Transitioning from the classroom to any type of work environment often takes a little bit of time. However, when transitioning into an Agile work environment, I feel as though the transition can take a little bit longer without the proper help and expectations. In my software development course, we learned about Agile, and claimed to […]
Dear Loyal Readers, I’ve been delving into automating AWS deployments and I’m a huge ruby fan for any sort of Linux admin, so I started with the AWS SDK and the samples/ec2/run_instance.rb. The example for deploying an instance was pretty straight forward; I just wanted write about some features/modifications that I found useful. Modification #0 — […]
Agile projects are well known for using a task board for teams to track what is being worked. They can be a simple wall in an office taped off with columns for status or web-based tools that allow detailed tracking of individual stories and tasks. No matter what is being used, the task board needs […]
Crisis management is a tough job. The biggest problem isn’t solving the technical problem — given a little time, you surely can solve it. It often involves planning and anticipating crises will occur. Good crisis management has a contingency plan and always gives themselves a bit of wiggle room to avoid the necessary shifting priorities. […]
I’ve been working in the mobile space plenty recently, and exploring a whole host of tools. One of the great tools I recently stumbled across was Blazemeter. Among other things, Blazemeter lets you playback a recorded script of web traffic, and simulate user load, similar to JMeter. Blazemeter, however, can mimic all sorts of different […]
One of my all-time favorite sales books is entitled Hope Is Not a Strategy. It’s a book about how to properly manage sales teams and opportunities. But I often use this slogan when talking to senior executives about their unrealistic software project expectations. When teams push back on unrealistic project release schedules, story estimates, or […]
Backups Off site backups are an often talked about and rarely done well item for small to medium enterprises. This is usually due to the cost of an offsite facility storage, complexity of backup software, and operational costs. However, offsite backups are critical to keep an enterprise running if an unfortunate event happens to hit […]
New Sheriff in Town Having hopped on the CI/CD train early, starting out most of my work was with introducing a client to CI/CD and standing up an initial implementation. Later as DevOps and CI/CD matured, it became not uncommon to have to take over a failed or barely limping CI/CD implementation. The T word […]
The concept of whole team quality is a good one. Everybody on a project should be responsible for quality. Unfortunately, there are often holes in our whole team quality approach. Here are a few I’ve seen: No definition of Done – It’s difficult to achieve quality if you don’t define what it means! So many […]
When talking about the activities critical to agile success, one often hears about daily huddles, continuous integration, and user acceptance testing, but I’ve found that the agile principle of Self-directed Teams is equally important. Teams should be allowed to estimate and assign their own work for a variety of reasons: 1) Estimates will be more […]
