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Category → Agile Methodologies

Launch Dates – The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

Setting a launch date for your new web site is common practice. Even though nobody knows what exactly the site might look like and even less how much effort it will be to launch it, the release date is fixed. This can have positive and negative effects. The Good The positive side of having a [...] Related posts:Static Backlogs, Delivery Dates...

What have we done for you today?

I’m a firm believer of release early and often. If there’s more than 10 new commits in our code repository awaiting release, I start to get uncomfortable. Whether it’s extra “inventory sitting on our shelves” instead of in your browser, or the uncertainty of “going live” with a bunch of new stuff and then...

How to guide a team through a crisis

No matter whether your team is self-organizing or not, when the shit hits the fan, they’ll need strict rules and close guiding to manage the crisis. Clear Responsibilities First, everyone has to know exactly what they’re supposed to do. Whether it’s restarting crashed servers, capturing log outputs, or just staying the hell out...

Using Kanban For DevOps Projects

This is a guest post by Robert Dempsey, CEO & Founder of Atlantic Dominion Solutions. He helps clients with agile training and builds products like scrum’d. I wish I had known about Kanban when I was a network administrator. It would have helped me immensely in terms of prioritization of work and making everything we [...] Related...

DevOps: Why Silos Suck And How To Break Them

Divide and conquer, Caesar’s strategy to break huge problems down into smaller parts, is an outdated model for structuring teams and organizations. Breaking teams apart by area like development, QA, operations, product management, etc, creates silo like divisions of labor. Unfortunately, these divisions create so many “walls of...

The 12 principles behind the agile manifesto adapted to web operations

Walking once again through the twelve principles behind the Agile Manifesto, I realized how tailored they are for software development projects. Yet experience has shown that agile practices are not strictly limited to development projects, but to all areas involved in bringing a software product to the users. Here is my version of the twelve...

Improving Operations with Agile

photo credit: wapster Last week, I suggested that SysAdmins are much more agile than we give them credit for. But, when it comes to organizing their day-to-day work they need just as much help as the rest of us. Today, I want to talk about how agile methodologies work just as well in operations as [...] Related posts:What do Sysadmins really...