Agile Trailblazers Blog

I have heard it asked many times, “Where do architects fit into Agile?” But that's the wrong question.  Instead, you should be asking, "Is our architecture Agile-Ready?"

One reason for adopting Agile is to enable “flow” to breakout – meaning your organization accelerates moving business needs from the concept phase to delivering customer value in production. Agile, grounded in Lean principals, asks your teams to look at everything that does not contribute to “flow” as waste and to eliminate it. But what if your application architecture is holding you back? 

JIRA Portfolio is a powerful tool which provides an easy way to manage one or more teams' backlogs and schedule work for months at a time. Portfolio for JIRA 2.0, which was just recently released, brings many useful changes including an easy startup wizard to create a new plan, powerful forecasting tools, and a much tighter integration with your JIRA Boards. Learning to use Portfolio 2 could be a challenge for both experienced Portfolio users as well as JIRA users thinking of trying Portfolio for the first time. Either way, this guide will walk you through setting up and getting started with Portfolio 2.

All your software deployments happen very late at night/very early in the morning

In Agile Testing, you want to adhere to the testing pyramid when designing your automated tests. For this discussion, I will be focusing on the bottom tier of the pyramid, Unit Tests, where you want to have the largest percentage of your tests.   

You wrote a fancy new API that handles everything you can throw at it. You spent hours doing manual testing to make sure your API works perfectly. You release your code and make some updates. Now you have to spend hours manually testing again. There has to be a better way. Here are 6 reasons you should use Postman and Newman for API integration testing.

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The DevOps Story Needs to Be Told!

There is so much chatter about DevOps these days, but so little clarity about what it really means. The shame of it is that very few of us have really heard the "Story of DevOps." Some don't know the how the story begins...some get lost in the middle of the story...and others are scared of how the story will end.

The outline of any great story includes the Setting, Theme, Characters, Point of View, Plot, Conflict, and Resolution. 

• Setting - DevOps needs the right environment...the right mood, to really flourish
• Theme - The big idea that makes DevOps a foundation for successful Agile implementation
• Characters and Point of View - DevOps done right is so much about people
• Plot and Conflict - Transitioning from a silo organization can be a happy story or a disaster
• Resolution - Setting a destination for your DevOps journey is so important

In this blog series, we hope to help you write the “Story of DevOps” at your organization to make DevOps wildly impactful to your business results. Let's start with the setting...

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The lack of built-in test support for JIRA can feel like a strange omission. Luckily, there are multiple JIRA plugins that add testing support to JIRA, the most popular of which is Zephyr. However, JIRA and Zephyr are extremely flexible tools, and getting their full value requires a team understanding of testing practice, and integrating those practices into JIRA.

Here is a reprint of my article originally published with Scrum Alliance in March 2014. Enjoy!

Been blazed and confused for so long it’s not true . . .

So, your Agile transformation journey has been underway for a few weeks, a few months, or maybe almost a year. You have blazed a path toward agility. But, much like the Led Zeppelin song (Dazed and Confused– please, you don’t have to be from the ’70s to get the Led out!), there is a huge pause in the middle of the journey, and now you are not really sure if you are going anywhere.