act:ualise | technology

There isn’t much more to say than Flickr, ur doin it right! Respect..
The way that metrics are being used for the continual feedback and ongoing health and monitoring of system and features is very Lean and not something I get to see too often.
10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr

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Alistair Cockburn (@TheOtherAlistai) has posted a humorous yet incisive article reminding us that what absolutely certainly matters in software development is:

Coding
Testing
Listening
Designing

..  ergo, “That’s all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.”
His compulsion to remind us of this core essence comes from the emergence of all kinds of newfangled buzzwords.. [...]

My friend and associate Chris Pitts, an Agile Coach in London, has weighed in on the ongoing debate about software craftsmanship.
Chris is focused on trying to move the debate from just being open to interpretation toward specific codes – as drawn from other present day crafts such as carpentry, surgery, architecture/building and so on. 
He proposes that [...]

Gus Power and Kris Lander of EnergizedWork just presented ‘No Excuses: Concept to Cash Every Week‘ at QCon London which highlights the manner by which development is executed within the EnergizedWork stable. 
It’s worth reviewing the slides (available via ‘No Excuses’ link above) to get a sense of how using such methods can help achieve the [...]

Reading this question/answer on Stackoverflow I tangentially wondered whether working to Agile practices played any greater a role in my technical skills development compared to ‘back in the day‘ when I wasn’t using Agile methods.
There ought to be no difference in technical skills development whether the context is Agile or any other process – indeed [...]

Whilst this article is clearly specific to Lean in manufacturing processes what I find pleasing is how fundamentally similar a ‘Morning Market’ is to the morning Scrum in software development.

Its a short morning meeting
It’s not a forum to attempt to solve problems or to discuss them in detail, but a place to surface them
Where problems [...]

In my previous article on performance testing, I suggested that incremental and iterative development of performance unit tests was an essential part of your overall performance testing strategy. However, performance testing the parts of a system is vastly different from testing the whole and will require some careful thinking to avoid too much focus on [...]

In our last three projects we automated our performance testing extensively. This involved significant effort, which paid off for the 2 projects already delivered: meeting performance expectations owed a great deal to our performance improvements.
Interestingly after the bulk of those improvements were delivered and the product made live, the performance automation testing aspects fell slowly into [...]

I’ve done a lot of performance analysis and improvement in my time although it’s only in my last 3 projects that we started automating it.
In all cases a developer check-in would trigger the execution of a battery of stress/concurrency tests against a fully integrated as-live environment. Soak tests were scheduled nightly or over weekends against [...]