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.
A common refrain Brian Hicks hears from management in organizations transitioning to agile is, “if the teams are self-directed and get to choose how much work they do, how can i be sure they are working hard enough?”
I work and interact with multiple software development teams. Some are just beginning their agile and DevOps journeys and others are well on their way, but they have many of the same questions or concerns: How do we get all team member roles on the same page? How do we communicate and collaborate more effectively […]
Adopting agile in your program comes with inherent benefits around transparency and delivery, but it also often requires changes to other business practices to align with a more iterative way of developing software. Threat modeling helps you determine where to focus your security testing efforts when building your app, so it’s a useful practice. But one […]
“Failure is Feedback and Feedback is the breakfast of Champions” – fortune cookie Most everyone would agree that feedback is an essential ingredient to successful delivery. Feedback helps you to improve, whether you are a cashier, a coach, a teacher, or part of a software development team. So why is it so hard to accept […]
It seems like every other day, someone in the software development community feels the necessity to declare that agile is dead and they have something new and better. Sometimes it’s one of the founders of agile who now think the Agile Manifesto is dated and needs to be overhauled. Other times it’s ageless software veterans […]
I work with many organizations that are trying valiantly to transition to agile. While it is noble to try to just follow the agile principles and develop your own solution, most understandably find comfort and support in following a well-understood and documented agile framework. But which of the many frameworks do you choose? Scrum? Kanban? […]
Successful agile coaching requires a combination of experience, knowledge, and soft skills to help organizations build competence, sustainability, performance, and maturity in their agile practices. And when it comes to coaching, there is a vast difference between knowing and doing. That means not all coaches are created equal. There are a few things you can […]
