Can Agile and DevOps Get Along?
There is a common misconception that Agile and DevOps cannot work together, which does a disservice to everyone in the software development and delivery field. In fact, both approaches can significantly add to the Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection and adaption to better enable product teams to develop, deliver and sustain complex products. Both Agile […]
What Can Conway’s Law Teach Us About DevOps?
I first heard about Conway’s Law from reading the “DevOps Handbook” (an excellent read, by the way, if you want to dive head-first into DevOps). I was intrigued by how this idea came from slightly left field, yet seemed to have big implications for businesses on their journey to increased efficiency. In this blog, I […]
Cuba Embraces DevOps, Despite Infrastructure Challenges
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at the second DevOpsDays event in Cuba alongside some great technologists from across the United States, Europe and Latin America. The conference was held in a beautiful hotel in Varadero overlooking a marina right by the beach. Varadero is approximately two hours by car from […]
Creatures of Habit, Snowflakes and Integration Tax
Donovan Brown of Microsoft, in conversation with Matt Hilbert of Redgate Software, discusses database DevOps’ biggest challenges When DevOps was first talked about in Flickr’s seminal “10 deploys per day” Velocity presentation in 2009, it was regarded by some as strange and alien to corporate culture. It was the antithesis to the accepted way of […]
What is a DevOps ‘Best Practice’?
In IT, we love our frameworks. Whether agile, ITIL, lean, cobit, six sigma or others, our thirst for “best practice” guidance seems to be unquenchable. The concept of a “best practice” is an enigma. Who decides if a practice is actually the best? And best for whom? While an “adopt and adapt” mentality is advocated […]
Dice Breakers: using DevOps principles and nerdery to reimagine Team building
Software is a young industry, and not a very traditional one. Your team can’t always be expected to behave like teams in other fields. So it’s no surprise that when a development team hears the phrase, “teambuilding exercises” for most of them it conjures up the idea of a room full of awkward people marginally […]
Librato Seeks to Unlock DevOps Application Monitoring
As wider adoption of DevOps methodologies continues to foster demand for new tooling to help streamline evolving workflows, at least one vendor is attempting to address the growing need for related monitoring capabilities. Librato, a San Francisco-based provider of Amazon AWS applications performance monitoring (APM) services, claims that it is finding favor among the rapidly […]
5 Ways Continuous Integration Reduces Risk in Development
***This post is based on themes and ideas from the great e-book, “Continuous Testing,” by our friends at Parasoft. There’s a lot of talk about DevOps and Continuous Integration in the tech space right now, but sometimes the implementation of those methods can be tricky. An effective Continuous Integration strategy requires DevOps teams to manage […]
Continuous Testing: What exactly is it?
***This post is based on themes and ideas from the great e-book, “Continuous Testing,” by our friends at Parasoft. The aptly named DevOps practice of Continuous Testing synchronizes Testing/QA with Dev and Ops processes optimized to achieve business and development goals. A few years ago when Agile was all the rage, lightning-fast Dev sprints left the […]
Surprise! Broad Agreement on the Definition of DevOps
For the past few years, the conventional wisdom has been that DevOps has no agreed upon definition. Instead, everyone has their own interpretation. However, the conventional wisdom is wrong. While everyone supplies slightly different words, the same working understanding of DevOps is nearly universal. Our understanding of DevOps goes back to a handful of common touch-points. There is the “CAMS” […]
10 Top Tips for DevOps Cultural Change
DevOps is commonly recognised to be primarily about creating a culture of effective and seamless collaboration but this is often the hardest piece to enact when it involves changing an existing culture (as opposed to creating a culture from scratch in a startup type environment and having the luxury of hiring individuals with certain mindsets […]
Five Top Tips for DevOps At Scale
Since I published my blog explaining the topic of ‘Big DevOps’ late last year, the concept of Enterprise DevOps has exploded, with commentary, experience, and advice (some good, some awful) popping up from many different quarters. Fortunately, many pundits have now come to agree that application delivery in a traditional enterprise is very different from […]
DevOps Needs a Tsunami To Jump The Chasm
All start up business endeavors must go through the phase of crossing the chasm. Most of those business endeavors usually fall prey to the chasm. The chasm is this black hole that everyone claims to understand but no one truly does. We have all seen businesses cross the chasm or fail to cross the chasm […]