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 Gero Vermaas around lunchtime: August 31st, 2011
That was the question on my mind while walking out of an hour and a half meeting which was attended by 6 people. The problem wasn’t that complicated, we went into the meeting with 3 alternative solutions: so why did it take so long to pick one? It kept nagging me a bit and then I recalled the “Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises” book by Roger Sessions. By applying his approach I was able to determine if we made the right choice and I’ll describe the results below.
Posted by Gero Vermaas in the early morning: August 19th, 2011
A while ago I realized that the C in COTS stands for Customize, so in reality it is Customize Off The Shelf (and not Commercial Off The Shelf). The premise of COTS products is that it reduces system development costs and long term operational maintenance costs. Sounds like music to management and procurement departments. Reality can be different. Realizing that the C stands for Customize highlights one of the pitfalls most people are aware of: the amount of customization needed to make a COTS product fit in an organization can be huge. But there are more pitfalls and in this blog I’ll highlight a few.
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh mid-afternoon: June 24th, 2011
To celebrate my move to the Agile Consulting and Training division of Xebia I thought it would be very appropriate to start playing with some hip new technologies.
From their homepages:
Node.js: Evented I/O for V8 JavaScript. (A framework for building completely non-blocking servers in Javascript)
NPM: A package manager for node.
CoffeeScript: A little language that compiles into JavaScript
Express: High performance, high class web development for Node.js
Jade: Node Template Engine
Redis: An open source, advanced key-value store
In this guide I will take very small steps so that you can verify that you are check whether you are still on track.
The result is an extremely performant, scalable and lightweight alternative for web development.
Posted by Herbert Schuurmans mid-afternoon: May 5th, 2011
A flexible architecture can only come to its full potential when the organization itself is flexible. (more…)
Posted by Niklas Odding in the early morning: May 3rd, 2011
This Blog is a kick off to for many writings about architecture in an Agile World. We will explore the topic from all the views possible, in order to gain a better understanding about it. By doing so, we hope to create a community of followers, who would also like to contribute or discuss about this topic.
Xebia is helping many organizations in the Netherlands, France, the United States and India with implementing an agile way of system development. In most of the cases the Scrum method is applied and very good results are achieved. Business and IT are working much closer together, resulting in more quality and much more customer satisfaction. However, lately we also see a trend in problems that seem to occur in (almost) every organization. Software is developed in a fast way with high quality, but it takes forever to get it in production. The more teams are being formed, the more interdependencies between the teams occur (more…)
Posted by Niklas Odding mid-morning: February 28th, 2011
In my last blog I presented an illustration which shows the two primary aspects of the architects’ role. On one side they play a role in strengthening the heartbeat. On the other side, they play a role in envisioning the future.
The focus in this blog is on the solution architect or application architect. The way the Enterprise architect deals with Scrum will be explored more in detail in a later blog. This blog combined with the previous 3 blogs can be also downloaded as a whitepaper from the Xebia website: http://www.xebia.com/architects_scrum
What is the role of the architect?
Last blog I presented the illustration as shown below. In this blog I will focus on the parts of this illustration in which the solution architect / application architect plays a role
Posted by Niklas Odding mid-morning: February 9th, 2011
In my last post I stated that there is a lot of emphasis on the fact that architects have to help to get the scrum team to work better, faster en with more quality. By following the agile values the architect will help “strengthening the heartbeat” of the scrum teams. However the activities of architects should encompass more. In this blog I will explain what this is and how to incorporate this in your way of working with scrum teams.
Posted by Niklas Odding mid-morning: January 18th, 2011
This blog is intended to be the first of a series of blogs in which I will examine the role of architects in Scrum. I will start with what I think that are the forgotten questions of Scrum and in next blogs I will examine how the role of the architect changes, what kind of architects are needed and and which activities architects should be doing to be successful and valuable.
The forgotten questions of Scrum
In the 1960’s Alfred Chandler already wrote that the organization structure of an organization is tightly related to its strategy and based on its organizational processes. In the optimal world according to Chandler: Structure follows processes follows strategy. (more…)
Posted by Jarl Meijer in the early evening: January 6th, 2011
2010 has ended and a new year has begun. 2010 offered us a lot of learning opportunities. It was a good year for the Agile community in the Netherlands and in the world. We saw more and more big corporations embrace Agile methodologies and put serious effort into making it work for them, mostly as a project methodology. ‘Agile adoption’ was THE 2010 word, maybe on par with ‘Wikileak’. So what do we think will be hot in 2011?
(more…)