Join Codesion’s ScrumMaster and Sales Engineer Caleb Brown as he discusses hot Agile topics that face the software community. This interactive demo will discuss the why and a bit of the now when it comes to Agile estimation based on units other than time. Click here to register for our upcoming webinar.

Agile Estimation: Why don’t we use time?

Tuesday, May 22 at 10am PDT

Register Today!

A big thanks to our audience for making this week’s webinar, “Go Ugly Early - Limiting Risk in Agile” interactive and full of great questions. Below are the Q&A’s from our webinar this week.

Q: There are so many man-hours available for any project. How does Agile make the team work faster?

A: There’s no short answer to this, but I will try my best to answer accordingly. The team composition, self organization, cross functionality, and stability, practices like time boxing and ordered backlog, and finally a focus on what is produced (working, tested, and deployed code) instead of the old fashioned focus on just keeping people busy (as promoted by a focus on ideas such as man hours) are all contributing factors to how organizations who have fully adopted agile will typically see improvement. That improvement may not be efficiency, or speed for every organization, but agility will improve quality, consistency, and overall it will help an organization to build the Right software. Building valuable features a little more slowly is better than building worthless features efficiently and fast.

Q: What does “Go Ugly Early” mean?

A: Going Ugly Early is a bit of a paraphrase of something a customer once said to me. Basically he said that they liked to know as early as possible what the worst thing that could happen to them in the project would be, so they could start to figure out how to overcome it. That way they aren’t surprised by a huge problem 75% through the project when they couldn’t change course even though they need to. Ultimately agile limits risk constantly by showing us those risks as soon as we can get a hint that they might be there, allowing us to address them earlier rather than later.

Q: How do you know when a backlog item is “Done”?

A: When the team has shown that it works and the product owner accepts that the work defined in the backlog item is complete.

Q: Will agile tools help us adopt Agile?

If your tool does not force you to deviate from healthy agile practices it may help. Typically a piece of software is most valuable as an agile adoption aid when an organization is adopting agile at scale or when the teams are geographically distributed.

Q: Is it possible for distributed teams to practice Agile?

A: Yes. It’s not as easy, but it certainly is possible. How you do it is another very large topic. One piece of advice: try to keep your teams as close to each other in terms of time zones as possible. When your team members are in too many different disparate time zones meaningful communication becomes nearly impossible.

Q: What happens to the backlog when the priorities of the business or market change?

A: The product owner changes the priority of the items on the backlog. The backlog is a tool specifically constructed to manage constantly changing priorities.

On May 22, we will be hosting another Agile webinar. Read below to register!

Agile Estimation: Why don’t we use time?

May 22, 10 - 11AM PDT

This webinar will cover a lot of the why and a bit of the how when it comes to Agile estimation based on units other than time. Click here to register.

Codesion’s first webinar from its Agile Guru Webinar Series is kicking off next week! Attend our interactive session hosted by our ScrumMaster and Sales Engineer Caleb Brown to see how you can limit risk by going Agile. Tune in next Tuesday, May 8 at 9am PDT to learn more! Click here to register.

Below are a couple questions that will be addressed during our webinar:

Q: Why is Agile so much better than waterfall in the long term?

A: Limiting Risk.

Q: How does Agile uncover and ultimately limit risk?

A: By falling fast and reacting to that failure.

Go Ugly Early - Limiting Risk in Agile

Tuesday, May 8

9:00 - 10:00am PDT

Presenter: CollabNet ScrumMaster & Sales Engineer Caleb Brown

Register Today!

It’s Monday, April 30 here in San Francisco, and we have officially just launched CloudForge in Public Beta- our new development Platform as a Service (dPaaS). CloudForge is something that we’ve been working on since early 2011, so we’re glad to finally be in production.

Our History & Philosophy

Since the early 2000s, we at CollabNet have envisioned that developing software in and for the cloud would be the mainstream way of working. Today, mobile, web, collaboration, and social apps have exploded, and PaaS/IaaS vendors like Amazon, CloudFoundry, and Force.com are now first-class citizens alongside Enterprise IT. Agile development organizations are developing faster, more nimbly, by using a heterogeneous mix of process and tools, provisioned on-demand and paid per use, with teams working remotely around the world.

With CloudForge, we were given the opportunity to reimagine our vision: providing an easy-to-use agile platform that offers the tools and services collaborative teams need to deploy to any production environment (private, PaaS, cloud). As a company who practices agile development and continuous deployment compulsively, we ourselves leverage a range of tools and environments, and so flexibility, interoperability and scalability are critical for us to be able to deploy to production dozens of times each day. We have incorporated many of these principles into CloudForge.

What is the CloudForge dPaaS?

CloudForge is a new development Platform as a Service (dPaaS) for developing, deploying and scaling application services. It’s fast, self-service, and designed to meet the needs of Enterprise scalability and security. It provides the broadest range of hosted tool services, platform services, integration services and deployment services available.  The CloudForge dPaaS differs from an application PaaS like CloudFoundry or Heroku, in that there’s no runtime environment for application hosting.

Cloudforge is built in Rails on the same battle-tested, multi-tenanted infrastructure that has powered Codesion.com since 2004. CloudForge can be managed via the UI, or control can be customized using our REST APIs. Large customers like Devfactory (a Trilogy Inc. company) manage access controls (authorization) using our APIs, while channel partners like Elance and CloudBees are offering development services to their users from their local environment.

What programming languages and frameworks does CloudForge support?

CloudForge is a true development Platform as a Service (dPaaS) which means it is programing language and framework agnostic.  It does not matter what type of application (mobile, web, cloud etc.), CloudForge provides the platform you need to code, manage, deploy and operate your next development project.

What environments can CloudForge deploy to?

CloudForge Publisher provides a direct deployment framework to any PaaS/IaaS and private datacenter environment.  To help you make deployment as easy as possible, CloudForge already has preconfigured deployment target recipes for all major PaaS/IaaS (Like VMware’s Cloud Foundry, Joyent, Force.com, Google App Engine, Amazon EC2, etc.)

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The CloudForge UI simplifies routine tasks for managing and scaling your development environments. This includes adding/removing users from a central user pool, setting up tools and project workspaces, defining role-based permissions across multiple tooling environments, configuring email notifications, defining deployment recipes and targets, and integrating with popular tools like JIRA, Pivotal, and Rally. A typical customer scenario would be setting up the London-based R&D team with SVN integrated with JIRA, enabling the Boston UX team to continue using Git integrated with ScrumWorks for agile management, while enabling the Bangalore team to deploy testing and staging environments in Amazon.  

Real-time activity feed in one place

The CloudForge Activity Feed is prominent in all Account and Project dashboards, and aggregates development activities within a single location. You can facet and search the feed, for example to see SVN or Git commits made to my branch by a certain team member. In coming months, we will be opening up the Feed to 3rd party applications using our Data APIs. This might include build or test results, app downtime alerts, and artifact updates that can be pushed/pulled into the Feed.

Select and connect your apps instantly

The new App Center enables customers to host or integrate SCM and agile tools from the “My Services” zone, or activate integrations to a range of 3rd party tools like Basecamp, Rally, JIRA, or Pivotal. Note that we have built-in best practices and tips into the first-time user flow, to help get up and running quickly. The “Marketplace” section allows the account admin to browse and link to certified CollabNet partner applications, all of which are either compatible with or integrated with CloudForge. 

View reports, integrate CloudForge SVN & Git into your workflow

The CloudForge reporting center provides insight for development leaders into coding activities, project progress, and user contributions, while enabling security and IT Managers to access system logs for compliance purposes. Customers can set up numerous integrations, using Web Hooks APIs (for example to fire off a build from a coding commit), commit-hook integrations (to update artifacts across a range of third-party services), and CloudForge Publisher for deployment.

How do I buy CloudForge services?

CloudForge is currently available as a Public Beta, which is free. Monthly or annual subscription plans will be available for purchase when CloudForge is made Generally Available (GA), in the near future. Again, the platform is built on established, highly iterated infrastructure, and we invite you to try it out and provide feedback. Please read our Beta FAQ to learn more.

Guy Marion is the VP & General Manager of CollabNet Cloud Services. Guy was previous CEO of Codesion.com, which was acquired by CollabNet in 2010. Connect on Twitter @guy_marion