In my previous post on building robust teams, I mentioned the need to have some people in a team with an appetite for risk and some who are risk-averse. Some people take risks because they are too inexperienced to know better but some experienced people know that it’s important to take risks. NetFlix continuous delivery […]

The failure of “predict and control” When it comes to managing projects and teams, the natural inclination for many people is to try to predict and control everything while taking comfort in tools and technology and processes and practices. This happens frequently in software development despite the fact that other, far more mature, domains learned […]

Friction In a previous post about retrospectives and continuous improvement I described how we track “pain points” which are issues that block or hinder our ability to develop a specific development capability. Another way to think of pain points is that they are sources of friction. In physics, friction is a force that impedes movement. […]

In a previous post Sreerupa Sen wrote about run teams and feature teams and how they are helping to make our continuous delivery successful. I want to expand on that in this post and talk a bit about the culture that enables such fluid organizational constructs to work successfully. In the Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) project […]

The ability of any team to execute with agility is predicated on a shared awareness of important team elements such as the team’s strategy, plans, and current status. A measure of shared awareness is easily gained when team members work alongside one another. You can’t help but notice what your teammate is doing when she […]

In my last post about retrospectives I discussed the way we have been tracking pain points and associated improvement actions to address those pain points. In this post I want to discuss how we’ve taken this even further by using Rational Team Concert to help track our continuous improvement and how we’re using IBM’s DevOps Maturity Model. […]

In the Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) project we have declared three imperatives for improvement in order to increase our agility with a goal of continuous delivery: culture, process, and tools. Of these three things, culture is, in my opinion, the most difficult thing to change because it’s less tangible than processes and tools and because culture […]

I am currently the feature team lead and scrum master for the team working on the feature to improve gap handling in Jazz Source Code Management (SCM). We have been using the feature team model that was presented in the blog post Organizing our teams for Continuous Delivery and we thought it would be worthwhile […]

I am one of the developers in the Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) project contributing to the Tracking and Planning (TAP) functionality of Rational Team Concert (RTC). I have been part of the TAP team from last four years and involved in delivering RTC in longer and shorter release cycles. You would have read posts […]

You may have been reading the blog posts of my colleagues around continuous delivery including the motivation behind it, our focus areas as we transformed from annual to quarterly releases, and some process improvements that we implemented. Continuing this theme, in this blog I’ll write about one of the most dramatic changes that we underwent […]