What’s with the DevOps hype?
Someone asked at one of the forums if the DevOps hype is justified – after all “it’s something we’ve been doing for the last 20 years”… It’s a good question and here’s what I have to say: DevOps isn’t new, but the hype around it is all about the ever-growing amount and speed of change in the development process. We’ve seen large shifts in development methodologies and release strategies over the last 5-10 years – towards shorter cycles, continuous delivery, automated testing, etc. New tools and practices have been established to deal with these new requirements and organizations now clearly see the competitive advantage they provide. So yes, the discipline itself isn’t new, but it’s role in the software manufacturing process is becoming more visible and acknowledged than ever. That’s what the hype is about. //
Automation is for the Lazies!
In my overview of build automation benefits I already stated that it leads to “Less job burnout due to routine tasks”. That’s another way to say – automation is good for us lazy folks! 🙂 Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m lazy. Especially when it comes to long repetitive tasks with a lot of small steps that are easy to forget. Like closing a release baseline or cleaning my apartment. Alas, we can’t automate the apartment cleaning (as yet), but we can, and should be lazy about SDLC tasks. So how do you go about this? Well, first of all – get out these annoying checklists with all the steps needed to close that baseline, prepare that installation kit, merge that branch into the main stream, etc. Don’t have the checklists? It’s all in your head?! Well, you’ll have to write it down now – this will be…