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 […]

This is the fourth installment in our blog series describing the transformation of our internal ALM development organization toward a Continuous Delivery model. The previous post was From ‘use what we sell’ to ‘practice what we preach.’ In this series, we describe the motivations behind adoption of a Continuous Delivery model and the many challenges we […]

Our journey towards IBM UrbanCode Deploy Our team has been responsible for the deployment of IBM Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) on jazz.net production and staging systems since 2007.  On top of the production system known as jazz or jazz.net, we have 2 staging systems named BLUES and SOUL. We deploy to the staging system weekly, […]

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 […]

You have probably heard about DevOps but you want to cut through the hype and understand more about this approach. That is the genesis of DevOps for Dummies, authored by IBM’s Sanjeev Sharma. It is written to appeal to both practitioners and managers and to show you how you can apply a new DevOps approach […]

Previously I have focused on build performance in posts like Speeding up the pipeline by slowing down builds and Rethinking personal builds, but there is a lot more to a continuous delivery pipeline than build times.  Once a build produces artifacts, you need to do something with them.  Often the next step is to install […]

I have worked for IBM for about 20 years, moving back and forth between development, customer support and IT operations roles. Working in these different roles helped give me perspective for my current role as the manager for Jazz Continuous Deployments/DevOps. In this role I am responsible for ensuring that our multiple staging and self-hosting […]

This is the second article about testing in our Continuous Delivery series to share practices we have adopted in our own development team within Rational Team Concert (RTC). The presented techniques are used to control software evolution and to improve the quality of our code base. Since there is a variety of IBM and open […]

In my first post, I described how we were able to increase parallelism and significantly improve the end-to-end build time of the Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) pipeline.  This has provided value in many ways, but as Pete Steinfeld pointed out in his Accelerating CLM builds post, it doesn’t do much to improve the developer experience.  […]