It’s not uncommon for teams at IBM to be distributed across countries and timezones. I joined my current team last January, and we have team members in the United States, Canada, and even Switzerland. I work from home, met my team lead in person for the first time in November, and have not yet met […]

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. […]

This is the fifth installment in our blog series describing the transformation of our internal ALM development organization toward a Continuous Delivery model. The previous post was Planning & Execution from Prototype to Practice. In this series, we describe the motivations behind adoption of a Continuous Delivery model and the many challenges we faced as we […]

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 […]

We test a lot.  The primary reason for this is because we have so much to test.  As you can imagine, a product as large as our Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution – with many millions of lines of code – requires a gargantuan test effort moving from release to release while maintaining the level […]

Earlier this year, we did something that shocked a few people. We moved our internal technical learning spaces outside our firewall and opened them up to everyone. In essence, we’re expanding our definition of enterprise learning to include our clients or anyone else who needs to gain basic competencies and connect with others … and this is free and scalable. We call these spaces learning circles.

This week we released CLM 4.0.5, the next version of Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM), and the latest quarterly release using our new continuous delivery model. A continuous delivery kind of year CLM 4.0.5 will be our fourth quarterly release this year, and we’ve heard positive feedback from several clients about the more rapid delivery […]

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 my last post, I described how we use IBM UrbanCode Deploy to quickly and easily deploy server applications produced by each build.  In this post I will describe how we are using those deployed applications to improve our automated testing and reduce the time it takes to validate the contents of a build. Quality […]