Cloud is good for us. So too are practices like DevOps and Continuous Delivery. It’s easy on the surface to read a few articles and think, “yeah, that’s a good idea,” but putting them into practice on the other hand isn’t so easy.
Enterprise lacking skills required for cloud migration
For all the excitement and talk of cloud it seems the reality, at least in enterprises, is a little less glamorous. With more and more executives backing the move to the cloud, more and more organisations are booting up large migration programmes. Unfortunately their aging IT departments lack the experience required and organisations are forced to depend on service providers to fill the gap.
Agile Planning
Both words, “agile” and “planning”, mean different things to different people. In this article I hope to provide an overview of agile planning without going into specific implementations like Scrum or Kanban whilst still providing practical advice for any implementation.
Let your teams plan for themselves
As an industry of tinkerers, optimisers and perfectionists we occasionally miss the beauty of unorganisation and human instinct. Our obsession to be more efficient and productive can sometimes have some undesired consequences. At Made we often adapt our processes in the name of efficiency but lately we’ve started experimenting by taking away some of these processes with surprising results.
How To Build An Agile Team
There are many challenges in building an agile team. We hear about self organising teams, but how can a CTO ensure a roadmap is kept? We hear about #noestimates, but how can we plan anything without estimates? Failure is an important part of agile, but how can we accept failure in production? Communication is key, how can we encourage it?
Where to start with cloud migration?
Your organisation has decided it’s ready to move to the cloud. Where do you start?
Privilege Bingo
Intersectionality, BAME, cis, anonymous hiring, inclusion. These words are likely not on your ticket if you are playing privilege bingo. Like a canary in a coal mine, a lack of understanding of these concepts will likely mean your daily actions reinforce systemic discrimination.
Trusting teams to deploy at any time
Developers should be allowed to deploy at any time. Many find this a scary prospect since it makes traditional release management and QA very hard. We have found that empowering developers to own the responsibility of deployment allows you to ship software much faster whilst maintaining or even improving the safety of releasing changes when compared to more traditional processes.
When to avoid the DRY principle
The Don’t Repeat Yourself principle is probably one of the most widely recognised software design patterns out there; most beginners in the industry will have heard of it, and more seasoned engineers will have taken it further and see its use in other design patterns such as Service-Oriented Architecture, Inversion of Control and Composability over inheritance.
Continuous Delivery: Keeping A Clear Path To Production
Note: Article edited on the 4/12/2018
