Identifying a need for better collaboration between teams is only the first step to introducing DevOps workflows into your organization. You also need to define a common DevOps goal, a strategy to achieve it, and then to break down this strategy into series of manageable tasks for each team. Bob Walker describes how Farm Services of America started to "do DevOps".… Read more
Effective team-based software development has more to do with the organisation than the technology. Teams that must cooperate are most productive when there are high levels of trust between teams and within teams. To grow a culture of trust, the participants must take conscious steps to set boundaries, agree on protocols and models, and let a shared purpose emerge.… Read more
Michael Fal is a huge advocate of automation and many ways it can improve the lives of developers and DBAs alike, but you can't just automate all your problems away. The real challenge is breaking down barriers and having developers and DBAs functioning smoothly together. You may have heard of DevOps, and so Mike explores what the buzz might mean for database administrators.… Read more
Having described some of the most common database deployability blockers, Matthew Skelton proposes a way to enable database continuous delivery that isn't as outlandish as it first appears. What can Conways Law and Microservices tell us about the future of databases and DBAs? Matthew shows us a glimpse.… Read more
Deployability is now a first class concern for databases, so why isn't it as easy as it should be? Matthew Skelton explores seven of the most common challenges which will bring your database deployments to their knees, and the steps you can take to avoid them.… Read more
Alex and his team at Inedo are developing a game - inspired by development strategies like Lean, Agile and DevOps - about software and some of the people who make it. In this opening of a short series, Alex looks at how games affected his office culture, what he's learned about designing games to do more than just be fun, and how his team are hoping to share their passion with the developer community.… Read more
In the course of rescuing a development from 'merge misery', it became increasingly apparent that there were a number of practices for managing branches in the Version Control System that would have reduced the pain and effort of the subsequent merge, and made the dream of continuous delivery come closer to reality. From the experience comes some well-tested ways of making branches and merges a stress-free part of application development.… Read more
Continuous Delivery is fairly generally understood to be an effective way of tackling the problems of software delivery and deployment by making build, integration and delivery into a routine. The way that databases fit into the Continuous Delivery story has been less-well defined. Phil Factor explains why he's an enthusiast for databases being full participants, and suggests practical ways of doing so. … Read more
