Matt Kimber

organisations

Why enterprise companies are sinking in the flood

There's a question enterprise companies ask about startups. "How are we being beaten by ten guys in a loft in Shoreditch? We've got so many more resources than they have!" And more often than not when challenged they double down on more - more planning,

agile

Working with both physical and electronic progress boards

Yesterday in a retrospective one of my teams asked a question which is all too familiar: "Updating both a physical board and an electronic board to track our progress is a bit annoying - can we get rid of one of them?" So we had a bit of a

scrum

Kaizen and Scrum

Kaizen, the process of "improvement" in the Toyota Production System, is a valuable complement to Scrum, based on many of the same principles. It means teams can get effective results both from their retrospectives and daily attempts to resolve waste. At the core is a variant of the

agile

Waste redux

A conversation today reminded me of my musings about waste from a couple of months ago. The context being that Scrum is misunderstood more often than it's understood, the relatively broad statements of the Agile Manifesto are easily abused to claim whatever you're currently doing is

agile

Agile transformation: The Low

A few months into any company's journey towards agile development I often see a point which I call the Low. This is where you've brought in a few experts, and done a few of the things they've said... but nothing seems to have improved

EC2 Container Registry

A small PSA that I missed in the run up to Christmas - Amazon's EC2 Container Registry is now available. This is a boon if you've got a bunch of small containers that you want to put in a private registry and nowhere else to do so.

tools

Load Balancing and Health Checks

It's pretty common to want to load balance a web application across multiple nodes. The canonical implementation looks something like this: Traffic comes in from the public Internet to the load balancer, which then distributes it amongst the available application servers. There are various tricks you can employ

development

Bob Ross on software development

I'd really encourage anyone new to software development leadership or mentoring to watch Bob Ross on The Joy of Painting. That patient, calm and above all encouraging style while demonstrating great technical skill is exactly what I like to see in tech leads. It's inclusive; the

organisations

Bimodal IT isn't anything to aspire to

Bimodal IT is a term created by analysis form Gartner, to describe an increasingly common pattern in enterprise development. It's where you have one part of the organisation working in a very traditional, governance-focused manner using lots of process charts, documents and explicit signoff, and one part

agile

Lean Startup is Agile by another name - and that's okay.

There's a lot of buzz building around the Lean Startup model lately; it's been around for a few years but we're starting to see mention of it in places like the WSJ and the boardrooms of major enterprises. To some degree the sentiment is

elk

Shipping logs to Logstash with Filebeat

I've been spending some time looking at how to get data into my ELK stack, and one of the least disruptive options is Elastic's own Filebeat log shipper. It's one of the easiest ways to upgrade applications to centralised logging as it doesn'

docker

Setting up Docker and Docker Compose on AWS

For most of my Docker development, I use William Yeh's Docker-enabled Vagrant boxes, but for Amazon Web Services I quite often find myself on a default Amazon Linux AMI which doesn't come as readily set up out of the box. The default Amazon Linux AMI

docker

25 Minute ELK Stack With Docker - Part 4

I'm going to take a slightly different route with this article. Previously (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3), we set up an ELK stack almost anyone could use, providing they set up the right grok filters and figure out how to send data to it. This time I&

elk

25 Minute ELK Stack with Docker - Part 3

In previous articles in this series (Part 1 | Part 2) we set up a functioning ELK stack in 25 minutes, and added nginx for a reverse proxy with some basic authentication. Now we have that ELK stack, it's time to put a meaningful amount of data into it.

elk

25 Minute ELK Stack With Docker - Part 2

In the last article in this series we set up a functioning ELK stack in 25 minutes. But we left a few things still to do for a production-quality system; some form of authentication, tuning ElasticSearch to prevent queue-limit problems with large quantities of data, and having persistent

docker

ELK Stack in 25 minutes with Docker

Let's say you've got an application which outputs log files to a directory. Somewhere on your server is a file called applog_20151116.log, which contains a whole bunch of unstructured log entries output by your application - debug statements, errors, exceptions, stack traces and all sorts

organisations

Waste

What's the difference between a merely good Scrum organisation and a great one? The answer is waste. Waste in a Scrum context is loosely defined as any activity which does not result in something the customer uses. At its most obvious we're talking things like TPS

organisations Featured

Be careful with "Modern Agile".

I have a problem with a lot of the recent advice suggesting firms looking to adopt agile practices should eschew the stand-ups, estimations and fixed iterations of Scrum. Which is strange as a lot of that advice is coming from respected, experienced Scrum practitioners. However, I think what'

Enterprise Lean Startup

In this article I'm going to answer some of the following questions: * How does Lean Startup work with change management? * How do I apply governance to Lean Startup? * How does Lean Startup fit in the enterprise? * Can Lean Startup releases be internal only? * Do I need to change

planning

Budgeting

Budgeting in a typical organisation where you have a few teams of full-time developers can be counter-intuitive. The monetary cost is fixed; your developers get the same salary whether they're building products, fighting fires, or goofing around on Facebook. What you're actually budgeting is

Agile's not dead. Enterprise Agile is.

I'm seeing more and more posts claiming that agile development and in particular the Scrum process are in some way "dead". And there's something in common with all of them. They don't describe the lean, collaborative people-focused ideas I know and

The temptation of the core services team

One of the things I see a lot of companies doing once they start trying to get to grips with their development process is to look at building common services and components. Things like user authentication, customer notifications or file uploading that up until that point have been built multiple

planning

Why tasking matters

Something I perhaps neglected in my talk about breaking down user stories into tasks is why you'd want to do that. Let me illustrate by analogy. When you're hiking, there's a question you're continually asking: "where am I in relation to

planning

Breaking down user stories

A user story is a short, simple description of a piece of functionality, as told from the perspective of a customer. It's intended to form the basis for a discussion about how to provide business value, and it should be relevant to the customer. "I want to

How strict governance causes rather than prevents shadow IT

Shadow IT is when something's happening in your organisation that ops ought to have control over, but don't. Common examples include personal laptops connected to the network, software frameworks covertly installed on servers, corporate mail sitting on personal phones, internal code published to Github, and services