Blog

Requiem is now available! It comprises fourteen interwoven heroic crowns of sonnets, numbered I through XIV. Each of these, in turn, comprises fourteen sonnets plus a fifteenth master sonnet. All fifteen sonnets of XI are available below as a free sample of the book, for you to read or listen to. Free audio sample: Crown XI     XI.1 To ghosts and fictions from a past of lies Shall turn the gray defenders of the realm To tales of nobler breed, of clearer eyes To words of steady hands at sceptred helm To fantasies of guards who never tire Brave knights atop high walls who show their worth As dragons clawing, crawling, climbing higher Emerge from deepest fissures in the earth The blight soon follows in the dragons’ wake Another…

The core around which all continuous practices revolve is the production of release candidates. These are the release candidates built from the continuously integrated changes, the release candidates built, tested, evaluated and documented in the continuous delivery pipeline, and eventually continuously deployed into the target environment. In our experience, when asked what they find most challenging about continuous integration and delivery, most engineers tend to say something about test automation. Indeed, automating one's testing, achieving sufficient confidence in release candidates to automatically release and/or deploy them is certainly a daunting challenge – particularly in the case of complex safety critical systems. This is something we look closely at in Continuous Practices, but constructing those release candidates in the first place is no trivial task, either. In this article we will…

People seem to throw these phrases around like without a care in the world. Sometimes they'll come up with new catchy ones as well: just tack "continuous" onto a noun and you've got yourself a brand new revolutionary paradigm. Continuous testing, continuous architecture, continuous compliance and continuous what not. Stop and ask what they truly mean, though, and things easily get awkward. Let's try to split the difference between all these continuous practices and see if we can work out how they relate to one another. But first, why does any of that matter? Preamble: This article is adapted from Chapter 2 of Continuous Practices: A Strategic Approach to Accelerating the Software Production System, by Daniel Ståhl and Torvald Mårtensson. Compare prices and availability.   On Semantics It is not…

  The concepts underpinning the Eiffel protocol, originally developed by Ericsson and now available as open source on GitHub, can pose a threshold to newcomers. The Eiffel Community channel on Youtube has published a series of short, accessible screen casts explaining the basic ideas. Here's the first screen cast: What is Eiffel and why should I care?