Posted by Geert Bossuyt around lunchtime: December 23rd, 2010
We encounter possibilities to focus more on effectiveness by working Agile and learning from that. Based upon our experience we value :
Teamwork & responsibility over Individuals and Interaction
Deliver Value over Working software
Partnership elaboration over Customer collaboration
Embrace change over Respond to Change
While we value the Agile Manifesto, we state that MoreAgile is more Agile.
Posted by Vincent Partington at around evening time: December 20th, 2010
In my two previous blogs I compared deployment automation to build automation and release management automation respectively. Build automation tools automate the building of software while deployment automation focuses on deploying the software after it has been built. In the other blog I explained that release management tools manage the release process of software but don’t do the actual work. In this blog I will compare deployment automation to server provisioning automation and here the distinction is harder to make. So please bear with me!
Let’s start by defining server provisioning. We can look at the ubiquitous Wikipedia definition or at the one from wordIQ. They tell a similar story; Server provisioning is about making a server ready for service. It usually involves activities such as:
(more…)
Posted by Jeroen van Wilgenburg in the early morning: December 15th, 2010
Last friday we had a techrally at Xebia. We could pick our subject: MongoDB or Websockets or Canvas. I teamed up with Albert. There also was another websockets team consisting of Mischa, Ron and Frank.
We decided to use Jetty for websockets. No particual reason to pick Jetty, we both heard it did something with websockets and in the end it was an easier solution than the other team picked (jWebSocket).
Since we only had a few hours we were in quite a hurry, but in the end it was so simple we had time to write a blog, listen to Dan North and Albert even redid everthing and more in Python. (more…)
Posted by Jarl Meijer just before lunchtime: December 13th, 2010
The transition to the Agile way of working is more than a process change. It requires a different way of interaction and behavior and a different mindset. In a large (a little less than 200 people) Agile Implementation endeavor we organized an Agile Mindset session to explain Agile principles and to push the Agile teams away from the comfort of their traditional patterns.
Getting on the Agile track successfully… (more…)
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh just before lunchtime: December 10th, 2010
Why a good Scrum is like World of Warcraft
Today I saw a brilliant TED talk by Tom Chatfield called “7 ways games engage the brain”. While watching the presentation and going through these 7 ways, I realized that while I have seen these playing games, I have also seen these happen in a good Scrum.
The 7 ways are:
- Experience bars measuring progress
- Multiple long and short-term aims
- Rewards for effort
- Rapid, frequent and clear feedback
- An element of Uncertainty
- Windows of enhanced attention
- Other people
I will go through each of the points comparing World of Warcraft to a Scrum.
(more…)
Posted by Andrew Phillips late at night: December 8th, 2010
A couple of weeks ago, my ever-active colleagues Marco Mulder and Serge Beaumont organised an nlscrum meetup about “Combining Scrum and Operations”, with presentations by Jeroen Bekaert and devopsdays organiser Patrick Debois.
Unfortunately, I was late and only managed to catch the tail end of Patrick’s well-delivered talk explaining how Dev/ops can become Devops. Thankfully, the lively open space discussions that followed provided plenty of interesting insights, comments and general food for thought.
One recurring theme that particularly struck me was the comment, uttered with regret by many in Operations, that they would very much like to help and coordinate with the development teams but inevitably were always too busy keeping the production environment up and running.
In other words, helping prepare for new releases might be desirable, but achieving the five nines, or whatever SLA Operations has committed to1, will always be paramount.
This is a fallacy! Indeed, one of the core realisations of the “Devops mindset”, to me, is that 99.999…% uptime is not an end in itself, but a means to an end: delivering the greatest business value possible. And aiming for the highest possible availability may not be the best way to go about it!2
Posted by Gero Vermaas in the early afternoon: December 1st, 2010
At the start of your career your backpack with is filled with lots of theory and as your career progresses more and more experience get’s thrown in, perfect. At some point you won’t be learning new things if you keep doing the same role. That’s why people take up different roles and grow in a team. However, the goal of the team’s you’re in often remains similar: develop system X that realizes user stories Y and Z. Many people do lots of roles, but all on the ‘producing’ side of the IT. I personally experienced the value of jumping to (one of) the other side(s) for a period of time. After returning to my original role I became much more effective.
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