The idea of a self-organizing team has been promoted strongly since the Agile movement started to gain popularity following the publication of the Agile Manifesto in 2001. The list of principles that support the four tenets of the Manifesto includes a brief mention of the idea: “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” It’s noteworthy that there is no definition of “best,” nor of “self-organizing teams,” in the document. In fairness to its authors, however, we should remember that the definition of manifesto is “a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer,” according to…

Way back in the Dark Ages, it was common for programmers to receive phone calls in the wee hours of the morning to fix production issues in their applications. I remember joining a team in the late 1970s that supported an application used worldwide by a large corporation. When I started, the application suffered an average of 140 production incidents per month. The team resolved to drive that number down. After a few months, we had reduced the average number of incidents to 11 per month. Experiences like that one led programmers of the era to adopt a philosophy we…

In a piece posted here some time ago, Works on My Machine, I offered some suggestions on how to ensure our local development environment doesn’t have leftover configuration from a previous project that might affect our current project. One suggestion was to use an online coding environment rather than adding more and more configuration settings to a longstanding local system. I listed two such environments with the caveat that this was a relatively new option, and we should “[e]xpect to see these environments improve, and expect to see more players in this market.” One that I listed at the time…

Often when working with clients I am asked about smaller batch sizes…mostly in the context of “How is that even possible? Look at what’s on our plate already.” Admittedly that’s a tall order. Everyone is working as hard as they can; unfortunately, nothing is fundamentally moving through the system. Typically the result at end of the quarter is that most, if not all, the myriad of commitments end up delayed significantly or outright missed. There are plenty of apparently valid “reasons”for this being the case. To put it politely the delivery teams are in a constant reactive mode not responsive…

This is the final instalment in a series of posts that walks you through test-driving a microservice and setting up a working continuous delivery pipeline to deploy it to the cloud automatically. Hail to you who have survived Parts 1 through 3! In Part 1 we set the stage for our project and you received a homework assignment to sign up for several online services. In Part 2 we configured our version control, dependency management, and run management facilities and started to get familiar with our development environment. In Part 3, we test-drove the initial thin vertical slice of our…