Your path to business agility
Dr. Mik Kersten started his career as a Research Scientist at Xerox PARC where he created the first aspect-oriented development environment. He then pioneered the integration of development tools with Agile and DevOps as part of his Computer Science PhD at the University of British Columbia. Founding Tasktop out of that research, Mik has written over one million lines of open source code that are still in use today, and he has brought seven successful open-source and commercial products to market. Mik’s experiences working with some of the largest digital transformations in the world has led him to identify the critical disconnect between business leaders and technologists. Since then, Mik has been working on creating new tools and a new framework - the Flow Framework™ - for connecting software value stream networks and enabling the shift from project to product. Mik lives with his family in Vancouver, Canada, and travels globally, sharing his vision for transforming how software is built, and is the author of Project To Product, a book that helps IT organizations survive and thrive in the Age of Software.
Here is a short interview from The Server Side conference, with Jan Stafford of Software Quality Insights, on how ALM got a bad name from heavyweight methodologies like RUP, and why the move to Agile, open source and developer-centric tools is changing that. Yes, I am in fact holding an invisible crystal ball, which is...
Development managers at large organizations with monolithic application lifecycle management (ALM) stacks once had it good. ALM components were well integrated, played nicely with one another, and when they didn’t, there was someone to call. But lightweight issue trackers started to move into the organization, popularized by the need for developer-centric collaboration facilities. At a...
How does a continuous integration (CI) tool named after a butler or two grab such a large market share when much more feature-rich and polished commercial counterparts exist? The naive answer is that it’s free. If you dig a bit deeper, the success of Hudson can be seen as part of a larger trend in...
A couple of years ago, a web-based code editor called Bespin was the rage at EclipseCon, and has been reborn in the form of the Cloud9 IDE for JavaScript. Eclipse re-embraced the push towards web-based IDE technologies with the introduction of a new code editor named Orion. While activity is again heating up on this...
The Mylyn JIRA Connector has been developed as part of the Eclipse Mylyn project since 2006 (Bug 109905), when Wesley Coelho and I met in a Vancouver coffee shop and decided to start collaborating on an idea for a startup that involved extending Mylyn’s open source integrations to commercial tools. A year later Wesley became...
Open discourse brings conflicts out from behind closed doors. A while back I was involved with an open source conflict that degraded technical discussions to power struggles. I looked to Bjorn Freeman-Benson and Mike Milinkovich the help resolve that conflict. This week, countless eyes were peeled on Planet Eclipse as a very public conflict arose...
I very much enjoyed doing this interview for the Microsoft-created How Software is Built series. In terms of length, it may go against the less is more mantra, but for that I blame the skills of Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell, who raised some very interesting questions and insights. The interview covers building communities, bridging...
Comments on The Server Side have been voicing concerns about SpringSource’s new maintenance policy, which gives incentive to purchase a support contract if you’re building mission critical apps on Spring. I’ve been amazed at some of the dialog, which ranges from suggestions that SpringSource has neglected its community to recommendations that they should instead ask...
I just spotted a neat post about Living inside Eclipse. This line of reasoning is where Gail Murphy and I were at a couple of years ago when laying out plans for bringing the benefits of Mylyn and Eclipse to activities outside of programming. We had created an RCP version of Mylyn, coined the “task-focused...
Last April, David Green, Principal Tools Architect at Make Technologies, started a conversation with me about how neat it would be to have Mylyn’s task editor support markup for descriptions and comments. David is a long-time Mylyn user, and we brainstormed about providing this as a new feature for Bugzilla users in addition meeting the...
