Better Software Magazine Articles

Bridging the Bimodal Divide between Waterfall and Agile

Most software developers are in either the agile or the waterfall camp. Agile is required to be competitive, but many enterprise processes still rely on waterfall practices for stability. They can coexist.

Steve Elliott's picture Steve Elliott
Development, operations, and QA DevOps: Collaboration with a Purpose

Development, operations, and QA have long recognized the importance of coexistence, but they've still had weak or unbalanced relationships. DevOps emphasizes collaboration, rejecting the "us versus them" mentality. Every department needs information, feedback, and support from every other department, helping everyone see how they enable each other.

Douglas Fink's picture Douglas Fink
Using DevOps to Solve Your IT Problems: An Interview with Sherry Chang

In this interview, Sherry Chang, chief architect for Intel IT's DevOps initiative, explains how DevOps can solve many of your lingering IT problems. She defines the term, details how DevOps can be seen as disruptive to some teams, and lists what techniques you should consider using.

Josiah Renaudin's picture Josiah Renaudin
Scaling DevOps Scaling DevOps in the Enterprise: An Interview with Anders Wallgren
Podcast

In this interview, Anders Wallgren, the CTO of Electric Cloud, explains how to help DevOps travel from small, individual teams to the entire organization. He covers the benefits, risks, and best paths to success if you want to make your company faster and more effective.

Josiah Renaudin's picture Josiah Renaudin
Failure Next Exit sign How to Guarantee Failure in Your Agile DevOps Transformation

Many organizations make the same agile and DevOps scaling mistakes year after year, then attempt to rectify them by putting together a great new strategy—only to miss the reasons causing the failure. If you want to refuse to evolve and, as a result, cause your organization’s agile and DevOps transformation efforts to deliver zero business value, be sure to follow these seven antipatterns.

Mik Kersten's picture Mik Kersten
desktop computers connected to data center Generating Configuration Management Databases Using Data-Driven Synthesis

The traditional configuration management database (CMDB) is big, complex, difficult to grow and change, and very expensive. Compiling data through data-driven synthesis gives IT organizations a better and more cost-effective method of providing the capabilities of a CMDB. This article explains data-driven synthesis, how it is used to generate CMDBs, and its measurable benefits.

Frank Guerino's picture Frank Guerino
hands assembling puzzle Coaching Technology Teams Out of Their Silos to Collaborate in an Emergency

When there is a system outage or other serious problem, most organizations have a critical incident response team to handle communication with all relevant stakeholders. But what happens when communication among the technology experts is not going well? How do you go about understanding the problem and helping each contributor work effectively with the entire response team?

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
start, continue, and stop doing signs When Postmortems Meet Retrospectives: Improving Your Agile Process

If you want secure, reliable systems, you need all stakeholders actively communicating. This means involving both IT operations and developers in discussions after deployments, to ascertain if anything went wrong and can be avoided, and what went well or could be refined. Integrating your postmortems and retrospectives facilitates collaboration and improves processes.

Bob Aiello's picture Bob Aiello
DevOps diagram Testers: An Integral Part of the DevOps Team

Building innovative software faster and better is imperative to an organization’s success, so it makes sense to take advantage of DevOps. But what some teams fail to consider is that testing is a crucial part of the process. Without a “test early and often” mentality, DevOps would only be able to release software faster—not better.

Renato Quedas's picture Renato Quedas
myth vs. truth sign Fear Not: DevOps Is Not Killing the Operations Engineer

Development and operations have fundamentally different goals, so some people are wary about how they can collaborate in DevOps. With increased automation and continuous delivery, operations engineers in particular are worried their responsibilities will become obsolete. Not true! DevOps actually creates opportunities for everyone to benefit.

Anuj Kumar Sharma's picture Anuj Kumar Sharma

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