A few weeks ago during an agile adoption seminar with a program manager considering using agile, I was asked to evaluate approaches to scaling agile practices to support adoption by a large program for their enterprise.  This program had already adopted some basic agile practices (such as daily meetings, stories and Scrum) but felt they weren’t getting the benefits that other, smaller teams, got from “going agile”. At first I thought this would be an easy exercise, given over the years I have had to assist several large... [More]

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In a recent post, see here , I summarized four of the key DevOps principles, namely:  Automate as much of the deployment pipeline as feasible Develop and test against a production-like system Deploy frequently Continuously validate operational quality characteristics Programs and projects adopting continuous delivery practices must create software in such a way that the software can be released to production at any time.                              ... [More]

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Establish a “Single Source of Truth” In a recent post, DevOps in Practice – Best Practices for Adopting Continuous Delivery , I summarized seven practices for helping teams establish a automate continuous delivery process. Establish a single source of truth Automate painful tasks Manage inter- and intra- application dependencies Make “what is where” visible Make certifications and approvals visible Deploy consistently across environments   This post focuses on... [More]

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Perhaps one of the most difficult aspect of scaling agile is the ability to quickly identify, develop and translate large business requirements into actionable stories.   Recently, I had the opportunity to work with a Program management team incorporate several lean / agile principles into their existing enterprise agile adoption strategy in support of a DevOps initiative. The customer wanted to implement improvements that would allow their teams to establish agile practices along with continuous delivery, continuous testing to allow them... [More]

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DevOps in Practice – Best Practices for Adopting Continuous Delivery In many respects, delivering software updates the last mile to production is often one of the biggest challenges. Product development has worked with the business on defining a innovative product, the architects have architected a first-rate technical solution, the team is designing a great mobile app and the solution has passed the testing suite ensuring quality. However, releasing it to product is often the most difficult and dangerous part  of the process. The... [More]

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Scaling Agile practices in support of DevOps A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to participate in the "Release and Deploy workshop" at the 2014 Innovate conference. During the day long hands-on workshop, we learned about several new UrbanCode Release (UCR) capabilities.  While there were several interesting capabilities, UCR's abilities to "visualize" the deployment pipeline and to track the  del ivery lifecycle for a particular set of "applications" being released together showed how effective it... [More]

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Continuous Integration (CI) Practice and Challenges, Part 1 Today, CI is given more attention than ever,because it is becoming more and more complex to use. Large projects involvehundreds of developers working together on a huge volume of components. As aproject scales up in size and complexity, it becomes harder and longer tointegrates all pieces together. The effort required for integrating asystem increases exponentially over time and without a Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), CI adoption might fail.Taking a CI approach to software... [More]

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Agile Testing - Mobile application testing challenges Several months ago, I was challenged by the Release Quality Manager, at a large financial institution, to demonstration the value agile on large projects where several of his development teams were struggling with quality with their mobile application (mobile app) development.  Here is a summary of the challenges, recommendations and outcomes from this engagement. Current Situation My customer was in the middle of an extensive agile transformation with many teams adopting a combination... [More]

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