Stories by Matthew Heusser

Most of the literature on scaling addresses overcoming objections and how best to do it. Matthew Heusser posits that ‘Does agile scale?’ is simply asking the wrong question.

The risk may be high, but the rewards can be even higher. Here are some practical tips for making the leap from employee to independent IT consultant.

When it comes to release management, what sounds great in theory doesn’t always work in practice. Here are four steps to building an effective strategy.

Release candidate testing takes too long.

The basic idea behind Dev and Ops is to get the two roles working together. This sounds obvious, but think for a moment about how the roles have traditionally been implemented. Operations is responsible for uptime and reliability; the simplest way to keep systems up and running is to lock ‘em down and prevent change. The job of a software developer is to create change. From the beginning, the incentives for one role are misaligned with the other. The first part of DevOps, the very inkling of an idea, is to break down the walls between the roles.

ITIL is one of the most common frameworks for IT service management. However, questions and misunderstandings abound regarding this set of popular practices. In this article, we'll address the following (and more):

In the world of programming languages, sometimes you don't need the overhead and performance of Java, C#, C++ and other power tools. Sometimes a scripting language, or Swiss army knife, will do.

Years ago, in the bad old days, you had the weekly status meeting. You'd wait for your turn to talk about your status to the project manager; when other people talked, you'd either tune out to think about what you were going to say or, possibly, tune out entirely and think about that upcoming skiing trip.

"I spent $174 million on a website and all I got was this bad press."

Ask an 'agile coach' what he or she does and the answer could range from write code to run meetings. It's not what you'd necessarily expect an agile coach to be doing, but that doesn't mean the role is unnecessary.

The Japanese word Muda loosely translates as waste. The core element of lean manufacturing is to eliminate waste--or, in more North American terms, to "cut the fat." While applying lean concepts to manufacturing may seem straightforward, there is little agreement on what that term even means for software, or if it applies.