Articles

ALM and Business Processes

5 Configuration Management Best Practices

There has been a lot of conversation going on around the configuration of applications, and how to manage it. This article explores things people can do from within their code to make their lives, and the lives of anyone else who has to administer or maintain their application, easier. These patterns have been used a number of times on ThoughtWorks projects, and they have proven their worth.

Book Excerpt and Interview: Dynamic SOA and BPM: Best Practices for Business Process Management and SOA Agility

Boris Lublinsky interviews Marc Fiammante as part of a review of Marc' new book, Dynamic SOA and BPM: Best Practices for Business Process Management and SOA Agility. The book is based on many years of practical experience obtained during dozens of enterprise SOA implementations and covers major steps of such implementations

Improving the Performance of Automatic Configuration Management Processes by Encouraging Human Intervention

In this case study, the pattern of automatic processes interlaced with human intervention provided bwin with an instrument to raise process efficiency in CM drastically. Furthermore, successes of the incorporation of human factors into change management was an increased visibility and appreciation of the context and importance of change amongst team members and stakeholders across the company.

Scaling Agile with C/ALM (Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management)

IBM Rational and InfoQ published an eBook, Scaling Agile with C/ALM, "dedicated to all of the functional and dysfunctional organizations that are eager to break down the organizational and cultural silos, and become a finely tuned software delivery machine." The eBook explores the barriers to team integration and scaling and then shows, in detail, how to overcome these obstacles.

Lean and Agile: Marriage Made in Heaven or Oxymoron?

Scrum and agile methods promote the establishment of a product backlog. Some leaders of the Lean community feel that the product backlog is "waste." This article argues that Lean advocates that see backlogs only as "an inventory" of things to be done are making the classic mistake of viewing software development as a production process. Backlogs are fundamental to Agility.

Version Control for Multiple Agile Teams

When several agile development teams work on the same codebase, how do we minimize chaos, and ensure there's a clean, releasable version at the end of every iteration? Here Henrik Kniberg outlines the scheme used in "Scrum and XP from the Trenches". This paper is not so much for version control experts as for the rest of us, who just want to learn simple and useful ways to collaborate.

Interview: IBM Architect Bertrand Portier on joining MDD and SOA

In the wake of the latest product announcement from IBM, InfoQ talked to Bertrand Portier about a RedBook that presents a Model-Driven-Development approach to service construction. The concepts are general enough to be applied to product stacks other than IBM.