Articles

2012: The Year of DevOps

Scott Ambler explains how DevOps has grown within the agile community, and why he believes it will become an IT buzzword in 2012. DevOps uses agile's community-based teamwork and offers developers and those in operations a great way to make everyone's job easier.

Scott W. Ambler's picture Scott W. Ambler
Handling Personality Issues of a Team Establishing Process

IT professionals are often surprised to discover that it’s a bigger challenge to handle the people side of establishing process. This article gives you a head start on handling the implicit personality issues that are found in establishing process and more process.

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
Early Automation Approach

An early automation approach involves the automation team in the early phase of the testing lifecycle to support agile or iterative projects. Automation scripting can commence in parallel to system development.

Common branching patterns Branching to Distraction

Branching can be an effective solution for managing change, enabling parallel development and improved productivity. But, working on a branch is a distraction and can decrease agility, productivity, and code robustness. Learn when the value of working on a branch outweighs the cost.

Steve Berczuk's picture Steve Berczuk
flow chart Four Agile Tips to Eliminate Rework in Application Development

Your applications need to meet business needs, overcome complex processes, and provide instant results to customers. And, ideally, they’ll require minimal rework on your part. The first step to success is requirements definition. Here, Filip Szymanski offers some tips from agile methods that will improve your requirements—even if you haven’t otherwise adopted agile.

Filip Szymanski's picture Filip Szymanski
Build Capability Basics

A basic build capability is founded on two key fundamentals: the ability to reproduce the build and the ability to automate the build process. Without these two fundamentals, you're fighting an uphill battle. Reproduction of the build implies that you have a CM system able to capture the build definition. Automation helps to ensure that no manual errors can play into the production, but this is just the beginning. These build basics will help set you on the right path for high-quality changes.

Joe Farah's picture Joe Farah
Getting Empirical about Refactoring

Often when we refactor, we look at local areas of code. If we take a wider view, using information from our version control systems, we can get a better sense of the effects of our refactoring efforts.

Michael Feathers's picture Michael Feathers
Performance Factory for Agile and Lean Organizations

Implementing agile and lean performance appraisals presents some unique challenges. This article discusses how to do so in a way that helps to enhance the agile and lean practices that so clearly result in excellent team and organizational performance. The good news is that agile and lean performance management is much more effective than other methods.

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
We're All in the Same Boat

Lisa Crispin dives into the "we're all in the same boat" theory and explains how it can't be more true in the software development world. From the need for common goals to going beyond taking responsibility for the team's actions, each team must know that you're going to fail or succeed together.

Lisa Crispin's picture Lisa Crispin
Picking SCM Standards or Frameworks

There are many things to consider when picking an SCM standard or framework for your organization. Taking the time to explore compliance, politics, experience, and driving forces before making a selection will increase acceptance and smooth the transition.

Joe Townsend's picture Joe Townsend

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