Too often, organizations try to rush agile change. It is usually because they want to see the business benefits of agile as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, change doesn’t work like that—you can’t rush it. In fact, trying to change too fast often results in no change at all. Here are some examples to avoid.
One of the major reasons organizations adopt DevOps practices is to accelerate delivery of software to production. However, many fail to include quality components in their practices. Continuous deployment without quality is just delivering continuous bugs. Here’s why software testing is an essential part of DevOps.
Federal agencies generally have more regulation, slower processes, and a command-and-control style of bureaucracy. How does it work when trying to foster agility and implement a continuous delivery model? Gene Gotimer relates his experiences and challenges with encouraging a culture change in federal government.
I’ve had the privilege (and the many challenges) of working in IT for more than three decades. Early in my career I tended to accept things as they were presented, following the techniques, processes, guidelines, and approaches I was taught by my peers and managers. As I gained experience and wisdom, I became a better independent thinker and started to connect the dots and ask questions.
The word continuous gets thrown around a lot when talking about agile and DevOps. One area that often doesn’t get enough attention is how to continuously build, test, and deliver secure applications.Just like for quality, you can’t test security in, so you need to have a plan for how to build it in from the ground up. Here are some tips on how to do that.
One of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto is “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” Unfortunately, many associate that practice with performing team retrospectives at the end of a sprint, or periodically in kanban. But if you seek to build a high-performing team, there are more improvement activities you should consider adopting.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. The cultures that are trying to adopt agile are usually command-and-control, because most organizations are. This means that there’s a boss who tells their subordinates what to do, and then those subordinates tell their subordinates what to do. Agile attempts to flip that script upside […]
For many organizations, traditional testing groups are separated from the IT security group. But having traditional testers perform some security testing efforts is a great way of achieving a balanced approach to shifting left while being mindful of staffing and budgetary challenges. It also has some great advantages.
Today in class, one of my students asked the seemingly straightforward question, “what is agile?”. This got me thinking – what is the most fundamental aspect of agile? My unorthodox view is that agile is simply the name given to the bundle of values and principles that result in more successful outcomes in software development. […]
Introduction This is the second part of a series of tutorials focused on the process of creating, deploying, and consuming a Node.js REST microservice. In part one of this series, I walked through the initial creation process. I demonstrated how to leverage Node.js and just a few modules to create a functioning REST microservice. While […]
