The Latest

This two-part article explores branching strategies—development tactics that allow teams to work concurrently on different features and maintain the relationship between them. In part one, Steve Berczuk explains what branches are, common types of them, and the tradeoffs between branching styles.

Many of us have our personal identities wrapped up in our jobs, which can make change hard, particularly in agile environments. Recognizing the power of storytelling, Michele Sliger started collecting first-person stories about how adopting agile affected individuals and what their "light bulb moment" was like. Find out how agile adoptions have changed individuals—their perceptions of agile, their leadership styles, and even their personal lives.

Optimism is normally viewed as a positive trait, but not when it comes to goals and estimates. Project managers who don their rose-colored glasses when faced with the harsh light of reality are setting themselves up for disappointment.

DevOps is steadily gaining traction and currency, particularly in the world of web apps. Below you will find an introduction and some pointers to resources and further reading. Many DevOps principles have been around for a long time. This is similar to agile methods and, in some ways, a repackaging of existing principles.

Agile methodologies aren't the only way to empower your team; utilizing cloud-driven development is another great way to improve processes throughout the development lifecycle. Testing can be done earlier, and costs can be saved, by turing toward the cloud on your next project.

This month’s topic is a paradigm shift that requires that we move from focusing narrowly on the CM function to the much broader Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) view. I know people who cannot make this shift. From a personality perspective, these folks have great difficulty seeing the big picture and the more comprehensive lifecycle view required by ALM. There are good reasons for these problems, and in this article we’ll examine the personality challenges inherent in shifting from CM into ALM.

Perhaps when there was less market pressure, or fewer applications and products with far fewer computers, it was fine to focus on software design and implementation. Joe Farah writes that in those days of old, managing the new flexibility and capabilities afforded by software was the big challenge, but we've come a long way since then.