The Agile Manifesto states that “at regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjust its behavior accordingly.” Despite being a key principle of the manifesto, continuous improvement eludes some organizations. They find themselves “doing agile” instead of “being agile.” In traditional agile approaches, the sprint retrospective provides a […]
When transitioning to agile, applying agile methods to a single project is a great way to get started. However, care must be taken to ensure the project you choose is appropriate. Here are five tips to help you pick the right project for your agile pilot. 1. Make sure the project is the right size […]
One of my favorite agile principles is “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” Unfortunately, many agile teams ignore this principle, instead focusing on collaboration, organizing self-directed teams, and performing agile ceremonies. While all the agile principles are important, without producing working software on a regular basis, the others won’t matter. Traditional software development […]
It’s difficult for an agile team comprised solely of specialists to be fully productive. If team members are unable to help others with their tasks, the team will not maximize its potential. The agile community calls team members who are capable of working in a variety of roles generalized specialists. A generalized specialist is not […]
In working with one of the teams at one of my current clients, the team said they didn’t want to do Scrum. At this organization, there is a lot of Scrum. Most of the teams there are Scrum teams. The team in question decided that Scrum wasn’t working for them. They wanted to try something […]
Scrum and other agile processes advocate using time-boxed periods called a sprint or iteration in order to focus a team on getting work done. The idea is that the team will select an amount of work about this size of their capacity and commit to completing that work during the sprint. How the team decides […]
I was lucky enough to speak at AgileDC 2017 and present my experience report on the Agile DevOps Transformation I have been a part of at Housing and Urban Development. In this presentation, I go over the theories of DevOps, how we intended to put these theories into practice, and how we actually put these […]
Deploying and running applications in Containers is one of the hottest trends in DevOps and IT today. Docker, a containerization platform that lets users easily package, deploy, and manage their applications within containers, is principally responsible for bringing containers to the mainstream. This article provides information about what containers are, their relationship with DevOps, and […]
When people think of DevSecOps the first thing that comes to mind is automation. A strong DevSecOps environment should employ tools that automate the following: Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Testing, Continuous Deployment, and Continuous Monitoring. While automation is certainly important, it’s just as important (if not more important) to build the mindset that “everyone […]
There is an old saying in testing: Automating a bad test only gives you bad results faster. The same thing applies to DevOps. Lots of DevOps initiatives focus on speed and frequency of deployment without an emphasis on quality. Bad testing practices in DevOps only deploys buggy software faster. Here are some ideas about how […]
