Divide and conquer, Caesar's strategy to break huge problems down into smaller parts, is an outdated model for structuring teams and organizations. Breaking teams apart by area like development, QA, operations, product management, etc, creates silo like divisions of labor. Unfortunately, these divisions create so many "walls of confusion" between the silos that your speed … Continue reading DevOps: Why Silos Suck And How To Break Them
Tag: agile
Stop. Reflect. Adapt. The 3 Steps to Stop Writing Bad Code
Writing software that doesn't suck is hard - even for the pros. The problem doesn't lie in solving a hard problem, but in creating a solution which is easy to understand, robust, and easy to change. A lot of problems in teams and organizations stem from bad code. Bad code ruins the motivation of your … Continue reading Stop. Reflect. Adapt. The 3 Steps to Stop Writing Bad Code
20 DevOps guys you should follow
DevOps is an approach to bridge the gap between agile software development and operations. The DevOps tribe is a growing group of people practicing a new way of combining development and system administration for more speed, quality, revenues, and fun. The DevOps Tribe Here is a list of some of the most active guys in … Continue reading 20 DevOps guys you should follow
Agile Links From The Archives
One finding from our survey was that a lot of you want to read more about agile basics. As most of you haven't followed Agile Web Operations since Day One, here's a list of the top three posts about agile and kanban: Agile Is About Feedback, Not About Fancy Practices Kanban vs. Iterative Development Kanban … Continue reading Agile Links From The Archives
Agile Web Operations: What do YOU want it to be?
For nearly two years Dan and I have shared our experiences and ideas about agile development and system administration. With every post we hoped to be helpful, and maybe some of them even were... Now, as we approach 500 subscribers, we would like to ask you, our dear readers, how we could help you to … Continue reading Agile Web Operations: What do YOU want it to be?
Pragmatic Personas: Concrete Examples of Your Users
Jeff Patton's talk at agile 2009 about Pragmatic Personas is quite interesting. I've seen talks about personas way back at agile 2007 already, but, at that time, I found them quite "bulky" to use. In pragmatic personas I see more value. What is a Pragmatic Persona? Jeff defines a pragmatic persona by having a name … Continue reading Pragmatic Personas: Concrete Examples of Your Users
Sub-optimization Kills Customer Value
When we start optimizing our processes, it happens quite often that we only optimize our area of influence instead of addressing the whole process of creating customer value. When we're responsible for a software development or an operations team, we tend to optimize the process of our team. We adapt agile practices and our teams … Continue reading Sub-optimization Kills Customer Value
Agile Is About Feedback, Not About Fancy Practices
Too often people complain that to become agile they need to start using iterations, fancy story points and time boxes even though it simply does not fit the way they work. But, that's not true. Agile is much simpler than that. And much harder. In essence, agile is about fast feedback. But the feedback needs … Continue reading Agile Is About Feedback, Not About Fancy Practices
Waterfall, SCRUM and Lean Software Development simulation as teaching platform
Currently, I'm preparing for teaching my next course on Agile Methodology. Again and again, I wonder what is the single most important thing my students should be able to take with them after four full days. One of my core messages is definitely that agile is more about principles than about practices. If you absorb … Continue reading Waterfall, SCRUM and Lean Software Development simulation as teaching platform
Pair Programming: Staying within “the zone”
Today I spent the whole day debugging an elusive concurrency problem in ruby on rails running on JRuby. We start some threads during the web request and, usually sooner than later, all our database connections are blocked. Getting deep into the details of multithreading, connection pooling and the like is nothing I enjoy doing. Especially … Continue reading Pair Programming: Staying within “the zone”
