Posts Tagged ‘Collaboration’
Our Walls are Thicker
Indeed, not only were their walls thicker, they actually seemed to have razor wire on top and armed guards with vicious dogs patrolling each side of the metaphorical wall. All in an era characterized by tremendous advances in social networking and collaboration.
Click here for details of my Cutter blog post on the subject. Until you have the opportunity to do so, the picture below will quickly gives you the gist of it…
Juggling on the Berlin Wall (source: Wikipedia)
Outline of the Technical Debt Seminar at the Cutter Summit
Pictured above are speakers of the forthcoming Cutter Summit. Between the seventeen of us we will cover a broad spectrum of IT topics such as Agile, Enterprise Architecture, Business Strategy, Cloud Computing, Collaboration, Governance and Security. Inter-disciplinary seminars, panels and case studies will weave all those threads together to give participants a clear view of the unfolding transformation in IT and of the new way(s) companies are starting to utilize IT. Click here for a details.
As Jim Highsmith and I continue to develop our joint seminar on technical debt for the summit, I would like to give readers of this blog a sense of where we are and ask for feedback. Right now we are considering the following building blocks for the seminar:
- The Nature of Technical Debt
- Technical Debt Metrics
- Monetizing Technical Debt
- Constructing Roadmaps for Paying Back Technical Debt
- Risk Assessment and Mitigation
- A Simple Software Governance Framework
- Schedule in the Simple Governance Framework
- Enlightened Governance
- Baking in Quality One Build at a Time
- How Often Should the Project Team Regroup?
- Multi-Level Governance
- Extending Technical Debt Techniques to Devops
- Use of Technical Debt Techniques in Agile Portfolio Management
- The Start Afresh Option
- Technical Debt as an Integral Part of a Value Delivery Culture
In the course of going through a subset of these building blocks, we will cover the latest and greatest from the October issue of the Cutter IT Journal on technical debt, present two case studies, and conduct a few group exercises.
How to Initiate a DevOps Project
Source: 17th/21st Lancers c. 1922-1929 “THE FIGHTING SPIRIT!”
Agile consultants on a development project often start by helping the team construct a backlog. The task is sufficiently concrete to get all stakeholders (product management, project management, development, test, any others) on a collaborative track through the creation of a key artifact. The backlog establishes a base line for the tasks to be carried out in the project.
For a DevOps project, start by establishing the technical debt of the software to be released to operations. By so doing you build the foundations for collaboration between development and operations through shared data. In the DevOps context, the technical debt data form the basis for the creation and grooming of a unified backlog which includes various user stories from operations.
Apply the same approach when you are fortunate to be able to include folks from operations in the Agile team from the very beginning. You start with zero technical debt, but you track it on an ongoing basis and include the corresponding “fix-it” stories in the backlog as you accrue the debt. Running technical debt analytics on the source code every two weeks is a good practice to follow.
As the head of development, you might not be comfortable sharing technical debt data. This being the case, you are not ready for DevOps.
The Agile Executive 