Tag: infrastructure

The Growing Influence Of Open Source Projects
Two years ago, I began writing about the impact of open source development tools, components, processes and organizational models on corporate IT shops. I worked with a range of development managers that shared a very similar point of view: instead of dismissing the so-called renegade open source projects, the managers emulated these projects' activities and hoped to mimic their success. This trend is only growing and I am intrigued by the ways in which IT shops are looking to the open source community for leadership.

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The Economic Impact of Open Source
For many years, pundits have anticipated seismic change from open source. Beyond the high-profile changes, the effects of open source can be seen everywhere in software development today. While still an emergent phenomenon, there are cost, revenue and intangible benefits for any company that becomes an active consumer and contributor to the open source community now. 

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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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An Agile Approach To Managing Distributed Development
Traditional approaches to distributed development impair flexibility: they don't expose what's actually happening on the ground in different locations, they lack common and effective communication channels, and they substitute "hope" for "managed process" when reconciling work. Distributed development should be as responsive to change as co-located teams.  A program managing distributed development requires behaviors that engender agility.  Three contributing factors are release cadence, transparency of activity, and lightweight communications.

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Generating Real Value From Your Service Oriented Architecture

The question is no longer how best to automate business systems, but rather how to improve what's already been automated. We are nearly finished with the initial wave of IT adoption and most of what can be automated already has been. This means that the essential set of features and functions required to run a business already exists in some form. The trick is how to reuse and repurpose existing investments for additional value.

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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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Seven Agile Team Practices That Scale (Part I of II )

The benefits of agile software methods, including faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer requirements and higher application quality are undeniable to those who have mastered these practices. Agile practices, however, have been defined and recommended primarily to small team environments where co-location, ready access to interactive customers and small team size are the defining rule.  Are the benefits of agility to be denied to those larger software enterprises who don't share these simple paradigms? Or can the industry learn from these practices and apply some of the core principles to large scale development of applications that require 100, 200 or even 1,000 distributed team members to achieve?

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