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Five key organizational practices make up Agile ALM
SAN FRANCISCO and LONDON, June 7, 2011 – ThoughtWorks Studios (www.thoughtworks-studios.com), a global leader in enterprise Agile development products and services, today released a new white paper – Agile ALM: Redefining ALM with Five Key Practices. The paper outlines an entirely new and modern approach to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) that helps IT organizations meet increasing customer expectations and quickly adapt to competitive pressures through the design, development and Continuous Delivery of high quality software.
To download a complimentary copy of the white paper please visit: (http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com/user/register&destination=resource_whitepapers/whitepaper/download/redefining_alm).
“The impact and reach of Agile software methodologies now spans the entire application lifecycle, making the use of traditional ALM tools and processes counter-productive for organizations moving to a more rapid and incremental build, test and release cycle,” said Cyndi Mitchell, managing director for ThoughtWorks Studios and co-author of the white paper. “Thispaper draws on the collective experience of both ThoughtWorks and ThoughtWorks Studios to provide five strategic building blocks IT executives can use to bridge Agile principles into ALM.”
While traditional ALM-applied tools enforce pre-defined standardized processes, ThoughtWorks sees Agile ALM as the application of tools to support people and the processes that best suit the way they actually work when creating great software. The white paper outlines five key organizational practices of Agile ALM, and describes how organizations that keep these practices in the forefront of all software delivery activities will reap the benefits in increased agility.
In addition to co-authors Cyndi Mitchell, Chad Wathington and Ethan Teng, ThoughtWorks’ luminariesMartin Fowler, Jim Highsmith and Jez Humble provide an introductory overview into each of the five practices for Agile ALM:
Evolve Process Definition
Agile ALM recognizes that the most effective process for any software initiative cannot be defined up-front; it must be continuously discovered, evolved and refined over time.
Embrace Heterogeneity
Agile ALM embraces the fact that every software project is different. Just as processes cannot be completely defined up-front, they also cannot be completely standardized across all teams.
Build the Right Thing
Organizations that focus on building the right thing over managing the lifecycle of artifacts create software that is more exciting and useful to their end users and customers. Agile ALM embeds customers and business people into the day-to-day activities of software teams.
Practice Continuous Delivery
Agile ALM continuously delivers a few features every couple ofdays or weeks, instead of a bunch of features once a quarter. Practicing Continuous Delivery ensures that the path to production is clear, kinks in the release process are ironed out early and predictability becomes the norm.
Orchestrate, Don’t Manage
Agile ALM calls upon company leaders and managers to become orchestrators by making sure the work being done is aligned with business goals, removing obstacles, fixing bad projects, understanding the portfolio, and helping to spread best-practices across teams.
To download a free copy of Agile ALM: Redefining ALM with Five Key Practices, and to see the entire ThoughtWorks Studios library of Agile-focused white papers please visit: (http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com/user/register&destination=resource_whitepapers/whitepaper/download/redefining_alm).
About ThoughtWorks Studios
ThoughtWorks Studios provides Agile ALM products and training. A division of the Agile consultancy, ThoughtWorks, Inc., it offers the tools, coaching and experience to help companies realize the full potential of Agile-based development in the enterprise. Its Adaptive ALMTM suite, Mingle® (Agile project management), Twist® (Agile test automation) and GoTM (Agile release management/DevOps), helps organizations manage and automate the application lifecycle through an adaptive approach that supports people and processes. Its Agile Workshops deliver training for all facets of Agile ALM practices. Customers include 3M, Barclays, BBC, eBay, Honeywell, McGraw-Hill, Rackspace and Vodafone. For more information, please visit http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com.
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Media Contact:
Christie Denniston (for North America)
Catapult PR-IR
Office: 303-581-7760, ext. 13
Mobile: 303-827-5164
Fowler and Humble to present practical, useful methods to capitalize on new business opportunities and create a competitive business advantage
WHO: Jez Humble
ThoughtWorks Studios
(www.thoughtworks-studios.com)
Humble is the author of the highly acclaimed book, Continuous Delivery, and is the build and release principal for ThoughtWorks Studios where he leads the design and development of its Agile release management product, GoTM.
Martin Fowler
Fowler is the Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks. He concentrates on designing enterprise software, looking at what practices are needed to come up with and make a good design
WHAT: Tutorial
Continuous Delivery with a Rapid Deployment Pipeline
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 8:30 a.m.- 4:30 p.m. (Pacific)
To capitalize on new business opportunities and create a competitive advantage, businesses need to rapidly deliver compelling new features to their customers and users-all the while ensuring that software releases are robust and well-tested. Fowler and Humble will discuss how developers can organize development processes to deliver features rapidly and reliably through a surprising pattern of build-deploy-test-release they call the rapid deployment pipeline. After introducing the value and principles of Continuous Delivery, the presenters will explain the deployment pipeline in detail-starting from the end goal of release, moving back through testing, then back to deployment and development practices. Along the way they will discuss how to improve collaboration and feedback to speed up delivery. Fowler and Humble will then dive into the Continuous Delivery ecosystem and explore ways to manage the components, data and infrastructure needed to implement Continuous Delivery. Importantly, they cover the transformation many teams and organizations must make to roll out a successful rapid deployment pipeline.
WHERE: Better Software Conference
Caesars Palace
Las Vegas, NV
CONTACT: For more information or to set up an interview with any of the speakers listed above, please contact Christie Denniston at Catapult PR-IR 303-581-7760, ext. 13 or (cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com).
THOUGHTWORKS’ MARTIN FOWLER AND JEZ HUMBLE TO PRESENT ON LATEST AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT METHODS AT OOP 2011
Fowler to present keynote on advancements in software design and co-present with Humble on the rise of Continuous Delivery and its role in the Dev/Ops movement
WHO: Martin Fowler, ThoughtWorks’ (www.thoughtworks.com) Chief Scientist, is an author, consultant and international speaker on software development, specializing in object-oriented analysis and design, UML, patterns and Agile software development methodologies, including Extreme Programming. He has written six books on the topic of software development and helped create the Manifesto for Agile Software Development in 2001, along with more than 15 co-authors.
Jez Humble, ThoughtWorks Studios’ (www.thoughtworks-studios.com) build and release principal for the Agile release management product, GoTM, and author of the highly acclaimed book, Continuous Delivery.
WHAT: Continuous Delivery – Jez Humble and Martin Fowler
Mon., Jan. 24, 2011
This tutorial outlines the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable and new functionality to users and includes many interactive exercises. Through automation of the build, deployment and testing process, and improved collaboration, teams can have changes released continuously.
At the heart of the tutorial is a pattern called the deployment pipeline, which involves the creation of a living system that models your organization’s value stream for delivering software. Humble will introduce this pattern and discuss how to incrementally automate the build, test and deployment process, culminating in continuous deployment. He will then describe an Agile infrastructure to automate the management of testing and production environments. Development practices that enable incremental development and delivery will be covered at length as well as how practices such as branch by abstraction and componentization provide approaches that enable large and distributed teams to deliver incrementally.
Keynote: Software Design in the 21st Century – Martin Fowler
Tues., Jan. 25, 2011
In the last decade or so we have seen a number of new ideas added to the mix to help us effectively design software. Patterns help capture the solutions and rationale for using them. Refactoring allows us to alter the design of a system after the code is written. Agile methods, in particular Extreme Programming, give us a highly iterative and evolutionary approach which is particularly well suited to changing requirements and environments. Fowler has been a leading voice in these techniques and will give a suite of short talks featuring various aspects about his recent thinking about how these and other developments affect software development.
WHERE: OOP 2011 Conference
ICM International Congress Center
Munich, Germany
Media and analyst inquiries should be directed to Christie Denniston at 303- 581-7760 or cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com
THOUGHTWORKS ANNOUNCES LATEST BOOKS FROM AGILE EXPERTS MARTIN FOWLER, JIM WEBBER AND IAN ROBINSON
New titles address practical software development techniques using Domain Specific Languages and REST for successful Agile applications
CHICAGO, Nov. 1, 2010 – ThoughtWorks (www.thoughtworks.com), the global custom software solutions experts and leaders in enterprise Agile software delivery, today announced two new books published by ThoughtWorks employees, chief scientist Martin Fowler and senior Agile advisors Jim Webber and Ian Robinson. Fowler’s book, Domain Specific Languages, part of the Addison-Wesley Signature Series, provides a how-to approach for using a variety of different techniques available for Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Webber and Robinson’s book, REST in Practice (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596805838), examines how REST (Representational State Transfer) continues to gain momentum as the preferred method for building web services and how the approach is used for SOA and SOAP-based applications.
“It’s great to see the collective body of works that ThoughtWorks employees have published continue to grow as we work to create better and more productive ways of building and delivering meaningful applications,” said Fowler. “These books come on the heels of Jez Humbles’ breakthrough book, Continuous Delivery, and exemplify our continued commitment to shared innovation that benefits both our customers and the industry.”
Fowler’s Domain Specific Languages is a wide-ranging guide to building DSLs, providing readers with enough information to make an informed choice about whether or not to use a DSL and the types of available techniques. Part I of the book is a 150-page narrative overview that gives a broad understanding of general DSL principles. The reference material in Parts II through VI provides the details and examples needed to get started using the various techniques discussed. Both internal and external DSL topics are covered, in addition to alternative computational models and code generation. Although the general principles and patterns presented can be used with a variety of programming languages, most of the examples are in Java or C#. For more information visit: (http://martinfowler.com/books.html#dsl).
In REST in Practice, SOA experts/authors Webber and Robinson (along with Savas Parastatidis of Microsoft) provide a down-to-earth explanation of REST, demonstrate how developers can create simple and elegant distributed hypermedia systems by applying the web’s guiding principles to common enterprise computing problems. The book provides techniques for implementing specific web technologies and patterns to solve the needs of a typical organization as it grows from modest beginnings to become a global enterprise. For more information visit (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596805838).
Continuous Delivery (Addison-Wesley Signature Series, Jez Humble and David Farley), published in August 2010, explains how delivering software to users can be a painful, risky and time-consuming process. It outlines the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality through the automation of the build, deployment and testing process. The book represents the culmination and collective experience gathered from large-scale enterprise Agile engagements conducted by ThoughtWorks’ professional services teams. To see a complete Table of Contents of Continuous Delivery please visit the publisher site: (www.informit.com/title/0321601912).
About ThoughtWorks
ThoughtWorks, Inc. is a global IT consultancy providing Agile-based systems development, consulting and transformation services to Global 1000 companies. It has pioneered many of the most advanced and successful Agile methods of software development and best practices used in the industry today. At its core, ThoughtWorks helps its clients maximize investment and performance across a portfolio of complex, business-critical applications, while reducing time and risk. Its products division, ThoughtWorks Studios, offers tools to manage the entire Agile development lifecycle through its Adaptive ALM solution®, comprised of Mingle®, GoTM and Twist®. ThoughtWorks employs 1,500 professionals to serve clients from offices in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and the United States. For more information please visit: (www.thoughtworks.com).
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Media Contact:
Christie Denniston
Catapult PR-IR
Office: 303-581-7760, ext. 13
Mobile: 303-827-5164
cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com
THOUGHTWORKS EXPERTS PRESENT LATEST TRENDS IN AGILE DEVELOPMENT AT QCon
WHO: ThoughtWorks (www.thoughtworks.com) experts Martin Fowler, Jez Humble, Ola Bini and Tom Sulston will present latest trends and methods for achieving Agile success at the QCon conference (http://qconsf.com/sf2010/speakers/)
ThoughtWorks is also a sponsor of QCon. The company invites interested attendees to stop by their booth to see demonstrations of ThoughtWorks Studios Adaptive ALM.
WHO: Martin Fowler – “Software Design in the 21st Century”
In the last decade a number of new ideas have been added to the mix to help improve the design of software. Patterns help capture the solutions and rationale for using them. Refactoring allows developers to alter the design of a system after the code is written. Agile methods, in particular Extreme Programming (XP), provide a highly iterative and evolutionary approach which is particularly well suited to changing requirements and environments. Fowler will present a suite of short talks featuring various aspects about his recent thinking about how these and other developments affect software development.
Jez Humble
Martin Fowler – “Continuous Delivery”
Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This tutorial sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours-sometimes even minutes-no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.
Ola Bini – “Adopting the JVM”
The JVM gives developers access to a multitude of powerful languages that can make the life of a developer much better. However, getting started can be a problem. This presentation provides an introduction on how to successfully apply polyglot programming on the JVM by using languages like Ruby, ML, Scala and Clojure without giving up day-to-day Java coding.
Tom Sulston – “Doing BDD with Puppet and Cucumber”
The DevOps movement is bringing useful developer tools and practices to the operations team. In this session, attendees will learn why behavior-driven design (BDD) is a useful practice for systems management; how it can be implemented with tools like Cucumber/Puppet; and some of the common tricks and pitfalls.
WHEN: Nov. 1 – 5, 2010
WHERE: Westin San Francisco Market Street
50 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Media and analyst queries should be directed to Christie Denniston at 303- 581-7760 or cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com
THOUGHTWORKS’ EXPERTS PRESENT LATEST ADVANCEMENTS IN AGILE DEVELOPMENT AT JAOO 2010 CONFERENCE
Jez Humble, Martin Fowler, Tom Sulston and Neal Ford address latest trends and practices around Dev/Ops and domain specific languages for enterprise Agile software development
CHICAGO, Oct. Oct. 5, 2010 – ThoughtWorks® (www.thoughtworks.com), the global custom software solutions experts and leaders in enterprise Agile software delivery, will have four of its leading Agile industry experts presenting topics pertinent to enterprise Agile success at the JAOO Conference this week in Denmark. The JAOO conference is one of the leading IT industry events in Europe for software developers, IT architects and project managers, and attracts more than 1,300 participants. Learn more at (http://jaoo.dk/).
Presentations include:
Jez Humble – Build and Release Principal, ThoughtWorks Studios
Continuous Delivery
Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky and time-consuming process. This talk sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment and testing processes, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can reduce cycle times and improve the quality of software and the reliability of the release process.
Humble will introduce the value proposition of Continuous Delivery and the concept of the deployment pipeline, a pattern for modeling the delivery process that ensures everyone in delivery can self-service deployments and provide fast feedback on the production readiness of the software upon every change to its source or configuration. He will also discuss patterns for zero-downtime releases, and patterns for continuous development – keeping software production-ready in the face of change without the use of branches in version control.
Learn more about Continuous Delivery and Humble’s book on the topic, visit: (www.continuousdelivery.com).
Martin Fowler – Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks
Neal Ford – Software Architect and Meme Wrangler, ThoughtWorks
Domain Specific Languages
Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are an old technique in software development that’s getting a recent resurgence in interest. Most developers run into them regularly – as XML configuration files, regular expressions, query languages or build scripts. However, they haven’t been given the attention they deserve and there is very little information out there to help developers build them effectively. In fact, very few people have done much to build their own DSLs and even fewer have a broad appreciation of the various techniques involved.
During this tutorial, Fowler will provide a broad introduction to ways in which developers can build DSLs. He will explain the two main varieties of DSL today: internal and external, providing patterns to help build them and insight so attendees have the understanding needed to determine which of the two would be most suitable for future projects. He also will share with attendees the importance of building an underlying Semantic Model, and explain why DSLs are less important than one might think. By the end of the tutorial, participants will have an idea of where DSLs fit into the software development ecosystem. This material is based heavily on Fowler’s upcoming book on DSLs. For more information visit: (http://martinfowler.com/books.html#dsl).
Tom Sulston – Lead Consultant, ThoughtWorks UK
Continuous Deployment and DevOps: Deprecating Silos
In this session, Sulston will run a retrospective on how to break down organizational barriers with continuous deployment and other DevOps practices. He will talk about the role of tools and practices like CI and build pipelines, Puppet and Yum. He also will address some puzzles he has encountered during customer engagements, such as massive data deployments to global data centers, and replacing silos with cross-functional teams in complex, evolving environments.
Neal Ford – Software Architect and Meme Wrangler, ThoughtWorks
Rails in the Large: How Agility Allows Us to Build One of the Largest Rails Projects in the World
While others have been debating whether Rails can scale to enterprise levels, we’ve been demonstrating it. ThoughtWorks is running one of the largest Rails projects in the world, for an enterprise. This session discusses tactics, techniques, best practices and other things learned from scaling Rails development. Ford will discuss infrastructure, testing, messaging, optimization, performance and the results of lots of lessons learned, including killer rock-scissors-paper tricks to help practitioners avoid babysitting the view tests!
ThoughtWorks and ThoughtWorks Studios continue to provide thought leadership, products, services and resources around the latest trends and methods in Agile. To learn more about ThoughtWorks new Build, Release, DevOps service offering, visit: (http://www.thoughtworks.com/services). For information on ThoughtWorks Studios’ recently launched Continuous Delivery product, GoTM, please visit: (http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com/go-agile-release-management).
For information on any of these presentations please contact Christie Denniston at cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com
About ThoughtWorks
ThoughtWorks, Inc. is a global IT consultancy providing Agile-based systems development, consulting and transformation services to Global 1000 companies. It has pioneered many of the most advanced and successful Agile methods of software development and best practices used in the industry today. At its core, ThoughtWorks helps its clients maximize investment and performance across a portfolio of complex, business-critical applications, while reducing time and risk. Its products division, ThoughtWorks Studios, offers tools to manage the entire Agile development lifecycle through its Adaptive ALM solution®, comprised of Mingle®, GoTM and Twist®. ThoughtWorks employs 1,500 professionals to serve clients from offices in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and the United States. For more information please visit: (www.thoughtworks.com).
# # #
Media Contact:
Christie Denniston
Catapult PR-IR
Office: 303-581-7760, ext. 13
Mobile: 303-827-5164
cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com
THOUGHTWORKS’ JEZ HUMBLE AND MARTIN FOWLER TO DISCUSS CONTINUOUS DELIVERY AT AGILE 2010
New book from Humble and co-presentation at Agile 2010 with Fowler addresses how collaboration and automation delivers valuable software rapidly and reliably through Continuous Delivery
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 2, 2010 – ThoughtWorks Studios (www.thoughtworks-studios.com), a global leader in Agile ALM solutions, today announced new thought leadership initiatives around the latest methodology in Agile software – Continuous Delivery. Jez Humble and Martin Fowler will share insights at the Agile 2010 conference on how better collaboration between developers, testers and IT operations, along with automation of the build, deploy, test and release process, drives rapid, incremental delivery of valuable software without the stress, pain and risk of traditional methods. Humble will introduce his new book, Continuous Delivery (Addison-Wesley Signature Series, Foreword by Martin Fowler, Jez Humble and David Farley), at the conference and co-present with Fowler on the topic during a three-hour session on Mon., Aug. 9. (http://agile2010.agilealliance.org/schedule.html).
“Continuous Delivery addresses the need for businesses to deliver software rapidly and reliably so they can get valuable feedback from users. In the current economic environment, this represents a huge competitive advantage,” said Humble, build and release principal for ThoughtWorks Studios and product manager for its recently launched Agile release management platform, GoTM. “Continuous Delivery focuses on the engineering practices that enable organizations to keep their software production-ready throughout the lifecycle of projects so they can be released on demand using a push-button process.”
Set for availability at the Agile 2010 conference next week, the new book, Continuous Delivery, explains how delivering software to users can be a painful, risky and time-consuming process. It outlines the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality through the automation of the build, deployment and testing process. The book represents the culmination and collective experience gathered from large-scale enterprise Agile engagements conducted by ThoughtWorks’ professional services teams. That same input helped shape the capabilities of GoTM, the recently launched Agile release management platform that enables Continuous Delivery. A free trial of GoTM is available at (http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com/user/register&destination=forms/form/go/download). To see a complete Table of Contents of Continuous Delivery please visit the publisher site: (www.informit.com/title/0321601912).
Jez Humble and Martin Fowler: Agile 2010, Continuous Delivery
At Agile 2010, Humble and Fowler will lead a three-hour tutorial session on the latest movement for enterprise Agile adoption, Continuous Delivery. The presentation will outline how businesses can deliver valuable new features to users as frequently as possible, while making sure releases are stable and well-tested. During the tutorial, Humble and Fowler will discuss how to deliver features rapidly and reliably through an automated build, deploy, test and release pattern called the deployment pipeline, and through better collaboration between developers, testers and operations. They will show how this unique approach of moving from release back through testing to development practices, and analyzing at each stage, can improve collaboration and increase feedback to make the delivery process as fast and efficient as possible.
“Continuous Delivery has been one of the most important practices that ThoughtWorkers have developed in our decade of applying Agile methods in enterprise IT,” said Fowler, chief scientist for ThoughtWorks. “It’s going to be a lot of fun working with Jez to spread the idea of deployment pipelines through the industry. The notion of Continuous Integration has got a lot of traction and we hope to extend this out to Continuous Delivery so businesses everywhere can take advantage of deployments that are both more frequent and less stressful.”
A global leader in helping organizations adopt and leverage Agile development to transform IT and business operations, ThoughtWorks supports and has released some of the most widely used open source Agile tools (Selenium, CruiseControl and RubyWorks) that have played an integral role in Agile becoming the mainstream practice it is today. It also has helped lead the growth of now-established best practices for Agile development, including continuous integration, test-driven-development, automated functional testing, behavior-driven development and now, Continuous Delivery.
About ThoughtWorks Studios
ThoughtWorks Studios is the global leader in Agile ALM tools and training. A division of ThoughtWorks®, the pioneer in Agile development and best-practices, it offers the only holistic, fully integrated delivery lifecycle platform designed exclusively for sustainable, enterprise-wide Agile ALM success. Based on ThoughtWorks ground-breaking experience and commitment to software excellence, Adaptive ALMTM helps organizations manage all aspects of the software development lifecycle – from requirements definition and portfolio management to test automation, quality assurance and release management. The company also provides in-depth training courses that cover all facets of Agile ALM through its Agile Workshops series. Customers include 3M, Barclays, BBC, eBay, Honeywell, McGraw-Hill, Rackspace and Vodafone. ThoughtWorks Studios is headquartered in San Francisco and Bangalore, with offices in London and select cities in Europe, Asia and Australia. For more information, please visit www.thoughtworks-studios.com.
# # #
Media Contact:
Christie Denniston
Catapult PR-IR
cdenniston@catapultpr-ir.com
O: (303) 581-7760
C: (303) 827-5164