Articles
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Infrastructure as Code: The Foundation of Effective DevOps The absence of versioned infrastructure as code (IaC) and automated provisioning undermines one of the most important benefits of DevOps: the ability to version, manage, and control the servers and networking required to run software applications in development, testing, and production. Automating infrastructure setup and continuous monitoring helps keep system environments stable and less susceptible to outages. |
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Measuring the Performance of Your Operations Center Many organizations have problems with consistently tracking and measuring system outages. Issues aren't logged, admins make changes to systems without going through change management, and a high number of issues turn out to be recurring problems. Implementing a performance measurement process calculates system reliability and can help you improve consistency. |
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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. |
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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. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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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. |
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How Can You Get More Effective with DevOps? By emphasizing better communication and collaboration between software development and IT, this article explores ways to establish trust by focusing on customer value. For example, Manoj Khanna suggests continuous integration and validation as techniques that helps build that trust. |
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What's a Professional? For years we've all heard how software development and IT are a mixture of art and science. As our industry matures and becomes more mainstream, Johanna wants to upset the apple cart by suggesting that there's a missing and sorely needed ingredient—professionalism. |
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Green IT: A Sustainability Perspective for Portfolio Optimization As organizations grow and diversify, they end up with a large number of IT systems. However, by quantifying sustainability metrics, they can optimize their IT infrastructures and introduce a greener side of IT. |
Interviews
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How Configuration Management Is Changing: An Interview with Joe Townsend
Video
Joe Townsend has been working in the configuration management field for fifteen years and is a regular contributor to CMCrossroads. In this interview, Joe discusses how configuration management has changed over the years, the trouble with tools, and trends in IT. |
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Making Governance Work on Agile Teams: An Interview with Scott Ambler
Video
Dr. Dobbs senior contributing editor Scott Ambler sits down with Noel Wurst at Techwell.com to discuss how agile team governance does not have to have a negative stigma. Scott helps people see through naive assumptions, while eliminating out of control governance to get teams back on track. |
Conference Presentations
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What’s Our Job When the Machines Do Testing?
Slideshow
After its highly hyped introduction decades ago and followed by a long, quiet “winter,” artificial intelligence (AI) has slowly crept back into our consciousness. While our Siri and Alexa assistants entertain us, machine learning (ML) has brought new conveniences into our lives with solutions including Nest and Netflix. Today, AI brings us to the tantalizing brink of the autonomous vehicle. The sea change of this 4th Industrial Revolution has begun to disrupt industry after industry. The emerging capabilities of these fascinating machines demand our attention as AI starts to be applied in ways that directly affect our workplaces. And the test community will not be immune. Geoff Meyer explores industry-wide applications of analytics and machine learning to testing, and shares an in-depth view into how this next generation of automation is being used to optimize test and IT operations. |
Geoff Meyer
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Rapid and Intelligent Test Engineering
Slideshow
Today’s IT plans tend to be defined as much by constraints as by requirements. Conventionally, the testing phase starts after the design and build phase. In today’s competitive and... |
Mathi Natarajan, Cognizant and Sreeram Gopalakrishnan, Cognizant
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IT Governance and Compliance in an Agile World
Slideshow
Establishing IT governance and compliance practices is essential for organizations that have regulatory or audit requirements. The good news is that you can be agile and still comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, CFR 21, HIPAA, and other regulatory imperatives. Done well, IT controls actually help you improve both productivity and quality. Bob Aiello describes how to implement IT controls in frameworks such as ISACA Cobit and ITIL v3 that many regulatory frameworks require-while maintaining agile practices. Bob's guidance includes specific examples of establishing IT controls: separation of duties, work-item to change-set traceability, physical and functional configuration audits, and more. Bob explains how these practices help government, defense, and corporations scale agile practices where audit and regulatory compliance is a must. |
Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
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Cloud Computing: Powering the Future of Development and Testing
Slideshow
Developers and testers are under constant pressure to operate more efficiently, cut costs, and deliver on time. Without access to scalable, flexible, and cost effective computing resources, these challenges are magnified. Brett Goodwin explains how to create scalable dev/test environments in the cloud, and shares best practices for reducing cycle time and decreasing project costs. Learn how scalable, cloud-based data centers can run software without complicated re-writes; enable rapid defect resolution with snapshots and clones; and provide global collaboration for multiple product and release teams. Brett presents a case study of Cushman and Wakefield, the world's largest privately held real estate services firm, which struggled with an on-premises development and testing environment. |
Brian White, Skytap, Inc.
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