The Relationship between Agile and DevOps
Coworkers sit across table with sticky notes

Many are beating the drum that DevOps is something new and different—just like agile was new and different before it. Make no mistake, DevOps fixes an age-old conflict between software development and operational teams, but it’s not new. In fact, the DevOps philosophy is ingrained within the Agile Manifesto, and one could argue that DevOps […]

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Why Frequently Delivering Working Software Is Crucial to Agile

One of my favorite agile principles is “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” Unfortunately, many agile teams ignore this principle, instead focusing on collaboration, organizing self-directed teams, and performing agile ceremonies. While all the agile principles are important, without producing working software on a regular basis, the others won’t matter. Traditional software development […]

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5 Tips for Balancing Manual and Automated Software Testing
Code

There’s a battle in the testing community between those who believe 100 percent test automation is in our future and those who think test automation isn’t even testing at all. As continuous deployment is becoming the goal of more and more organizations, manual testing is viewed as a blocker for those seeking to accelerate the […]

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Growing Generalized Specialists on an Agile Team

It’s difficult for an agile team comprised solely of specialists to be fully productive. If team members are unable to help others with their tasks, the team will not maximize its potential. The agile community calls team members who are capable of working in a variety of roles generalized specialists. A generalized specialist is not […]

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Avoid Continuous Bugs
DevOps

There is an old saying in testing: Automating a bad test only gives you bad results faster. The same thing applies to DevOps. Lots of DevOps initiatives focus on speed and frequency of deployment without an emphasis on quality. Bad testing practices in DevOps only deploys buggy software faster. Here are some ideas about how […]

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5 Tips for Making the Most of Your Agile Meetings

People often think agile entails too many meetings. I’ve even heard product owners say sprint kickoffs are a waste of time because they “take away from doing real work.” Teams should stop talking and start coding, right? This complaint has nothing to do with the number of meetings, but rather the way meetings are run. […]

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Why DevOps Engineering Is Important

The following is an edited excerpt from our webinar that took place March 10, 2015. The entire recording may be viewed here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/recording/737060184353086210.  This is the first in a series of webinars on DevOps Engineering and discussed why DevOps Engineering is important.  The webinar was given by Mr. Jeffery Payne and Mr. Richard Mills of […]

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From Naivety to Negligence

I understand the plight of senior executives, I really do.  Most don’t have a software background and that makes it difficult for them to fully understand application security.  But when security breeches are caused by basic, simple code vulnerabilities that can be found using readily available tools, it makes me wonder how serious businesses even […]

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Hope Is Not a Strategy

One of my all-time favorite sales books is entitled Hope Is Not a Strategy.  It’s a book about how to properly manage sales teams and opportunities.  But I often use this slogan when talking to senior executives about their unrealistic software project expectations.  When teams push back on unrealistic project release schedules, story estimates, or […]

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