I had been pushed around one too many times on software projects… At 30 years old, I had been developing software for 10 years and had trouble sleeping, was addicted to coffee and cigarettes, and held bitter, angry feelings towards...
As someone who’s done projects for over 30 organizations in my career, I’ve run across a wide variety of development methodologies. Most folks know by now that when an organization says they are “doing SCRUM” or “doing Agile” what they...
While burn down charts are effective tools for tracking how a team is progressing towards finishing planned work, there is a sinister effect that happens in many organizations that learn to use them. Managers begin to primarily focus on the...
About 3 years into my career, I was promoted to the coveted “Application Architect” at a manufacturing software subsidiary of a Fortune 500. At the time I was a force of youth and passion – but I hadn’t developed the...
Much like what is happening in the “big data” space, challenges with interoperability in the IT deployment tool market are converging to create an opportunity for standardization. Before I go any further, let me introduce two terms that have no official...
While a team must adopt a customer-guided, acceptance criteria-driven culture to begin releasing IT assets frequently and with high quality, eventually an investment needs to be made to create a Deployment Pipeline. Put simply, this is a technology that enables an organization...
Getting revenue generating IT released faster is a clear advantage. The biggest ROI of Continuous Delivery is a little more subtle....
Ahh, estimating. We all hate to do it, but it's critical when releasing more often. The good news is it's not nearly as important to get it "just right" for an entire effort, but it is important that the current...
Think back to the last time you released to your customers. There was probably a brief feeling of satisfaction, hopefully a validation from the customer that you delivered what they wanted, and your team learned a thing or two about...
When a team decides to try reducing the time it takes for their ideas to get to their customers (cycle time), there are a few new technical investments that must be made. However, without business stakeholders supporting the changes in a SCRUM approach...
