The 7 Deadly Sins of Agile

This week I went to an event organised by La Fosse and Intertechnica. This was a networking and discussion event with 2 speakers from Intertechnica (Rod Armstrong & a colleague) presenting 7 "sins" and opposing "virtues" followed by break out sessions to discuss them.

It certainly was a lively event, with some of the sins reflecting what happens when people adopt and perhaps bend the principles underlying underlying the "Agile Manifesto". Itwas great to hear that for most of the seasoned Agile Practitioners there, that the Agile Maifesto is not regarded as some holy dictat but more as a historical "call to arms" which, whilst useful at the time, is now rather dated and too restrictive to be regarded as the definitive bible for practising Agile.

Probably the best couplet of sin and virtue was Chaos vs Discipline. As this sparked some interesting discussion about how Chaos is in some circumstances useful for innovation and discipline for systemising value delivery, amongst other things.

Heidi Anderson of La Fosse has posted a review of the night here.

Cloud Expo 2019 Shows The Way

This week we had the annual Cloud Expo Exhibition in Excel (London), combining multiple tracks for IoT, Cyber Security, Big Data, Blockchain, AI, Data Centres and Big Data.

As usual the show was massive and noisy, though this year definitely there was more buzz and energy than last year and there appeared to be more exhibitors including a new batch of database and big data tool providers as well as old school adaptors such as Oracle and IBM.

Cloud Expo has a continuous stream of presentations, but to be honest they are difficult to extract much value from, as they are short and the venue is extremely noisy. The couple that I attended just served to reinforce what I thought that I knew already.

One of my personal favourites, Dark Trace, was there with its machine learning enhanced security technology (see past blogs), but I got more excited to see that Check Point had launched CloudGuard. Whilst Dark Trace will help dig you out of problems, Checkpoint is there to stop you getting into them in the first place. On a first inspection of claims and taking Checkpoint's pedigree into account, CloudGuard provides essential and robust means for securing SaaS and IaaS solutions and provides a platform for securing heterogeneous services such as Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform as well as many major SaaS applications such as G-suite, Salesforce, DropBox and 0365.

The other great thing which leapt out at me was Aptio's extended offering around cloud. Aptio, if you are not familiar with it, provides ABC (Activity Based Costing) software for IT operations. This assists greatly in understanding the unit costs of your key services at both an infrastructure tower level and an application level. So for example you can calculate how much it costs to support a user of an ERP system, or to digitally support a retail client, as well as understanding basic things such as what does it cost to run a server or support our business continuity plan. As the Aptio software plugs directly into the Finance Module of most ERPs, it uses real financial data and adapts to changes in pricing as they are incurred. So what's new? Aptio has added the capability to deal flexibly with cloud service providers. This makes it much easier to model the costs of say a cloud migration and compare different service providers, For existing users of cloud services it provides the means to model costs of hosting on different platforms on a day-to-day basis and adapt to changing pries and cost models of vendors to identify re-hosting opportunities for cost optimisation. Given the sheer volume of data and relationships to be addressed, this is an almost impossible task to keep up with if performed manually with a spreadsheet, so is obviously a great tool to assist in managing an enterprise estate.