DevOps – Break Down The Wall
How Non-negotiable Features Kill Software Products
You’ve most probably been there: To win that one ueber-important client, your friendly sales rep sells the farm and his grandmother (well actually he sells features, which he invents right in front of the client to make sure to get the deal, but the effect is nearly the same). And not only does he sell … Continue reading How Non-negotiable Features Kill Software Products
DevOps Q&A with Kevin Parker
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
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
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
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
Agile Web Operations 