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 […]

In my previous post I described how the Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) team is applying DevOps principles and practices to reach our goal of continuous delivery. When the Jazz project began in 2005, even before Rational Team Concert (RTC) existed, we maintained all our source in CVS and used hand-crafted Ant scripts, Eclipse PDE and CruiseControl […]

I’ve been working for IBM for over twenty years and I’m currently assisting the Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) team in its adoption of DevOps with the goal of enabling continuous delivery. I was previously the development manager for the CLM project and for Rational Team Concert. I’m also a jazz bassist and bandleader. When I […]

In a blog post published earlier this month, Scott Rich and John Kellerman wrote about our plans for upcoming fix packs for CLM 2011 (Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality Manager, and Rational Requirements Composer 3.0.1) and our plans for CLM 2012. In this post I’ll let you know how those plans will be realized in […]