I’ve said it before on this blog - it doesn’t matter how good your process is if your team doesn’t have the Right Stuff. But if your process is compromised, then so are your people. The right process and the right people are each, on their own, necessary but insufficient conditions for developing good software. And while you can find good people, a good process needs to be built from the ground up, starting with infrastructure.
Everything that your company does depends on its people. But everything your people do rests on the infrastructure that you put in place. Yes, the agile manifesto emphasizes ‘individuals and interactions over processes and tools’, and I can see where they are coming from. But if you don’t have the right tools to do the job, then you can say “We are agile” all you want - it won’t make your software any better. The wrong tools will create the wrong conditions, impediments around which engineers will find whatever torturous route they need to in order to get the job done. In other words, your process and practices will take on the twisted shape of a bad infrastructure.
And the job of finding the right tools is never over. We’ve been making wide-ranging updates to our development infrastructure over the last few months and I’ve mentioned some of them in previous blog entries. At some point in the near future I’ll blog again about our continuing travails with Maven2, our relatively straightforward conversion from CVS to Subversion, and our exploration of JIRA as a project management tool. Today there’s another piece of news that I’d like to share, and it relates to a new product that DSI is about to launch.
Continuous Integration has been one of the keystones of our process. Over the past few years we have tried many different CI products and settled finally (and happily) on Bamboo from Atlassian. But Jason Barry from DSI has taken things one step further. Jason is our Performance Architect and his idea of combining Continuous Integration with Performance Management (using JProbe from Quest Software) has resulted in the creation of DSI’s CPM Toolkit. Jason and his team have been particularly busy of late and version 1.2 of this product is about to be released as a closed beta. If yours is the kind of company that takes its development infrastructure seriously, if you think that you could make use of a tool that continuously monitors the performance aspect of your applications while they are still under development, and if you are prepared to offer us some feedback on this new product, feel free to get in contact: apm@decaresystems.com
0 Responses to “The Right Development Infrastructure”