Category: Practices

  • Huge scale deployments

    Deploying to 10 or 20 servers can be complicated. But what are some of the tools, tips and patterns for successfully deploying to 1,000s of servers around the world? Last month I participated in an online panel on the subject of Huge Scale Deployments, as part of Continuous Discussions (#c9d9), a series of community panels about…

  • BCS: Agile Foundations

    BCS: Agile Foundations

    Preconceptions challenged I really wanted to dislike this book, and in some respects I managed to achieve my goal. This is a book published to support yet another spurious agile certification (YASAC?), and I really don’t like that. The authors continuously use ‘Agile’ as a capital-A, noun, rather than the lower-case-a adjective that it clearly ought…

  • Continuous delivery conversations

    Continuous delivery conversations

    Last week I was at the CoDeOSL conference in Oslo. It was an interesting day, with some very good sessions, but as usual it was conversations had in the breaks that were of the most interest. I’d like to describe two discussions that I had that seem, on the face of it, to be in conflict.…

  • Making a meal of architectural alignment and the test-induced-design-damage fallacy

    Making a meal of architectural alignment and the test-induced-design-damage fallacy

    Starter A few days ago Simon Brown posted a thoughtful piece called “Package by component and architecturally-aligned testing.” The first part of the post discusses the tensions between the common packaging approaches package-by-layer and package-by-feature. His conclusion, that neither is the right answer, is supported by a quote from Jason Gorman (that expresses the essence…

  • Entanglement (or there’s nothing new under the sun)

    Entanglement (or there’s nothing new under the sun)

    I’ve just read The Age of Entanglement : When Quantum Physics was Reborn by Louisa Gilder. It’s a tremendous book, looking at the interplay between great physicists over the whole of the 20th century. If you want to learn about quantum physics itself, this is probably not the book for you, but if a mix…

  • Rolling Rocks Downhill

    Rolling Rocks Downhill

    It’s almost a year since I posted a glowing review of “The Phoenix Project” – a business novel, following in the footsteps of Goldratt’s “The Goal”, about continuous delivery. If you haven’t yet read it, then I’m going to recommend that you hold fire, and read “Rolling Rocks Downhill” by Clarke Ching instead. I should…

  • Always Be Coding

    Always Be Coding

    Last night I finally got around to watching Erik Meijer’s keynote from last year’s Reaktor conference. It was called “One Hacker Way” and, while it contains much that is apocryphal – or at least wildly inaccurate – it scores over the older, more pedestrian type of keynote in two important ways: first it is highly contentious,…

  • Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

    Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

    From http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/explore/reduce/: Three great ways YOU can eliminate waste and protect your environment! Waste, and how we choose to handle it, affects our world’s environment—that’s YOUR environment. The environment is everything around you including the air, water, land, plants, and man-made things. And since by now you probably know that you need a healthy environment for…

  • Do you practice BDSA?

    Do you practice BDSA?

    I get to visit a lot of teams. I talk to my peers about their experiences too. For every agile success story there seem to be a load of less happy outcomes. There are three common ways that I’ve seen agile ‘adoption’ go wrong, and they are: Bondage – “You can never change the business. That’s…

  • Half a glass

    Half a glass

    Is this glass half empty or half full? There’s normally more than one way to interpret a situation, but we often forget that the situation itself may be under our control. I often find my clients have backed themselves into a corner by accepting an overly restrictive understanding of what they’re trying to achieve. They will tell…