Why Software Testing Is Key to DevOps

One of the major reasons organizations adopt DevOps practices is to accelerate delivery of software to production. However, many fail to include quality components in their practices. Continuous deployment without quality is just delivering continuous bugs. Here’s why software testing is an essential part of DevOps.

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Leveraging Kubernetes as a Tester

With the advent of agile and DevOps, organizations are moving from specialized roles to cross-functional teams—and that means cross-functional sharing of the specialized tools used in each silo. So it’s not unreasonable for a tester to need access to the tools used in those other silos, such as Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a scalable, production-grade container […]

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Installing MicroK8s 1.14 for Local Development

In a recent development, MicroK8s replaced its dockerd installation with containerd. Many pre-existing sources mention “microk8s.docker”, but this command is no longer available. I will walk you through the full initial installation and basic usage on Ubuntu 18.04. Practically speaking, this means you now need to install Docker on your Ubuntu machine. In previous versions, […]

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The Importance of Goal Alignment in Agile and DevOps

I work and interact with multiple software development teams. Some are just beginning their agile and DevOps journeys and others are well on their way, but they have many of the same questions or concerns: How do we get all team member roles on the same page? How do we communicate and collaborate more effectively […]

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The Pros and Cons of a Serverless DevOps Solution

The dream of any product owner is fully customizable production software without the expense of paying for the hardware it rests upon. While the cloud and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) partially deliver on this promise, a completely serverless infrastructure would be much closer to this dream. From a product owner’s perspective, the possibility of […]

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Failure is Feedback
Feedback

“Failure is Feedback and Feedback is the breakfast of Champions” – fortune cookie Most everyone would agree that feedback is an essential ingredient to successful delivery. Feedback helps you to improve, whether you are a cashier, a coach, a teacher, or part of a software development team. So why is it so hard to accept […]

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Making Security a First Class Citizen in DevOps

I recently had the opportunity to do a web seminar with Jeff Payne about using open source tools for DevSecOps. In our discussion, I made the point that the goal of DevSecOps is to make application security a first-class citizen in the DevOps process. Making application security a first-class citizen improves the quality of your […]

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6 Signs Your Agile Project Isn’t Really Agile

More and more organizations are adopting agile software development processes and practices. But in many cases, these organizations have declared they are agile without actually changing how they develop software. Declaring that an apple is an orange doesn’t make it so. These six key indicators can help you determine whether your agile project isn’t really […]

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How Not to DevOps: Don’t Be Afraid
Clay figures reacting in fright

A Little History A number of years ago, I was part of a team supporting a US Federal Government program office responsible for bringing DevOps best practices to that agency’s programs. We acted as curators of tools, advocates of best practices, and maintainers of the deployment pipelines and procedures. Through this, we ensured the successful […]

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Implementing Continuous Delivery in the Federal Government

Nine years ago, I started on a project that was going to prove that agile processes could work within the US Department of Defense (DoD). Our goal was to introduce agile development processes, like unit testing and continuous integration, into a tool that promoted agile practices for other DoD projects. We started by making incremental […]

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