In the first episode of our Agile Coaching Intensive series - Ken Fritz (Director of Software Delivery) overviews the four main pathways of an agile coach's career and how the agile coach interacts with the rest of the organization.
In order for an organization to be successful with Continuous Business Value Delivery® the organization has to set a new destination and has to create a “new” route to reach this destination. This means, we have to REVERSE ENGINEER the entire delivery process to maximize value creation at a rapid pace.
The three key areas that need to be lean and automated, the foundations of a Release Oriented organization are 3 major process areas:
- Enterprise Release Management
- Enterprise DevOps
- Lean Agile Portfolio Management
There are many considerations on how to make the move from Project Orientation to Release Orientation. Probably more than any other, the key is a belief in moving your organization’s mindset to the new of way of thinking and recognizing that the value of the old project container has vanished in an agile delivery model.
An agile transformation journey implies a starting point, where you are now, and a destination. That destination might not be the final end point for your transformation journey, but that destination is somewhere you know you want to go – more automation, faster cycle times, higher quality, unimpeded flow from business intent to development, or just a happier place for everyone to work. A perfect destination to choose is Release Orientation.
There are many misconceptions about what Agile means. Here are a few of the most common that I've heard:
- Agile is a development methodology. Well, not really, but there are a group of methods that can all be considered Agile.
- Agile is the same thing as Scrum. They are not one and the same. Scrum is one of the best-known and widely-used Agile frameworks, but there are other frameworks that are still considered Agile.
- Agile is a free-for-all way of developing software. Nothing could be further from the truth. Done right, Agile provides the basis for some of the most disciplined software delivery practices available.
So then, what is Agile?
So you graduated with your degree in IT - how long ago? And you have been learning lots as you have worked at different jobs and on different teams. But you keep getting emails about taking this training or that course and wonder ... Is it worth spending the money? I've been doing this IT stuff for several years now, I know what I'm doing. What's the point of taking any of these training courses?
Wearables as a technology category is emerging as one of the leading technologies within health care. Whether it is Mixed Reality (MR) via the holo-lens, Virtual Reality (VR) from Samsung Gear or Oculus, or Augmented Reality (AR) from Apple, the industry consensus is that these technologies are here to stay.
Apple just announced their iPhone 8 series and the next-gen iPhone X. What was the buzz all about? A lot of the press and media is about the ARKit and how Apple is positioning the iPhone to be the World's largest AR platform. We at ATB want to be in front of this technology so we built a POC around the ARKit shown below in the video. Where does a POC fit in within an enterprise? Our Digital Transformation overview image below - is depicting where in the process a POC may be helpful for you - as you consider whether a POC is right for you. Specifically, an AR POC can apply to any segment, not just gaming; Education, Training, Social Media, E commerce, Sports and Health-Care.
Applications running in production, test, and development environments produce massive files filled with endless lines of text in the form of log files. Mining the data available in these files manually is a daunting, nearly impossible, effort. This is where log management tools come into play. The two most popular are Splunk and the Elastic Stack. Both solutions are excellent options, with each having their own pros and cons; this article makes no claims as to which tool is best for your organization, as there are simply too many variables to be taken into consideration to make a blanket statement of one being better than the other.
Cucumber, Selenium and Gherkin have become popular tools for helping teams implement test automation or what is often referred to as Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) or Behavior Driven Development (BDD). By running your tests locally, you can ensure your application runs as expected on your OS/Browser setup, but to truly know that the app works on other configurations, you need a way to emulate numerous environments. SauceLabs is a web service that you can sign up to which will give the ability to test on many OS/Browser setups, including numerous mobile options.
In this article, we will cover:
- Why Use SauceLabs?
- Connecting Your Tests to SauceLabs
- Parameterize your Rake File to Pass in Platform and Browser
- Using a Secure Tunnel to Access Your Internal Application
In this article series we use Ruby as the implementation language (and we recommend Ruby when there is no other existing preference). However, these examples will translate easily to other languages like Java.
If you are not familiar with Selenium, Cucumber and Gherkin take a look at our related introductory blog "The 5 Step Guide for Selenium, Cucumber, and Gherkin" and "Rake Up and Optimize Your Tests"