4 Top Tips for Developing a New Feature
As a backend developer at CA BlazeMeter, I recently had the chance to work on a big feature for our web app. The feature required a massive change on our backend code, a big change on our frontend and multiple migrations. You know what I’m talking about—it was one of those projects that developers fear. […]
Strategies to Build Trust in DevOps
I’ve been a member of the DevOps community a long time (literally since before it was ever even called “DevOps”). I was a pre-publication reviewer for both “The Phoenix Project” and the recently published “The DevOps Handbook,” and I’m always interested in seeing the outcomes successes software teams have and the failures they overcome, including […]
Relevant Continuous Testing: The Primary Key to DevOps
My recent blog, “7 Pillars of DevOps,” identified seven essential best practices areas that make up successful DevOps and explained that the pillars are not silos, but rather foundations that need to be kept in balance. One of the pillars is continuous testing (CT). For well-balanced DevOps, CT performs tests that are fast enough to […]
Welcome to the Continuous Delivery 101 Podcast
No matter what industry you’re in or how old your business is, your software often determines your success in today’s application economy. Applications are the face of your business—both the way it performs and the speed with which you can incorporate new ideas and innovations, driven by the efficiency of your software development life cycle—determines […]
DevOps by the Book in 2017: Where we Really Stand
Now that the year-end prediction season is over, it’s time to focus squarely on the actual here and now—where the DevOps movement actually stands at the start of 2017. As we’ll need to wait another six months or so for the annual State of DevOps Report to emerge from the good folks over at DORA […]
Automation: Achieving Faster Rollouts with Better Accuracy
A changing landscape requires new processes At the recent Symposium/ITxpo, Gartner shared a list of technologies and trends that will be important for organizations to embrace and prepare for in 2017. These trends, which are listed in the report, “Top Strategic Predictions for 2017 and Beyond: Surviving the Storm Winds of Digital Disruption,” reinforce the […]
Time, Training: How to Implement DevOps Effectively
Successful implementation of DevOps solutions requires two very important investments: time and training. New technologies have always transformed how the commercial world operates. The steam engine for example, fueled the industrial revolution of the 18th century and changed the face of business forever. This dramatic shift didn’t happen overnight, though; people had to learn new […]
The Code Doesn’t Lie, and Other Operations Mantras
As engineers, we spend a lot of time talking about things such as release processes, QA environments and deployments. But at the end of the day, most software systems fail because the software itself is faulty. The code doesn’t lie—you can almost always find the solution to your problem within the code itself. Of course, […]
A Holiday Tradition: 2017 Continuous Delivery Predictions
It’s that time of year. As the calendar year comes to a close, many of us are following time-honored traditions: making preparations for the holidays, planning some much-deserved time off and enjoying time with friends and family. In the business world, the year-end also brings its own traditions, and first among those is making predictions […]
Australian DevOps Company to Open US Office in 2017
Australia-based DevOps as a managed service provider base2Services is preparing to establish a U.S. office in mid-2017. Despite being based in Melbourne, Australia, base2Services already has five customers in North America—including media company All Day and online video specialist Sardius Media—that contribute nearly 20 percent of the company’s revenue. Further expansion in the region will […]
Don’t Cancel the Retrospective
Not too long ago, I noticed a lot of teams rescheduling or cancelling retrospectives. Sometimes it was because key people were going to be out of office. Sometimes it was because a major deliverable was due and everyone was crazy stressed. Sometimes it was because the project wasn’t as far along as they thought it […]
Mainframe Apps and the Long View of DevOps Strategy
IT is constantly under intense short-term pressures. Line of business (LOB) executives demand a competitive advantage in digital customer engagement now. Marketing leaders demand better customer analytics now. Legal demands better audit reporting now. In fact, much of the investment that companies are making in Agile, DevOps and continuous delivery is due to the urgent, […]
Continuous Integration vs. Delivery vs. Deployment: What’s the Difference?
“Continuous” is one of the most popular words in the DevOps lexicon. What does it really mean, and what is the difference between continuous delivery, continuous deployment and continuous integration? Keep reading for some perspective. Like many technological concepts, continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment are terms that DevOps teams tend to use without […]
Are We Leaving Developers Out of DevOps Spinoffs?
SecOps. DataOps. NetOps. Reading these terms, you get the sense that the key to IT efficiency is to make IT Ops work with everyone else. But that’s a mistake, because it leaves developers out of the picture. It’s no secret that the DevOps movement has generated a number of other *Ops initiatives, including those listed […]
Foster Creative Workers, not Assembly Lines
Why do we keep building assembly lines of creative people? Why do tech companies still structure their developer workforces around ideas invented during the industrial revolution over a century ago? It’s ignorant, lazy and, worst of all, it pisses everyone off. Most of these archaic ideas must die if we are to take fully enlightened advantage of the […]
How to Bridge the Developer Gap
It’s time to bring cloud application development back into the organization and bridge the developer gap by training your own people. For years, companies have outsourced many IT functions, treating computing as a commodity, perhaps thanks in large part to Nick Carr’s publication, “IT Doesn’t Matter.” Carr predicted that computing would become a utility. And […]
Making Performance More Than a Best Practice
Yes, you read that correctly: SRE means that strong application performance—speed, reliability and availability—no longer is simply a best practice. It is a must. Site reliability engineering, or SRE, is a term Google coined several years ago, and while there is no universal definition, SRE can be thought of as a discipline that blends software engineering […]
Why PR, Legal and HR Matter for Continuous Delivery
By most definitions, DevOps involves making developers and IT Ops teams work better together. But integrating other parts of an organization, such as legal and public relations, into DevOps is also important. Here’s why. DevOps has become popular because it helps to speed the delivery of software. The goal is to reach continuous delivery, which […]
Four Inspiration-Killing Concepts That Need Redefining
Software engineering is a creative process, and creativity cannot be measured by the hour. It can be measured only by the value of the contribution. Yet, a majority of companies still measure productivity by hourly contributions. Companies treat the development process as if it still existed in the days of the assembly line, and all […]
Continuous Integration vs. Continuous Delivery: There’s an Important Difference
If you read DevOps blogs today, it can be easy to assume that Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are synonymous terms. People often use them that way. But that’s a mistake. As an example of conflation of the terms CI and CD, take this page, which purports to be a “history of CI/CD […]
How Agile Are Your User Stories?
Around the world, enterprises are adopting the concept of Agile development. This methodology is based on a set of principles for software development by which requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of teams. User stories form the foundation of the Agile requirements process, and teams gather to create them by exploring how users […]
So Long to Configuration Management Systems?
When I was an operations architect at Ning way back in 2009, we were struggling to manage our deployments and configurations of more than 50 different application servers, or what the cool kids today call microservices. Applications were deployed across three distinct environments: development, staging and production. None of these environments were exactly the same […]
What to Expect from DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco 2016
Many have asked me what I’m looking forward to at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2016 in San Francisco—it is the third year of our conference, and I think it will be our best conference yet! Here are three of the things I’m looking forward to most: Where Are They Now? First off, we will have seven […]