Agile

The same marketing hype that surrounded “Agile” has now switched to “DevOps”; the combination of the two is one way to solve all the issues that IT organizations have been known for. This has generated the chimera of the “full stack” developer, which simply means that now a developer is expected to do it all. What else could it mean?

After some experimentation, Tomas Rybing is back with another visualisation for teams using the Kanban method. He’s cut the top off of his Priority Pyramid and created The Volcano, which covers bigger teams and more products.

What feels good for programmers in the short term, often feels bad in the long-term. But when a work environment invites programmers to deliver short-term results, then they tend to put the company in technical debt. And technical debt is SO no unicorn, says Marco Troisi.

Spotify’s famously engineered agile practices have become the stuff of lean legend. The company is growing at a rapid rate and continues to employ its unique brand of agile methodology, which is intricately linked to its organic organisational culture.

No concept is more complex and nebulous to a software developer than the one that is suggested by the word “done”. Is there such a thing as a finish line in IT? And if so, what exact requirements should a programmer need to fulfil in order to cross it?

Thinking of code as a beautiful work of art is a mistake. But at the same time we need to start seeing coding as a genuine skill that deserves professional recognition, says leading Software Craftsmanship advocate and JAX London speaker Sandro Mancuso.

Maturity models are known to lend long-term structure and understanding to the unfamiliar territory of DevOps. But anyone familiar with them will also know their many weaknesses. It turns out computer games already have all the answers.

Is the sole purpose of Agile to help programmers work faster? Is it about being ‘agile’ in the literal sense? Or is there more to the Agile methodology, asks software architect Lewis Foti.

There’s one thing we can agree on when it comes to database tests: they ain’t easy. In this JAX Magazine preview, testing guru and JAX London speaker Colin Vipurs runs through the strengths and weaknesses of common approaches to testing databases.

Which tools are best when you’re looking to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day? Nitish Tiwari has the lowdown on the software you need to keep your continuous integration game strong.

Another addition to the #NoEstimates debate, Tomas Rybing looks at measuring the capacity of teams without effort estimation, in a process easy to remember. It just so happens to be faster and more accurate than estimating.

After his success with the Priority Pyramid, Tomas Rybing is back with another great way to organise your workflow via the Kanban methodology.

Unpredictable, even damaging events occur frequently in agile software projects. In Part 2 of his article dealing with Antifragility, Gerrit Beine looks at the options we have when it comes to agility.

Unpredictable, even damaging events occur frequently in agile software projects. This type of event is noted by Nassim Nicholas Taleb as a Black Swan, and we can make use of these events by harnessing Antifragility.