Agile Operations
Is “Agile” restricted to “development”? Maybe not. A growing number of companies are exploring the idea of agile operations. We'll look at how agile concepts translate to the historically rigid realm of the operations group, including issues about deployment, monitoring, change control, and production availability.
Agile software development has successfully entered the mainstream. As we learn more about agile development, we're bumping up against challenges in other parts of the company: budgeting, QA, and operations, to name a few.
The operations group has often been viewed as a roadblock on the path to production. (In much the same way as development groups have been viewed as a barrier to application creation!) We're now seeing companies experimenting with practices to support rapid feedback, automated change, and whole team integration between development and operations.
About Michael Nygard
Michael strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers across the country. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Michael has spent the better part of 20 years learning what it means to be a professional programmer who cares about art, quality, and craft. He's always ready to spend time with other developers who are fully engaged and devoted to their work–the “wide awake” developers. On the flip side, he cannot abide apathy or wasted potential.
Michael has been a professional programmer and architect for nearly 20 years. During that time, he has delivered running systems to the U. S. Government, the military, banking, finance, agriculture, and retail industries. More often than not, Michael has lived with the systems he built. This experience with the real world of operations changed his views about software architecture and development forever.
He worked through the birth and infancy of a Tier 1 retail site and has often served as “roving troubleshooter” for other online businesses. These experiences give him a unique perspective on building software for high performance and high reliability in the face of an actively hostile environment.
Most recently, Michael wrote “Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software”, a book that realizes many of his thoughts about building software that does more than just pass QA, it survives the real world. Michael previously wrote numerous articles and editorials, spoke at Comdex, and co-authored one of the early Java books.
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