Posted by mvanbenthem mid-afternoon: January 27th, 2012
Net als in 2010 heeft Xebia in 2011 het jaarlijks onderzoek naar de de status van Agile in Nederland uitgevoerd. Met ook dit jaar weer opvallende resultaten. Zo zegt bijna 90 procent van de bedrijven die met Agile werken sterk verbeterde resultaten te realiseren bij hun (ICT) projecten. De vraagt die direct bij mij opkomt bij dit soort hoge percentages is waarom niet iedereen met Agile aan de slag gaat.
Daarnaast ervaart 83 procent van de Nederlandse bedrijven die Agile werken hebben geadopteerd, meer werkplezier en 85 procent meer teammotivatie. Dit percentage is aanzienlijk hoger dan vorig jaar, toen gaf driekwart van de respondenten aan meer werkplezier en teammotivatie te ervaren. Dus de mensen die Agile werken varen er wel bij, naar mijn mening een van de belangrijkste redenen voor het succes van Agile. Dit komt ook veelal tot uiting in een lager ziekteverzuim en grotere loyaliteit naar de werkgever toe.
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Posted by Nicole Belilos late at night: January 25th, 2012
Suppose one day, after a particularly bad hangover, you decide to change your life. You long for a trim body, a balanced spirit, lots of energy and no more headaches. In short, a happy mind in a healthy, good looking body. But how do you get there?
Well, we all know that there are many practices that will help you achieve those goals. Exercise three times a week, stop smoking, reduce your alcohol intake, and change your eating patterns. Oh, also, get more sleep, less stress, no more pills, and drink herbal tea instead of espressos.
But you hate sports, you love chocolate and smoking is your way to reduce your stress. So what do you do? (And what does this have to do with Agile? Read on and you’ll find out….) (more…)
Posted by Kris Geusebroek at around evening time: January 23rd, 2012
While we were building a little server to enable auditlogging on our hadoop cluster (more on that in a future blogpost) we needed a way to distribute our application.
This blog is about the packaging of this application. The application is build with nodejs and packaging and dependency management is mostly done with npm (the node package manager).
Of course installing this application in the production environment should have been as easy as the setup on our own laptop’s right? Wrong! On our laptops it was a easy git clone followed by a npm install and voila we have a running application. So how hard could it be to do this on a server at the client. Let me tell you….
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Posted by Maarten Kennis terribly early in the morning: January 15th, 2012
The country of Samoa has decided to skip a day, the 30th of december 2011 doesn’t exist on Samoa. This decision was driven by economical reasons. I wonder, what potential problems we can run into regarding software development for our IT systems depending on timezone information?
To skip a day, it all sounds so easy. First of all i was curious to know if similar situations have occured in the past and what the software development pitfalls could be. A small investigation showed me that you need to be careful with assumptions regarding regional timezone issues. Let’s have look at how a programming language like JAVA handles these kinds of situations.
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Posted by Daniel Burm around lunchtime: January 13th, 2012
Scaling the productowner (PO) role is tricky business. When you scale up too much within the same context, things become cumbersome. We don’t want to bring back the same centralized fear ridden ineffective decision making climate, we tried to kill off in the first place. When people spend so much time and effort to bring back entrepreneurship, they don’t want to create layer over layer of hierarchical PO/CPO relationships.
So if there is this perceived risk of fallback involved, why do we actually want to scale the PO role at all?
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Posted by Adé Mochtar mid-afternoon: December 29th, 2011
2011 has been an interesting year for cloud computing. Traditionally, cloud computing can be divided into three categories:
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
- Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
While SaaS has been around for some time (Salesforce.com started in 1999!), we are seeing an increase in adoption of IaaS and some heavy development in the PaaS world.
Now that 2011 is coming to an end, this is also the time for lists. So here are my 3 top 3’s of cloud computing.
Posted by Daniel Burm in the late afternoon: December 23rd, 2011
My motto regarding innovation is: being a first mover is a strategic choice, moving fast isn’t. Agile and scrum can help you move fast, so how can it accommodate innovation?
Posted by Maarten Kennis terribly early in the morning: December 19th, 2011
Introduction
One of the most common challenges of managing the configuration of servers in your typical DTAP environment is, in my opinion, keeping all the involved hosts at the same level of configuration in terms of installed operating system packages and their configuration files. It really can be a pain to keep all the systems at the same configuration level. Faillure to do so can lead to interesting situations where software produced by the project team does not run or perform on the acceptance and/or production environment while it was running perfectly on the development and/or test servers.
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Posted by Mark van Holsteijn in the early afternoon: December 14th, 2011
How do you setup a environment that support the continuous deliver of enterprise Java applications? How do you manage the large number of machines that are involved? How do you enable self-service, continuous delivery of applications onto the platform?
In this blog post we will give a description of an open source Java Application Platform as a Service that we created for our customer, using VMware, Redhat Enterprise Linux, Apache WebServer, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Operations Network, Puppet, Deployit, F5 Load Balancer and a Layer7 SecureSpan gateway.
Posted by Daniel Burm in the late evening: December 8th, 2011
A walking skeleton as meant in scrum is not always feasible. That’s the first sentence of one of my previous blogs. This one starts the same but approaches the subject from a different angle. The angle here is that we teach people to make story maps based on personas; the user, administrator and so on, but we don’t actually take into account that the product has to be bought by someone and how that decision actually works. This blog post tries to tie complex buying decisions into story mapping, to find the shortest route to a sellable Frankenstein, rather than a mere bag ‘o bones.
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