The world is going Agile – literally

On my run this morning, I caught an absolutely amazing piece on NPR. Turns out that the world is going Agile. We  - in the technology and software development world, have already learnt what it means to be agile. Its all about making small incremental changes,  delivering it to customers, gathering the feedback and iteratively [Read More →]

no comments | posted by on February 21, 2012

Demonstrating the value of DevOps to a diverse IT organization

Over the past year that I have worked at Electric Cloud I have had to do many engagements that could be classed as DevOps focused.  I have found these combined Dev & Ops customer interactions to have some key differences to those to the ones that are Dev focused (even the ones where Dev is “doing” deploying [Read More →]

no comments | posted by on February 13, 2012

90 days to 10 minutes – How do you like that for efficient software delivery cycles?

We recently talked to one of our customers implementing ElectricCommander, our software development and delivery automation solution, and the improvements this customer has seen with ElectricCommander are truly astounding. The customer (for privacy reasons, we shall not name them here), creates cutting edge software used by millions of web users/consumers around the globe.  Their software [Read More →]

no comments | posted by on February 2, 2012

The Secret to Fast, Reliable Builds – Part 2

In a previous blogpost by Eric Melski, he covered the basic conflict detection algorithm in ElectricMake. It’s surprisingly simple, which is one of its strengths. But if ElectricMake strictly adhered to the simple definition of a conflict, many builds would be needlessly serialized, sapping performance. Over the years we’ve made a variety of tweaks to the [Read More →]

no comments | posted by on December 5, 2011

ElectricCommander Feature Spotlight: The Batch API

This is the first in a series of spotlights on some ElectricCommander features that you may not be using as much as you could or which you may not even be aware of. In this installment, I illustrate why the batch api is an important tool in your arsenal as a procedure developer and how [Read More →]

no comments | posted by on November 28, 2011

The Secret to Fast, Reliable Builds – Part 1

Parallel execution is a popular technique for reducing software build length, and for good reason. These days, multi-core computers have become standard — even my laptop has four cores — so there’s horsepower to spare. And it’s “falling over easy” to implement: just slap a “-j” onto your make command-line, sit back and enjoy the [Read More →]

no comments | posted by on November 17, 2011

Agile Won’t Scale Without Automation: Limited Insight

This is part five of a five part series where we will present five distinct challenges that if left unaddressed will drastically reduce an organization’s ability to gain the benefits promised by a move to Agile development methods. It’s a sad fact that in most enterprises, the process of building, testing, and deploying software is [Read More →]

no comments | posted by on November 1, 2011

My Not-So-Secret Secrets to Management Success: Respect

Hugely important, mutual respect makes it possible to work together efficiently. Respect yourself, your coworkers, and your customers. Expect the same from everyone on your team, and help those who run into any difficulties with that. Any feedback is of course welcome (I sure hope my team won’t correct me too much). Read the other [Read More →]

no comments | posted by on October 31, 2011

My Not-So-Secret Secrets to Management Success: Feedback

Of course, I know and use all the favorite feedback phrases (“My door is always open”, “Let’s have regular one on ones”, etc.)  These are all good, but everybody is busy, so sometimes these happen, and sometimes they don’t. I am sure we have all had those pretty useless “Q: So how are things going?, [Read More →]

no comments | posted by on October 31, 2011

My Not-So-Secret Secrets to Management Success: Empowerment

Team members are empowered to make their own decisions where appropriate and know when to consult. I personally don’t care for micro management (too much work for me), so when choosing members for my team I look for people with a strong sense of personal accountability who drive towards finding the best possible solution. That [Read More →]

no comments | posted by on October 31, 2011