Category Agile

Magento 2 Test Automation – is it Helping? YES!

Magento 2 is more than a revamped platform – automating testing has also been a significant investment. But is it paying off? Is test automation worth the effort? YES! Here is the data to prove it. Disclaimer: opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily that of my employer. Please also note the data […]

The ABC(DE) of Task Estimation

I opened an agile card deck I have at random to “Story Estimation Fundamentals” or “the ABC(DE) of Task Estimation”. Here are my views … All contributors estimate I like to encourage a culture where the team is responsible for meeting the goals of a sprint, not individuals. By this I mean team members should be […]

Principles of Continuous Delivery

A colleague, Ritesh Triveli, showed this to me some time back. I like it so much, I decided to copy and paste it verbatim here. Extract from Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation by Jez Humble and David Farley. 8 Principles of Continuous Delivery The process for releasing/deploying software MUST […]

Reminder of the Value of Deployment Automation

Some time back I came across an article “5 things Amazon taught me about deployment automation.” It does not say anything radically new, but gives some good examples of why deployment automation (including quality automation) is good. Oh, and this is *nothing* about how Amazon does deployment automation – they just use the end-user Amazon […]

Continuous Delivery versus Frequent Releases

Continuous delivery and more traditional versioned releases are close, but a little different. In this post I dig into some of the practical details and issues that different between the approaches. There is no rocket science in this post – just summarizing knowledge gained from practical experience. Continuous Delivery In continuous delivery, the idea is […]

Continuous Delivery with Maven

Maven is not perfect, but it is very useful for its version dependency support when compiling Java programs. You specify the version of a jar file you want, and it will download the version from a repository and all transient dependencies as well. This encourages breaking a project up into smaller jar files, which can […]

Feedback Loops and Measurement

I like writing code.  I don’t really like administrative overheads and updating systems like Jira (or Rally or VersionOne or…).  But I know they are important and necessary.  Given that, I like to get the most out of them I can. Management needs systems like Jira on Agile Scrum projects to track progress and roll […]

Procedural Justice

One of my favorite books is called “Blue Ocean Strategy”.  It is a marketing book on how to position strategies, but fun to read because of all the examples. From Chapter 8: ›Social scientists John W. Thibaut and Laurens Walker combined interest of psychology of justice with the study of process ›Created: Procedural Justice ›- […]

Innovation without Execution is Futile

A few weeks back I blogged on Quality and Process Drive Execution and Innovation. When I went back to read it again, I realized I did not express the relationship between Execution and Innovation quite right. At the end of last year during the eBay leaders week, one session struck me in particular. Devin Wenig (President […]

Fail Fast and Agile

“Fail Fast” can be a really useful technique.  There is a Wikipedia description and a famous software engineering article.  But I am going to talk here about “fail fast” with respect to Agile. In “The Art of Agile Development” there is a chapter on Fail Fast.  It starts out It may seem obvious, but failure […]