Articles

Manage Good Solutions Visualize Your Problems to Manage Good Solutions

Visualizing your workflow is a key component of agile methods. But if we want to solve problems, we have to do a bit more than just visualize them with sticky notes. We have to perform some actual problem management. And to manage problems, a good start would be to measure them.

Jurgen Appelo's picture Jurgen Appelo
IT Fire Prevention Moving IT Operations into Fire Prevention Mode

Continuing to manage highly complex IT environments in a reactive mode leaves IT specialists vulnerable, when really they need to understand the actual causes and effects of what’s happening among the many technologies in use across the enterprise. Instead of constantly fighting fires, IT operations teams should aim to prevent the fires from starting.

Sasha Gilenson's picture Sasha Gilenson
DevOps Collaboration Harnessing the Power of Collaboration for a DevOps-Driven Organization

From buzzwords to definitions, much has been discussed and debated about DevOps. Yet what it really means is solely up to the IT professionals running the show at thousands of organizations around the world. This article describes building a DevOps culture organically, with less reliance on automation tools and more focus on contextual collaboration, information federation, and visualization.

Cass Bishop's picture Cass Bishop
Digging into DevOps Digging Deeper into DevOps

The DevOps movement was started to address the communication challenges between development and operations teams, but instead of engaging in the continuous cycle of self-improvement, management often wants to mimic techniques used by other successful companies. W. Edward Deming showed decades ago that copying others is not effective. This article suggests better approaches to good communication.

Pini Reznik's picture Pini Reznik
Development DNA The Evolution of z/OS Development

Kristin Cowhey explains how z/OS development has evolved throughout the years and what that means for developers and tech personnel. With legacy developers leaving the workforce, there’s a dire need to replace the knowledge in order to maintain the mainframe systems and applications that are still in use today. 

Kristin Cowhey's picture Kristin Cowhey
Managing Servers: With Agents and Without Managing Servers: With Agents and Without

Andrew Phillips details the challenges and advantages of two specific approaches to automating server management: agentless and agent-based automation. Agent-based automation refers to when a small piece of software—called an agent, service, or daemon—is installed on each target server, whereas agentless management automation software interacts with the remote-control functionality built into each host-operating system to perform the administrative tasks.

Andrew Phillips's picture Andrew Phillips
Risk-Based Testing: Test Only What Matters

Rajnish Mehta writes that test teams need to have a scientific way to support the business need of shipping a product out the door. Risk-based testing is a practical approach for test teams to utilize as it allows them to think from a business perspective. 

Rajnish Mehta's picture Rajnish Mehta
Configuration Management Needs Analytics Why Change and Configuration Management Needs Analytics

Analytics-driven management stands to end the key challenges that constrain change and configuration management. By applying powerful analytics to the overwhelming change and configuration data, IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) technology can turn massive amounts of information into clear, actionable insights.

Sasha Gilenson's picture Sasha Gilenson
The Technology behind Rich Internet Applications The Technology behind Rich Internet Applications

Alejandro Felipe writes on the technology behind rich internet applications (RIA) in service-oriented architecture (SOA). With this knowledge, you'll be better able to build and support web applications using technologies such as Ajax and JavaScript and development frameworks, including BackBone Router and Model View Controller (MVC).

Alejandro Felipe's picture Alejandro Felipe
Why You Cannot Afford to Overlook Environment Management Why You Cannot Afford to Overlook Environment Management

Environment management is an essential function in any complex, mission-critical system. Unfortunately, environment management is often overlooked and, even when addressed, usually only handled in the simplest way. Keeping an eye on your environment is actually one of the most important functions for IT operations. Bob Aiello explains how to get started with environment management.

Bob Aiello's picture Bob Aiello

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