PivotalTracker is a great tool for organizing your work. No matter whether you work mainly in software development, operations, or in a shared DevOps environment, PivotalTracker keeps you up to the task. Over the last couple of years using it, we've seen some patterns for setting up projects and organizing stories with tags. Start And … Continue reading PivotalTracker: The Simple Steps To Start a New Project
Tag: tools
Chef: RVM + Ruby Enterprise Edition as Default Ruby
The opscode chef bootstrap installs Matz Ruby on the node automatically. There are cookbooks for installing ruby enterprise edition on a node, but they create a separate Ruby "universe" on your box: You will have to be very careful how you install gems to make sure they are used by either the default Ruby or … Continue reading Chef: RVM + Ruby Enterprise Edition as Default Ruby
How to Deploy Ruby on Rails With The Opscode Chef Application Cookbook
I already wrote about how to get started with the Opscode Chef Platform. In this article I want to show you a very elegant way to deploy a Ruby on Rails stack with Chef. One of the strengths of Chef is the decent set of available cookbooks. @jtimberman does an especially excellent job in writing … Continue reading How to Deploy Ruby on Rails With The Opscode Chef Application Cookbook
A/B Testing with Webrat
It all began a year ago. We wanted to introduce a new navigation bar, but gradually, gaining feedback (and confidence) that it was the right upgrade for our users. My idea at that time was a random cookie which would show 20% of our users the new navigation while giving them a separate google analytics … Continue reading A/B Testing with Webrat
Why your boss will love Capistrano
Scaleability is a term near and dear to a CTO's heart. It's also the most important factor in growing a website. If you want to avoid the "fail whale" at right, you have to be able to scale your application to run on hundreds (and, if you're really lucky, thousands) of servers. Let's take a … Continue reading Why your boss will love Capistrano
Continuous Integration with Hudson
Wow - a big, fancy phrase that may seem intimidating at first. Let's break it down: "Continuous" meaning constantly, all the time; and "Integration" - building smaller parts into a larger whole. "Constantly Building" ? Well, that's pretty darn close. So, what are we constantly building here? Sure, we're churning out new features regularly, but … Continue reading Continuous Integration with Hudson
A Kanban Board for Features
We're using PivotalTracker as our agile planning tool. It's great for maintaining a backlog of prioritized user stories and managing the flow of stories within an iteration. We're really happy with it. But recently a new requirement came up: How can we manage our bigger features? How can we make sure all the stories we … Continue reading A Kanban Board for Features
Agile Project Management Tools Evolving: Kanban FTW
It's been a while since we were using Thoughtworks Mingle as our agile project management tool. We liked their Kanban style Card Walls View a lot. Nevertheless, we switched to PivotalTracker because of its superior support of prioritizing stories in a backlog and automated iteration planning. Unfortunately, PivotalTracker does not offer any Kanban style card … Continue reading Agile Project Management Tools Evolving: Kanban FTW
Kanban for Lean Project Management with agilezen.com
Zen is a brand new Kanban tool for lean project management. In contrast to PivotalTracker, which concentrates on automating iteration management for SCRUM like projects, Zen's main view is a story board. The funny thing is, that I preferred the stroy board view in Mingle over the list view provided by PivotalTracker before I started … Continue reading Kanban for Lean Project Management with agilezen.com
Dev and Ops Cooperation
John Allspaw and Paul Hammond did a great presentation at Velocity 2009 about the tools and culture at Flickr, which enable them to do 10+ deploys per day. My favorite quote is: Ops' job is NOT to keep the site stable and fast [but] Ops' job is it to enable the business (this is the … Continue reading Dev and Ops Cooperation
Agile Web Operations 