Getting Value from Your Task Board

Agile projects are well known for using a task board for teams to track what is being worked.  They can be a simple wall in an office taped off with columns for status or web-based tools that allow detailed tracking of individual stories and tasks.  No matter what is being used, the task board needs […]

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Successfully Responding to “Crisis-Mode”

Crisis management is a tough job. The biggest problem isn’t solving the technical problem — given a little time, you surely can solve it.  It often involves planning and anticipating crises will occur.  Good crisis management has a contingency plan and always gives themselves a bit of wiggle room to avoid the necessary shifting priorities.  […]

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Mobile Testing w/ Blazemeter

I’ve been working in the mobile space plenty recently, and exploring a whole host of tools. One of the great tools I recently stumbled across was Blazemeter. Among other things, Blazemeter lets you playback a recorded script of web traffic, and simulate user load, similar to JMeter. Blazemeter, however, can mimic all sorts of different […]

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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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Backups – Getting data into Glacier

Backups Off site backups are an often talked about and rarely done well item for small to medium enterprises. This is usually due to the cost of an offsite facility storage, complexity of backup software, and operational costs. However, offsite backups are critical to keep an enterprise running if an unfortunate event happens to hit […]

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DevOps/CI and the T word

New Sheriff in Town Having hopped on the CI/CD train early, starting out most of my work was with introducing a client to CI/CD and standing up an initial implementation. Later as  DevOps and CI/CD matured, it became not uncommon to have to take over a failed or barely limping CI/CD implementation. The T word […]

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Holes in Whole Team Quality

The concept of whole team quality is a good one.  Everybody on a project should be responsible for quality.  Unfortunately, there are often holes in our whole team quality approach.  Here are a few I’ve seen: No definition of Done – It’s difficult to achieve quality if you don’t define what it means!  So many […]

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The Benefits of Self-directed Teams

When talking about the activities critical to agile success, one often hears about daily huddles, continuous integration, and user acceptance testing, but I’ve found that the agile principle of Self-directed Teams is equally important.  Teams should be allowed to estimate and assign their own work for a variety of reasons: 1) Estimates will be more […]

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Solving Those Pesky BDD Issues

Introduction Last month wrapped up my Cucumber posts for a while. I’ve covered the full gamut of topics for Cucumber, and I don’t believe I have too many more nuggets of knowledge to offer without putting myself out of a job. While working with Cucumber over the past year I’ve done a lot of research. […]

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Mobile Application Testing with Kryptowire

The hunt for a tool to provide you some ability to scan and analyze mobile application code may not be as elusive as the Chupacabra any more.   Kryptowire is a security testing tools designed specifically for testing Android and iOS native mobile applications.  It provides a simple interface for analyzing source code developed locally […]

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