What is a Development Manager?

In a previous posting on Agile, I discussed the 3 main roles in Scrum: Scrum Master, Product Owner and the dev team. However, there is also an additional role that is not always considered core, but which is increasingly an integral part of Agile, and that is the Development Manager.

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Tags: agile, developmentmanager, devmanager, management, phb, scrum, scrummaster

What Is Agile?

Agile software development is an approach to developing and delivering working software into production in incremental, iterative work cadences, known as sprints.

Being ‘agile’ is more of a philosophy than a set of rules. It is a mindset to continually improve; to embrace new ideas and implement the best ones, testing in the wild all the while to find what really works. Collaboration, feedback and iteration are key.

In this post, I will briefly touch on the Agile Manifesto where it all started, before looking at some basic concepts (feedback) and alternatives (waterfall), before the main bulk of the article, which is the flavors of Agile, including XP, Kanban and, primarily, Scrum.

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Tags: agile, extremeprogramming, kanban, methodology, scrum, scrummaster, xp

Certified ScrumMaster

I became a Certified ScrumMaster today via the Scrum Alliance. I know certifications are worth very little, but the training and exam prep was definitely very useful and, more importantly, I’m implementing Scrum techniques on the new project I’m working on: Planning the sprint ahead, daily scrums, sprint reviews and trying to remove obstacles for the team.

Tags: agile, Certification, scrum

Running Jenkins jobs sequentially

I am a huge fan of the Jenkins continuous integration tool, using it not just for continuous integration, but also continuous delivery, server monitoring and performance testing.

Although using Jenkins is normally a breeze, I recently had a need to run several Jenkins jobs sequentially and it proved a little trickier than expected, so I thought worth posting about.

Basically, I wanted to call a database backup job before calling the deploy build job, which obviously shouldn’t be done in parallel. After a bit of research, I found a number of ways to have Jenkins run jobs sequentially.
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Tags: agile, ci, continuousintegration, devops, hudson, jenkins

Silicon Valley Code Camp Notes

I am at the Silicon Valley Code Camp at the moment.

I will try to post some notes on the various talks I attend below…

Day 1:

• Session 1: JavaScript
• Session 2: Easing into Agile
• Session 3: Building Better Tests in Java
• Session 4: What is Python?

Day 2:

• Session 1: Basics of Threading
• Session 2: Introduction to Grails

Tags: agile, codecamp, Java, JavaScript, python, Testing, threading