Another week, another preventable, high-profile tech disaster. The Iowa Democratic Party used a mobile app to pull results from statewide precincts for the Iowa caucus. While there were many reasons why this application failed, the Democratic Party left it to “coding issues.” Anyone with any degree of experience can tell you this excuse really means they […]
Every day organizations incorporate DevSecOps into their software development, security, and operations practices to ensure they can build critical security controls into their agile software delivery. According to one survey, 84 percent of respondents said it’s difficult to reduce risk to their applications because they’re not able to monitor, detect, and prevent attacks at the application level. […]
One of the most important parts of the agile process is the ability to continuously learn and adapt. While most find it easy to share positive feedback during retrospectives with their teammates, sharing negative experiences and criticism can often be a challenge. Negative feedback has the greatest potential to help people change in areas that […]
To succeed with distributed rapid development, a branch-merge strategy is key. A good strategy facilitates processes among multiple developers or teams and is the basis for any well-functioning DevOps pipeline that uses continuous integration (CI). While there are many ways to implement CI and DevOps without a branch-merge strategy, most mature organizations use them to […]
Many organizations struggle to understand why agile isn’t working for them. Often, the most telling difference between a high-functioning, mature agile team and an immature one comes down to the understanding and practice of one key concept: the minimum viable product (MVP). The struggle to appropriately define an MVP quickly results in a process more […]
I had an opportunity to do one of the lightning keynotes at STARWEST 2018 where I talked about the start of my career, and how I got to speak at testing conferences. Fresh out of college I was a Naval Architect, designing ships and submarines for the U.S. Navy. I was building model ships, often […]
Successful agile teams often have a coach driving continuous improvement. While some coaches are effective initially, many eventually succumb to pitfalls that inhibit their team’s growth and fail to compel any lasting changes. Here are five common pitfalls of agile coaches I see in most projects that fail to improve. 1. Not Applying Agile to […]
Long gone are the days of waterfall software development. The agile movement has brought common-sense software development principles to nearly every corner of the world and changed the way we look at software. This philosophy left marks on how we look at our infrastructure, too. With agile came DevOps and the idea to bring together […]
The Agile Manifesto states that “at regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjust its behavior accordingly.” Despite being a key principle of the manifesto, continuous improvement eludes some organizations. They find themselves “doing agile” instead of “being agile.” In traditional agile approaches, the sprint retrospective provides a […]
In working with one of the teams at one of my current clients, the team said they didn’t want to do Scrum. At this organization, there is a lot of Scrum. Most of the teams there are Scrum teams. The team in question decided that Scrum wasn’t working for them. They wanted to try something […]
