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One of the hardest daily tasks developers, QA, ScrumMasters, and product owners encounter is effective communication with others. Sound implausible? According to many articles, research, and personal observations, the main cause of project failure is not technology or hardware, but inefficient communication stemming from lack of effective communication between team members, incomplete business analysis, imprecise requirements, and vaguely formulated business objectives.

There are many people who do not like structure. Application lifecycle management (ALM), and, even more so, IT infrastructure library (ITIL) as a framework, touch some people's buttons as being just too much structure. In this article, Leslie Sachs examines the personality factors that you need to be aware of when implementing ALM and ITIL/IT service management (ITSM).

In this age of "going green," it helps to know how to get started. These selection criteria can help data centers become more energy efficient through the course of normal hardware and software replacement.

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.

In this article, we not only help define agile, and how you and your team can get there; we also explain how ALM tools have agile's methodologies in mind and how they can help you reach your goal. Learn the the meanings behind the terms you need ot know, and why now is a great time to go agile.

As companies focus on tuning their IT environment on rapid delivery of business value, more and more projects and initiatives within organizations are looking at the entire value chain of software production.

Whether under the trendy name of Devops, via integrated project teams or as part of the introduction of new development methodologies like Agile or infrastructure technologies such as cloud, there is a growing awareness of the need for automated, reliable and flexible deployment procedures.

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.