Why some agile projects fail and others succeed The Great Promise of Agile Productivity There are many reasons to adopt agile, but the list must start with increased productivity. Businesses exist to make money and agile proponents are quick to cite large increases in productivity when adopting agile. For example, Jeff Sutherland talks about “hyperproductivity” […]
Key Ideas and Takeaways from the Phoenix Project
Too busy to read book reviews The Phoenix Project The Phoenix Project is one of the most important books in the DevOps movement. The Phoenix Project is a business novel about a fictional company in crisis, called Parts Unlimited. Parts Unlimited attempts to launch a new system called Phoenix. Despite bugs and IT warnings not to […]
Team or Psuedo Team? (Make sure you have a team before building it)
What makes up a team? Before figuring out to build a team, let’s start with figuring out if you have a team. Patrick Lencioni in his book, Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, defines a team as small group of people that have the following characteristics: Shared Goals Shared Responsibilities Shared Rewards You need all three characteristics […]
Avoid Programming in TeamCity or Jenkins with Cake
Don’t Program in Your Continuous Integration Tool Continuous Integration tools, such as TeamCity or Jenkins are powerful and useful tools for a DevOps team. They can checkout code, build it, and deploy the software to the environment of your choice. This is a good thing. Problems arise when developers overuse custom steps in the CI/CD tool in lieu of […]