Tag: configuration

CASE STUDY: VA Software
Agile development methodologies aren't one-size-fits-all. Independent software vendors (ISVs) have unique needs-external customers, aggressive release dates and competitive pressures-that require tailoring software development methodologies that work well in corporate IT settings. Faced with a major new project and bogged down by a big design up-front process, VA Software adapted Extreme Programming (XP) to help build the latest versions of SourceForge® Enterprise Edition (SFEE).

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Open Source Tools for the Agile Developer
A defining characteristic of agile development is to keep moving forward, recognizing working code as the primary measure of valued software. Undoubtedly, there is no way to judge a software system until you have a system to judge. Yet, experienced developers recognize that requirements frequently change and traditional methods have achieved very little success in stabilizing requirements early in the lifecycle. Instinctively, we may feel change impedes progress, but agile developers embrace an attitude where change is viewed as an opportunity to improve the system. A variety of open source software tools  can enable important agile practices, allowing you to keep moving forward so long as you are willing to embrace change.

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FEATURED BOOK: Practical Development Environments - by Matthew B. Doar

Okay - so you're "doing the ‘Agile' thing" with your software development. How about your development environment? Are all the tools in your development environment truly practical?

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Stretched to the Limit

If the "World is Flat" how come we still have bumps in the road of collaboration and communication?

When serendipity taps you on the shoulder I've found it best not to ignore the intrusion. I recently got back from an intense trip to India, speaking at several seminars and to a number of our leading customers. On my return I picked up "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman and this book provided me with a deeper perspective on what I had just learned, face-to-face, with the same groups of people I had just met in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Delhi. And here we are in the second edition of Agile Journal talking about Offshore Agile Development.

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Tackling Offshore Agile Development
As an analyst, I have spoken with hundreds of software developers and managers struggling to improve their delivery capabilities. Many are turning to Agile processes as a means to deliver high quality solutions and at the same time improve time to benefits. And, at the same time, these teams need to work with ever-shrinking budgets. Of all the questions they asked about Agile development in 2005, the most common - and the toughest - was: "Can we take advantage of offshore resources and still use Agile processes?"

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FEATURED BOOK: Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders

Numerous Agile methods and principles emphasize the value of collaboration and self-organization. Most books on the subject of Agile development discuss principles and practices related to planning and development practices. Yet few Agile books delve deeply into the How To's of collaboration, facilitation and project leadership. Collaboration Explained, by Jean Tabaka, does exactly this: it takes the essential skills, methods, and proven practices of successful team leaders and group facilitators, and explains them in detail while also applying them directly to the context of agile software development.

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Make SOA Governance A High Priority

Today's enterprises face growing regulatory pressures with legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, HIPAA, the Patriot Act and others. As a result, corporate and IT governance - the processes, controls and reporting infrastructure over business and IT activities, respectively - are becoming progressively more pervasive as a means for providing the compliance infrastructure necessary to satisfy this list of complex regulations. Combine this increased pressure for corporate traceability and visibility with the "next big thing" in software, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and you have a challenging governance environment to say the least. SOA's loosely-coupled nature forces IT away from monolithic application development and deployment, and as a result it greatly increases the number of moving parts that must be managed and governed.

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Turning the Fragile into the Agile

Tool integrations are notoriously fragile; how can we fix this problem once and for all?

The first sign of trouble is the unusually long time it takes for your IDE to start one morning. Maybe you can't access the trouble tickets any more or the team members cannot build their applications or run the automated test suite.

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