There’s lots of confusion about what DevOps is. This has resulted in the emergence of DevOps “antipatterns”—DevOps patterns of behavior that will not result in success. Having worked with many organizations to successfully implement DevOps principles and practices, there are often clear signs that what you are doing isn’t going to work. Let’s delve into […]
When I teach classes on root causes of agile project failure, I’m often asked which of the causes is most difficult to overcome. From an enterprise perspective, that is an easy answer: bad culture. Sociologist Ron Westrum defines culture as “the patterned way that an organization responds to its challenges, whether these are explicit (for […]
Many organizations struggle to understand why agile isn’t working for them. Often, the most telling difference between a high-functioning, mature agile team and an immature one comes down to the understanding and practice of one key concept: the minimum viable product (MVP). The struggle to appropriately define an MVP quickly results in a process more […]
Our overarching goal in agile and DevOps is to deliver increments of customer value more quickly with acceptable quality. In doing so, we employ many approaches and techniques to verify requirements, designs, and code at every step in our software engineering methodology. One key practice in driving early defect identification is unit testing, but several […]
Many are beating the drum that DevOps is something new and different—just like agile was new and different before it. Make no mistake, DevOps fixes an age-old conflict between software development and operational teams, but it’s not new. In fact, the DevOps philosophy is ingrained within the Agile Manifesto, and one could argue that DevOps […]
Successful agile teams often have a coach driving continuous improvement. While some coaches are effective initially, many eventually succumb to pitfalls that inhibit their team’s growth and fail to compel any lasting changes. Here are five common pitfalls of agile coaches I see in most projects that fail to improve. 1. Not Applying Agile to […]
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 […]
A key part of an agile process is the retrospective. The purpose of retrospectives is to identify where you can improve and reinforce what you are doing well as a team. They typically happen at the end of each sprint in Scrum, at regular intervals in kanban, or after something goes wrong in your organization. […]
Many are beating the drum that DevOps is something new and different—just like agile was new and different before it. Make no mistake, DevOps fixes an age-old conflict between software development and operational teams, but it’s not new. In fact, the DevOps philosophy is ingrained within the Agile Manifesto, and one could argue that DevOps […]
Long gone are the days of waterfall software development. The agile movement has brought common-sense software development principles to nearly every corner of the world and changed the way we look at software. This philosophy left marks on how we look at our infrastructure, too. With agile came DevOps and the idea to bring together […]
