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Why Agile Isn’t Enough to Fix Your AppDev Backlog
The agile software development methodology has surged in popularity in recent years—and for good reason. More than 40 percent of companies say that they’re now using agile with their development and IT operations teams. Organizations that have adopted agile cite a wide range of benefits, most notably: greater project visibility, the ability to manage changing priorities, increased business/IT alignment, and faster time to market for deliverables.
But the agile methodology, like any way to develop software, isn’t perfect. This is especially true when it comes to application development backlogs, which seem to plague software teams of all kinds and sizes.
In a 2019 survey, 64 percent of IT professionals said that they have an IT backlog. What’s more, half of teams with an AppDev backlog reported that it was about the same size as it was the previous year, which means that many organizations continue to struggle with an effective solution for these challenges.
The IT research and advisory firm Gartner has outlined 10 principles for agile development, including the need for “documenting, managing, and eliminating technical debt.” Per Gartner: “All development creates technical debt. The difference with agile methods is that technical debt is recognized and added to the backlog, not swept under the carpet.”
Note that it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have a software backlog, as Gartner alludes to. The real problem is when items languish in your backlog for too long and start to fester, preventing you from releasing valuable updates, features, and bug fixes.
The good news is that the agile methodology employs multiple concepts and practices that can help you empty out your backlog:
- Agile roadmaps are detailed plans for how a software product will evolve in the short and medium terms, and can include backlog fixes to help you pay off your technical debt.
- Agile requirements modeling can help your team understand which items in the backlog have the greatest impact on the software’s end users, so that you know how to triage and prioritize your work.
- Agile sprints are short iterations of the development cycle (usually between 2 to 4 weeks) in which all members collaborate toward a common goal of improving the software.
But despite all the hype, agile isn’t a magic fix for your software development woes. Even if you have an in-house agile development team, cleaning up your AppDev backlog may be a challenge for reasons such as:
- Not enough capacity: If your team is focused on a high-priority project with an impending deadline, emptying your backlog may fall by the wayside temporarily. But if you’re constantly jumping from project to project, a permanently clogged backlog might become the new normal, because your team simply doesn’t have enough hands on deck.
- Lack of technical skillset: Cleaning up your AppDev backlog may require specialized technical skills that aren’t available on your team, or are no longer available after a team member’s departure.
- Budget constraints: Depending on its contents and their importance, the AppDev backlog may not take precedence in your team’s budget.
We’ve discussed why simply calling yourself an agile organization isn’t enough to vacate your AppDev backlog. So what can you start to do about it?
The good news is that the solutions to an overloaded AppDev backlog aren’t out of reach for your team, no matter what resources are available to you. As with most problems, the first step to solving your AppDev backlog issues is to figure out what tools you have at hand. Download our new white paper “6 Ways to Clear Out Your AppDev Backlog Fast” to read about our best practices and recommendations for boosting your agile team’s productivity, as well as the stories of some of Datavail’s clients who became more productive and profitable by cleaning up their backlog.
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How DBAs Will Support the Digital Workplace
The digital workplace is something that every company needs to address in order to stay competitive. Digital transformation requires new solutions to new challenges, many of which center around using data to achieve new insights. That’s where the database administrator of the future comes in. As applications multiply and data explodes, you’ll need people who know your data structure and who can help you use that data to its fullest.
What is the Digital Workplace?
The digital workplace is your opportunity to avoid doing useless things, based on a famous quote by Peter Drucker in the 80s. He said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
Achieving a digital workplace will involve creating systems that support integrated workflows across your organization. Your digital workplace will need to span research and development, marketing and sales, customer support, HR, manufacturing, and IT. The challenge is to eliminate data silos and create systems that allow workers to quickly access the information they need to complete mission-critical tasks.
The transition is worth it. You’ll see many things that the digital workplace can do to help your business grow, including:
- More collaboration
- Higher employee engagement
- Increased productivity
- More effective recruiting
- Improved agility
- Enhanced customer experience
Many of the apps you’ll need for digital transformation will reside in the cloud. And, you’ll need the expertise in-house, through a managed services provider, or using a combination of the two to make sure your data is safe and doing its job.
How DBAs Will Help
In the past, a database administrator was responsible for managing assets. As the world and the cloud environment have evolved, today’s DBA can play a much more significant role in helping your business make sense of its data and develop the apps you’ll need to utilize it.
Your DBAs will use their knowledge of the data currently available in the organization. They know what it is, where it resides, and how it is connecting across the organization. As a result, DBAs will be able to act as strategists throughout your transformation. The volume of data that you need to manage is exploding. And, relational databases are no longer going to be the answer to managing it.
Experts estimate that in the next five years, 80% of the data worldwide will be unstructured. And the number of data sources used is increasing due to remote workforces and IoT. Your DBAs will need to change your configurations to integrate the new data types and sources. With all that new data, you may need to redesign schemas, data management, and SQL deployments.
DBAs will need to convert data into information and then create applications that let you gain the benefits of advanced analytics. As your platform’s capabilities increase, you’ll need augmented analytics that use machine learning and AI techniques. You’ll have information, not just data, and your DBA will help design platforms that will let you use the information in ways that weren’t possible in the past.
DBAs as Strategists
It’s true that cloud automation is the wave of the future. Some people believe that it will make DBAs obsolete. But, with all the knowledge they have of the data in your operations, it’s much more likely that DBAs will turn into strategists. They are the ones who can answer questions about how to integrate data flows and determine when you need an upgrade and how to minimize the impact of completing it.
You’ll also need a strategy for managing the cybersecurity risks that will only increase as cloud automation expands. Security risks will also increase as a larger number of diverse devices need access to your systems.
DBAs will leave the lower-level tasks of data management to the cloud providers. They will use their database knowledge, and expand on it, to develop the perspective you’ll need to make sure your data supports your digital transformation goals. A DBA is the best and sometimes the only person who can do that. The changes in the business environment don’t support the idea that the role of the DBA is going to diminish.
Datavail is leading the industry in helping customers to meet the database challenges they’re facing today, and will face in the future. We can help develop plans to let you take advantage of cloud automation, and provide ongoing services. Download our white paper entitled, “Cloud DBAs & the Future of Computing” to learn more.
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EPM 11.2.2.0 on Linux: Got It Working!
Initial observations:
- If you’ve ever installed EPM 11.1.2.x on Linux before, the installTool.sh process for EPM 11.2.2.0 is identical.
- You obviously want a VNC client or PuTTY+XMing (unless you’re using the VirtualBox console or the like). If you don’t own a license for VNCViewer, look up “TightVNC” on your favorite search engine. It is open source.
- Before you dive in and run configtool.sh, stop and run RCU. As I’ve stated in other posts and in comment replies, in a distributed environment you need to do this on every server except the Essbase server.
- HFM is grayed out unless you’re either installing on Exalytics or Windows.
- The certification matrix says Red Hat 7 and Oracle Linux 7 are the only certified UNIX platforms for this release; AIX and Solaris are not mentioned.
- After you run RCU and then configtool.sh, you will need to fix script permissions.
- If you’ve tried 11.2.0.0, 11.2.1.0 or 11.2.2.0 in Windows, the Linux directory structure is laid out in an identical fashion. If you haven’t tried 11.2.x yet, the directory structure is mostly the same as 11.2.1.x, but there are some minor differences (primarily with Oracle Middleware… user_projects is the same as what you’re used to).
- Financial Reporting’s “FRConfig.sh” still shows an incorrect database schema, as do all prior EPM 11.2.x releases. This is a bug someone will need to report to Oracle. This bug means you will be forced to use either Workspace->Explore->File->Export or the LCM batch utility rather than LCM to export your reporting repository. LCM will throw an error for this specific task.
- Auto-installed patches are the same as 11.2.1.0’s, and mostly the same as 11.2.0.0’s (minor difference where WebLogic is concerned due to the addition of Chrome and Edge support). Essbase is still 11.1.2.4.033 and Java is still about 1 year old at 1.8 Update 181. Once you get the system stable, you’ll want to look into applying WebLogic and Java patches from the July 2020 Oracle Critical Patch Update. You can also patch the Essbase suite up to 11.1.2.4.039 or .040 if you want (as of this writing).
I’ll look into writing a more thoughtful post over the weekend if there’s anything else worthy of sharing. Have fun installing!
For information on EPM 11.2, visit our Resource Center.
Read the original post at epmonprem.pro.
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Clearing Out Your AppDev Backlog
IT research and advisory firm Gartner has outlined 10 guiding principles for an organization to be considered truly agile. In particular, Gartner highlights that the agile methodology requires developers to acknowledge and pay off their technical debt, i.e. the difference between a software’s current state and its minimum required state in terms of usability, performance, and reliability.
But even organizations that consider themselves agile may not be able to make a dent in their existing backlogs. The 2019 report “The State of Application Development” from OutSystems reveals a number of serious concerns about AppDev backlogs:
- 64 percent of IT professionals say that they have an application development backlog, and 19 percent say that they have more than 10 apps currently backed up.
- Most backlogs are still, well, backlogged: 50 percent of respondents say that their AppDev backlog is about the same as last year, and just 39 percent say that it’s improved.
Whether you use agile development or the traditional “waterfall” method, AppDev backlogs can be a major problem. Clearing out your AppDev backlog might be a challenge for the following reasons:
- No in-house team
- Lack of internal capacity
- Lack of the right skill set
- Budgetary constraints
- Poor choice of AppDev partner
- Lack of DevOps practices
While these issues are significant and complex, they’re by no means insurmountable. Here’s 6 quick strategies you can implement to get through that looming backlog.
- Continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD)
Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) are two interrelated concepts that are frequently employed in the agile and DevOps methodologies.
- MVP development
The agile methodology often speaks of the importance of developing a minimum viable product (MVP): a version of the application that has just enough features to demonstrate its value and worth to would-be users. You can then use this skeleton to generate feedback and momentum, building on it for later versions of the product.
- Backlog refinement
The term “backlog refinement” or “backlog grooming” refers to the process of reviewing the items on the backlog, making any necessary edits or changes, and prioritizing them by their importance.
- Low-code and/or no-code platforms
Low-code and no-code platforms help organizations rapidly build functional applications by automatically handling much of the infrastructure under the hood.
- Focusing the product owner and team
If key stakeholders have drifted away from the project over time, getting them interested, invested, and on board again will also help.
- Sprint Teams as a Service (STaaS)
Companies that take advantage of Sprint Teams as a Service have an entire development team at their fingertips, and can scale their usage up or down as their projects and budgets require.
For more detail on how to use these six strategies to clear out your backlog, download my white paper, “6 Ways to Clear Out Your AppDev Backlog Fast.”
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Building a SQL Server Virtual Lab in Windows: Test the Virtual Lab
In this final blog post of the series, we will test the virtual lab by registering all the SQL Server instances and then running a multi-server query to query all SQL Server instances. Then, we will wrap-up the testing by creating a shared folder in DV-SQL01 and then access it in both DV-SQL02 and DV-SQL03.
Registering all the SQL Server instances in DV-SQL01
Like creating an account with a website which stores your user account details so that you won’t have to key them in again the next time, registering a server in SSMS stores the server connection details for future connections so that you don’t need to type them in again.
In this section, we will create a server group and then register all the SQL Servers in the virtual lab.
To register all the SQL Servers in DV-SQL01:
- Logoff the current logged on local administrator user.
- Logon to DV-SQL01 using the DV-SQLNET\JBauer domain user account.
- Open SSMS.
- Type DV-SQL01 in the Server name text box.
- Click Connect.
This will connect you to the DV-SQL01 default instance. - Click the View menu on SSMS.
- Click Registered Servers on the drop-down menu.
- Expand Database Engine.
- Right-click Local Server Groups.
- Click New Server Group… on the drop-down menu.
- Type Virtual Lab SQL Servers in the Group name text box.
- Click OK.
- Right-click the Virtual Lab SQL Servers folder.
- Click New Server Registration… on the drop-down menu.
- Type DV-SQL01 in the Server name text box.
- Click SAVE.
- Repeat steps 13 to 16 to register DV-SQL02 to the Virtual Lab SQL Servers server group.
- Repeat steps 13 to 16 to register DV-SQL03 to the Virtual Lab SQL Servers server group.
As shown in Figure 2-41 Creating a New Server Group and Registering SQL Servers, you will find the three instances of SQL Servers registered under the Virtual Lab SQL Servers server group.
Figure 2-41 Creating a New Server Group and Registering SQL Servers
This completes creating the Virtual Lab SQL Servers server group and registering DV-SQL01, DV-SQL02, and DV-SQL03. Next, we will run a multi-server query to query all the SQL Server instance in the Virtual Lab SQL Servers server group.
Running a Multi-Server Query to Query all SQL Server Instances
If you have a script and you need to run it against multiple SQL Servers, would you rather run it once again all servers or choose to run it one at a time for each of the SQL Servers? Most likely, you would like the former option. Multi-server query allows you to do just that and the results returned by the query can be combined into a single results pane. The results set will include one additional column identifying the server name for each server.
To run a multi-server query to query all the instances in the Virtual Lab SQL Servers server group:
- Right-click on the Virtual Lab SQL Servers server group.
- Click New Query on the pop-up menu.
Notice the SSMS status bar turns into pink color indicating that it is a multi-server query. - Run the following Querying the Server Properties.sql script to query the server properties for all the registered SQL Servers in the Virtual Lab SQL Servers server group:
01 -- Querying the Server Properties
02 SELECT
03 SERVERPROPERTY('ServerName') AS [Instance Name],
04 SERVERPROPERTY('ProductVersion') AS [Version Build],
05 SERVERPROPERTY ('Edition') AS [Edition],
06 SERVERPROPERTY('ProductLevel') AS [Service Pack],
07 CASE SERVERPROPERTY('IsIntegratedSecurityOnly')
08 WHEN 0 THEN 'SQL Server and Windows Authentication mode'
09 WHEN 1 THEN 'Windows Authentication mode'
10 END AS [Server Authentication],
11 CASE SERVERPROPERTY('IsClustered')
12 WHEN 0 THEN 'False'
13 WHEN 1 THEN 'True'
14 END AS [Is Clustered?],
15 [cpu_count] AS [CPUs],
16 [physical_memory_kb]/1024 AS [RAM (MB)]
17 FROM [sys].[dm_os_sys_info]
Script 2-4 Querying the Server Properties
- Notice the output of Figure 2-42 Output of the Multi-Server Query shows all the server properties for the three SQL Server instances registered in the Virtual Lab SQL Servers server group:
Figure 2-42 Output of the Multi-Server Query
Creating a Share Folder and Accessing It from All Servers
Creating a share folder allows you to share and transfer files between servers. In this section, we will create a folder in DV-SQL01 and then test accessing it in DV-SQL02 and DV-SQL03.
Note: In a Production environment, as part of the change control process, you will need to make a service request for the Windows Administrators to create the share folder and grant the permissions to the specific user accounts.
To create a folder and share it in DV-SQL01 then test accessing in DV-SQL02 and DV-SQL03:
- Logon to DV-SQL01 as JBauer.
- Press Win+E on your keyboard.
- Click This PC on the left pane.
- Click Local Disk C:\.
- Create a folder and name it 24x7.
- Right-click on the 24x7 folder.
- Click Properties on the pop-up menu.
- Click the Sharing tab as shown in Figure 2-43 Sharing a Folder.
- Click Share…
You can add the domain users or groups you wish to grant access to this folder and the permission level. - Click Share.
Figure 2-43 Sharing a Folder - Type Administrator in the User name text box.
- Press Tab on your keyboard.
- Type Password$ in the Password text box.
- Press Enter on your keyboard.
You will see the Network access message box notifying you that the folder \\DV-SQL01\24x7 is shared. - Click Done.
- Click Close.
- Logon to DV-SQL02 with the JBauer domain user.
- Press Win+R on your keyboard.
- Type \\dv-sql01\24x7 in the Open text box.
- Press Enter on your keyboard.
- Create a text file and name it DV-SQL02.
You can create this file because you are logged on as JBauer and you have Owner permission. - Logon to DV-SQL03 with the JBauer domain user.
- Press Win+R on your keyboard.
- Type \\dv-sql01\24x7 in the Open text box.
- Create a text file and name it DV-SQL03.
- Go back to DV-SQL01.
- Open the 24x7 As shown in Figure 2-44 Checking the 24x7 Folder, you will notice the text files created in DV-SQL02 and DV-SQL03.
Figure 2-44 Checking the 24x7 Folder
This completes the testing of the virtual lab.
You have now completed setting up the virtual lab for SQL Server 2019 HADR testing. You can repeat these steps in later days when you need to re-create the virtual lab for further testing. Thanks for tuning in for my blog series. You can find all of the blog posts below if you missed anything.
If you’re looking for SQL Server support, please reach out.
Virtual Network for the Virtual Lab
Software & Hardware Requirements
Installing Oracle VM VirtualBox and Creating a Virtual Network
Creating the Domain Controller (DC) VM
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