The Beauty of Agile in the Cloud As compared to other development methods, agile is clear, straightforward, and rewarding for all of those who are involved in the process. Most of you know this already—that’s why you’re here! Clearly, a successful transition to agile requires a strong organizational commitment and a number of management and development changes. With that in mind, the white-hot movement to this trend over the past year continues to amaze me. In striking parallel, the industry has seen this same sort of resonance around the trend to the “cloud”—secure anywhere access by distributed teams to a centralized set of services and compute resources that span the complete lifecycle of the development and deployment process. |
Bill Portelli
October 18, 2010 |
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Moving Beyond Configuration Management to Application Lifecycle Management 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. |
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Lightweight Application Lifecycle Management Using State-Cards It is a well known fact that all applications are different; all application development teams are different. So, why should we expect application lifecycle management to be fixed? There is no such thing as “one size fits all.” Yet, it is also common sense that there must be something in common, as otherwise there is absolutely no way to learn from experience and mistakes. The challenge is then to find a middle ground that is easy to communicate to the development team and stakeholders. |
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The Checklist as Empowerment tool Checklists help teams make better decisions by making it easier to distribute decision making. A team of empowered cross functional people, working together to decide how to get work done sounds a lot like the model of an agile team. |
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My Manager Thinks I'm Holding Her Hostage You don't need to look any further than to your coworkers to see how many different personalities and work styles are in effect. Despite the differences, certain predictable behaviors occur between staff and management when personalities clash. Jonathan Kohl defines a few managerial behavioral anti-patterns that could undermine your project. He also sets the ground work for ways to improve the relationship between staff and management. |
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How Testers Can Help Drive Agile Development Although some experts say that testers are not needed in an agile development environment, Lisa Crispin knows differently. Testers want to make sure customers get what they need; they look at the "big picture" and work to ensure the best experience for the user. Unfortunately, even in the agile development world, business needs and the users' experience often are disconnected from the delivered software. Professional testers can help agile developers deliver what stakeholders want-the first time. Lisa describes how she uses tests cases to create a common language that business customers, users, and developers all understand. She explains the techniques for eliciting examples to define features and describes how to turn examples into executable tests. These tests define the scope of a feature, making it easier for everyone to envision how the feature should look, feel, and work. |
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Repaying the Happiness Debt—with Interest The pace of production depends on the capability of those at work. When an increase in profit is desired, production is sped up. Yet those forced to work faster aren't necessarily more productive. Unhappily experienced at being forced to work harder and faster resulting in less productivity, Clarke Ching found a way to slow down expectations and increase productivity. |
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How Workers' Personalities Can Affect How They Approach Projects and Products Personality accounts for a lot. You can tell a great deal about how someone is going to handle a situation by understanding their personality. In fact, if you get really good at this game you can sometimes predict what they are going to do. Some people just can’t manage to the see the big picture, and that is often evident in how they approach their work, whether tactical project or a strategic product. If you want to be able to work with different personalities then you need to understand what motivates them to act, or in some cases, fail to act. |
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Product vs. Project CM: Straddle the Fence Configuration Management can be applied at the product level, or the project level, depending on the needs and requirements of an organization. In this article, Angela Moore takes a look at when to apply CM at the short-term level, and when to have the bigger, longer picture in mind. |
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Configuration Management is Lika a Race Track—Really! A race track is built as a permanent facility designed with materials and formation to ensure the track is easily maintainable, and to enable that class of race car to travel in a reliable manner. So what does this have to do with configuration management (CM)? The race track is a lot like a CM infrastructure needed by product team to support the building of product. The race car is a lot like the CM tasks that are executed to help the project race to the release finish line. |
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