DevOps is fast becoming the winning strategy needed to accelerate the continuous delivery of exceptional software without sacrificing quality and cost efficiency. With its focus on better communication, collaboration and feedback within and across development and IT operations, DevOps is gaining many fans – even in the business, where performance is seen as being directly […]
The DevOps Litmus Test: Is Your Company’s Culture Ready to Get Agile?
New ideas don’t come to those who are afraid of breaking the rules. Improving something usually means you’ll have to push the status quo aside and try something that hasn’t been done before. What may be a standard operating procedure will have to make way for a brand-new approach with its own set of rules […]
Keep Calm and Refactor Operations
Developers have been refactoring forever to gain efficiencies and avoid mistakes. Let’s apply more than just theory to ops to do the same. There’s about a million articles, blogs, tweets and infographics available today that bespeak of DevOps as this or that or the other thing. But one core truth remains: DevOps in part attempts […]
The DevOps Diet (Getting Lean)
IT has gotten fat – fat silos, fat processes, fat procedures. Adopting DevOps is a great opportunity to look at some of our unhealthy habits and identify where we can eliminate unproductive waste from our process diets. DevOps will ultimately teach IT how to exercise more with less effort, trim the fat and get lean. According to […]
Microsoft strives to embrace open source culture
In many ways Microsoft is going through the corporate equivalent of a mid-life crisis—it has reached a stage where it longs to drop a few pounds, and turn back the clock a few years. After years of tremendous success, it’s now starting to show its age, and it is struggling to adapt to the new […]
Two Ways DevOps Unlocks the True Potential of Agile
In a recent post on InformationWeek, Erik Weber, a professional Scrum trainer and Agile expert, explores four signs that you’re doing Agile development wrong. Upon finishing the article, I was reminded that Agile in theory is often very different from Agile in practice, and when that gap exists within IT, it can have massive consequences […]
Your End Users Want Everything: Here’s How to Give it to Them
In today’s application-centric business environment, the end user is king. Whether we’re talking about being first to market with the next big thing or adding new capabilities and features to an existing application, so much of our current development time, resources and energy is spent on trying to meet the needs of end users. It’s […]
Deputizing Everyone for Security – Building Agile Assurance
Those of us highly focused on the delivery pipeline of DevOps will wonder why we should include the security guy to the party. After all, aren’t they just going to slow down the process and make it harder to deliver good features to end customers? My prior post about introducing SecDevOps by example was not […]
Waterfall and Agile, the effect of automation and continuous integration
Agile’s A Silly Idea? I was a young developer working at a large enterprise when I first heard about some of the principles that later became part of the Agile process back in the mid- to late-90s. I was skeptical about what I heard, to say the least. After all, what we today call waterfall […]
A Winning DevOps Approach for Established Enterprises: Pace-layered
Does your bank offer the ability to deposit a check by taking its picture with your smartphone? When that feature debuted a few years back, I remember thinking it was interesting and convenient enough that if my bank didn’t offer it soon, I’d be willing to switch to one that did. I bring this example […]