Over the past five to ten years, continuous integration has become a no-brainer for every medium to large scale software development project. It’s hard to imagine going back to not having every commit (or push) automatically trigger a build of the code and, most importantly, a test run of of the code. That test run will surely include unit tests, but setting it up to also run integration tests used to be harder. You’ll need to automatically deploy the application to the target middleware environment and then run the integration tests against that environment.

The Deployit plugin for the new 3.3 release of Atlassian Bamboo adds the enterprise-scale deployment capabilities of XebiaLabs Deployit to Bamboo. This allows you to speed up your development process by adding automated deployment to your continuous integration setup and make the the first step towards continuous deployment and continuous delivery. Instead of deployment being a bottleneck to your development process, it will be be an integrated part of it. You can test your application on the target platform as soon as possible, find any platform incompatibility and deployment issues early on, and, when it’s time to deploy to the production environment, your deployment will be quick and reliable.

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Filed under Build tools, Deployment, Testing, Xebia Labs | No Comments »

Market Driven Development  (aka Agile Fixed Price)

I propose a paradigm shift in developing software to deliver business value.

For a team to satisfy a business need,
it is not the amount of work that defines the time needed,
it is the available time that defines the amount of work that can be done.

The deadline is part of the need, and not the result of estimation or planning techniques.
With the deadline being part of the need, the Team and the Product Owner have a shared budget ( = number of Sprints ) to realize the Vision.

Instead of using Poker to give insight in the estimated time of delivery, let’s create a Market Place where Product Owner and Team ‘negotiate’ on the complexity of each story.

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Filed under Agile, Ideas, Project Management, Requirements Management, Uncategorized | 10 Comments »

Let me introduce you to Nick, Martijn and Harold.   Junior developers at a large company. They were good.  They were young. And they were angry.

Angry, because they felt they were being held down by the system. As junior developers they only got to do simple, boring work.  They were unable to show all their knowledge, or use the cool things they had learned in college. Their salary matched the level of the work they did, and this was another big frustration.

Then one day the company decided to transfer to Agile, and the lives of Nick, Martijn and Harold changed. While in the beginning it looked like a great improvement, the young men soon got trapped…

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