Companies that excel at agile software development often become enablers for their respective businesses. The ability to quickly react to the speed of business and deploy new features, fix bugs, and try new experiments leads to better products, happier customers, and increased revenues. In many cases it even gives IT some sense of work-life balance. Sounds awesome doesn’t it? Unfortunately, many companies attempting to move towards agile... Read More
Minimal Viable Architecture
One of the tasks in agile methodologies is to agree on what the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) for each sprint is. This allows the team to get software in the hands of users sooner before investing a ton of time and money into it. The sooner people get to visualize the software and test the usability, the faster we get real requirements. As we all know from years of waterfall development, writing down all of the requirements on paper and then... Read More
Can you really be agile without an agile architecture?
The answer to that question depends on how agility is measured. If agility is measured in the delivery of user stories then the answer is yes. If a team is very good at an agile process yet the underlying architecture prohibits the types of changes the business really needs and wants, then the answer is no. I think agility should be measured in a team’s ability to meet business demand. Delivering quickly is one thing, being able to... Read More
Your biggest competitor may not exist yet
Or, your biggest competitor may be a startup that is in stealth mode and you have no idea what they are up to. There are many reasons why you should be worried about new startups if you are a big monolithic company. Startups don’t have the following baggage: Cultural barriers that prevent innovation and new concepts Legacy systems that drain valuable resources (people, infrastructure, and budget) Silos between the business and... Read More
Agile SOA: Leveraging Data Services
The promise of SOA is flexibility and agility. I define agility as the ability to adapt to change at the speed of business. In today’s global economy which has been fueled by collaboration and Internet technologies, businesses change at a much faster rate than ever before. So how does SOA help companies become agile? Let’s look at a logical view of a typical SOA. You can see in this diagram how each layer of the architecture... Read More
How did we become a Dilbert cartoon?
A good buddy of mine forwarded me this article from eWeek by Deborah Perelman. The following quote from the article summarizes the content: “In the simplest terms: too many IT workplaces have become Dilbert-ized—micromanaged, bureaucratic and stifled creatively. It’s become an environment where busy work is praised and morale is low.” The article talks about IT as a commodity with trends in outsourcing. Flextronics CEO, Michael... Read More
