Articles

start, continue, and stop doing signs When Postmortems Meet Retrospectives: Improving Your Agile Process

If you want secure, reliable systems, you need all stakeholders actively communicating. This means involving both IT operations and developers in discussions after deployments, to ascertain if anything went wrong and can be avoided, and what went well or could be refined. Integrating your postmortems and retrospectives facilitates collaboration and improves processes.

Bob Aiello's picture Bob Aiello
lifecycle circle Using Agile Application Lifecycle Management to Streamline Status Accounting

Status accounting is following the evolution of a configuration item through its lifecycle. Using application lifecycle management along with agile helps prevent mistakes, but lets you have the minimum amount of red tape; the team achieves an acceptable velocity without being unduly burdened with too much process.

Bob Aiello's picture Bob Aiello
Agile Magic Why Adopting Agile Won’t Magically Reduce Your IT Budget

Of course, all companies would like to reduce their budgets. But cutting back in the IT department can have unintended consequences. This article looks at two of the more well-adopted cost-cutting approaches, the software factory and distributed teams, and goes into how they can help and hurt your company.

Mario Lucero's picture Mario Lucero
Women on Agile Teams How Women Can Help Build Better Agile Teams

The IT industry is dominated by men. But you shouldn't hire more women just to lessen the gender gap. The ultimate goal is better teams, and it just so happens that hiring more women tends to help build better teams anyway. Companies should reexamine what traits they value in job candidates.

Pawel Brodzinski's picture Pawel Brodzinski
Development DNA The Evolution of z/OS Development

Kristin Cowhey explains how z/OS development has evolved throughout the years and what that means for developers and tech personnel. With legacy developers leaving the workforce, there’s a dire need to replace the knowledge in order to maintain the mainframe systems and applications that are still in use today. 

Kristin Cowhey's picture Kristin Cowhey
Conquering the Challenges of Transforming to Agile Tales from the Trenches: Conquering the Challenges of Transforming to Agile

There is a lot of hard work and recalibration needed to adopt an agile approach. Just as one does not simply walk into Mordor, you also cannot simply decide to be agile. In this article, Alison Jacques describes her IT department’s experience transforming to agile and shares some of the lessons learned and tools she’s adopted to ensure continued success.

Alison Jacques's picture Alison Jacques
A Product Owner’s First Glimpse of Agile

Kent McDonald introduces us to Arthur, a middle manager and product owner in a medium-sized insurance company who has been assigned to take on an agile project. For those unfamiliar with agile, the terminology and techniques of agile approaches can seem strange and often a little silly when not accompanied with an explanation as to why those techniques exist. Kent explains the challenges product owners like Arthur face and how to make product owners understand agile better.

Kent J. McDonald's picture Kent J. McDonald
Configuration Management and DevOps with Jez Humble and Bob Aiello

In this excerpt from an interview recorded at this year's Better Software and Agile Development Practices East conferences, authors Bob Aiello and Jez Humble discuss the challenges and the rewards of instituting configuration management and DevOps practices.

Bob Aiello's picture Bob Aiello
My Experience with Test-Driven Development

Vinay Krishna explains why agile development includes testing and coding concurrently, which is also what test-driven development emphasizes. The transformation from coder to developer to tester is needed in all agile software development projects.

Vinay Krishna
The Crucial Role DevOps Plays in Change and Configuration Management

Agile's core principles may have been originally intended at the software development, but the concept of DevOps has shown that agile's benefits can be experienced by a much larger audience. Collaboration between these two departments benefits just as much as anyone.

Sasha Gilenson's picture Sasha Gilenson

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