In Agile, everyone agrees on the concept that continuous improvement is a good thing. In Scrum and also in most Kanban practices we even have a ceremony to support this, namely The Retrospective. This periodically occurring meeting (often every other week) with the entire team plays a vital part in the process and in team [...]

Last week I enjoyed to opportunity to speak at the Agile2010 conference in Orlando, Florida. Of course, I also attended many of the other sessions as well. The conference has in my view an excellent atmosphere. Where I expected to find lots of consultants in their typical formal style of dressing I found 1400 people mostly [...]

Planning has an important role in Agile. The team uses planning to estimate the complexity of a requirement (userstory). The number of complexity points handled in previous timeframes then helps to decide what could fit into the next timeframe. However the complexity changes in time. Things get easier doing it a second time or easier [...]

This is number 8, the third article in a top10 of middleware management pitfalls. The previous article dealt with infrastructure. This time I´ll discuss the application itself. There has been much cool stuff lately about devops and devs and ops working together in one team, like at sky.com. The uncool reality for a lot of companies [...]

In the current market it becomes more and more likely that developers in the same team will not be in the same physical location. This is caused by outsourcing, but also other reasons like ever increasing focus on open source projects. In a distributed scenario pair programming has huge benefits over meetings and sending comments on [...]

In my previous post, "future of deployment, part 2", i talked about the new ear, which is an image, with an OS and your application. Now before diving into part 3, which gets you going in creating your own virtual appliance aka "the image", there is one really big thing i forgot to mention; Some of [...]

Scene opens... An idyllic landscape unfolds before our eyes, in yonder distance we see a figure approaching us. He goes by the name of Arthur, King of the Britons... public class Arthur { // Some internals or Arthur, will be revisited later. }   When we turn around, we see a gorge. Over the gorge lies an old rope-bridge with wooden [...]

Over the last 4 month's we have written a series of blogposts describing 11 principles of Lean Architecture. This post will be the last of the series, the wrap up post. The posts are, in order: Lean Architecture Principle #1: Always involved Lean Architecture Principle #2: Travel light Lean Architecture Principle #3: Think Big, Act Small Lean Architecture Principle #4: [...]

This is the eleventh and last post in a series of blog posts discussing Lean Architecture principles. Each post discusses one principle. Applying these principles results in an architecture (process) that is better connected to the business, better able to deal with change and more cohesive. The eleventh principle we discuss is called "Freedom where possible, [...]

The art of coaching is not as easy as it looks. One of the main reasons for this is that being a successful coach is not measured by what you do but by what is achieved. I’ve discovered a few ‘patterns’ in my own coaching behavior that leed to on ‘working hard’ [...]

This is the tenth post in a series of blog posts discussing Lean Architecture principles. Each post discusses one principle. Applying these principles results in an architecture (process) that is better connected to the business, better able to deal with change and more cohesive. The tenth principle we discuss is called "Architecture emerging from Projects". One of [...]

Recently, Andrew Phillips, VP of Product Management at XebiaLabs, and I had the opportunity to speak with Mike Vizard, tech journalist for IT Business Edge. We had a great conversation about automating application deployments and Mike’s article provides a nice look into our discussion. In the last paragraph, he brings up an interesting point, saying “there [...]

People use metaphors to understand or to explain something better. Metaphors in software development are ubiquitous, as in the computer world in general. Especially people who are in the business of software development, but aren't experienced in actual software development, often use various metaphors to better grasp what they’re dealing with. [...]

In an attempt to better understand the ideas behind 'Life Beyond Distributed Transactions, an Apostate's Opion.' by Pat Helland, I'm going to try to explain how the concept would work out for a time-honored example: the good old transfer of money from one account to the other, the archetype of all distributed transactions because we [...]

This is the ninth post in a series of blog posts discussing Lean Architecture principles. Each post discusses one principle. Applying these principles results in an architecture (process) that is better connected to the business, better able to deal with change and more cohesive. The ninth principle we discuss is "Comprehensible over Comprehensiveness". Documentation is important in architecture. Architecture is [...]

How did we end up here? Fifteen years ago, at the end of the two-tier client server age, people started to realize the importance of distinguishing between at least three different layers in the architecture. A business layer, providing a convenient API allowing you to address a particular business concern, a data layer storing related data, [...]

This is the eight post in a series of blog posts discussing Lean Architecture principles. Each post discusses one principle. Applying these principles results in an architecture (process) that is better connected to the business, better able to deal with change and more cohesive. The eight principle we discuss is called "Focus on the value [...]

Sometime in the bright future, you will be able to deploy the same virtual appliance containing your application to all your target environments without adjustments. For the time being, however, deployments to traditional DTAP1 landscapes almost always mean "tweaking" the application and associated configuration and resources to match the target environment - think endpoints, properties [...]

Virtualization and cloud computing have exploded over the past few years. A recent study shows that 90 percent of businesses have implemented server virtualization at some level and Gartner estimates the current market for cloud services is $46.4 billion and will reach $150.1 billion by 2013. With other estimates saying business applications can be made [...]

This is the seventh post in a series of blog posts discussing Lean Architecture principles. Each post discusses one principle. Applying these principles results in an architecture (process) that is better connected to the business, better able to deal with change and more cohesive. The seventh principle we discuss is called "Architecture Initiated by Business [...]