Category Archives: Scoop.it

Killer Strategies to Dominate Social Media’s Big 3: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube [INFOGRAPHIC]

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How to Dominate Social Networking Sites: Facebook, Twitter and Youtube When creating a social media plan, you would have to consider how you could rock the big 3: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube…

This infographice provides 5 strategies for using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube effectively. Some strategies come down to use of capable technologies, others to interaction methods. Plenty of useful ideas for taking your Social Media prescence to higher levels.

Using some Lean principles combined with the use of analytics can make a big difference in how effective your Social Media prescence is. I think there is plenty of food for thought in this infographic. It will be printed of and on my wall at home by the time you read this.
See on ijustdid.org

#ChefConf 2012 Session Videos

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I recently read the Pro Puppet book and have been in the Puppet camp for some time, but there are 37 videos available from the recent #ChefConf 2012 that will no doubt have similar concepts and how they can be implemented using the alternative Chef implentation.

Automation of environment provisioning, the role of configuration management in continuous integration and deployment situations as well as numerous other scenarios are covered by the session available. Whilst I have (at this time) no experience using Chef – I am still interested in its capabilities and how it compares to Puppet.

Hopefully there will be a session in here for everyone to enjoy. I will be starting my viewing with the Rundeck & Chef Build DevOps Toolchain video – which is in the continuous build and deployment space. Feel free to comment with suggestions of session videos you find useful.
See on chefconf.opscode.com

Agile Australia 2012: Agile Coaching Workshop

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My workshop from Agile Australia 2012 with Adrian Smith called “Agile Coaching Workshop” is available on SlideShare. The Agile Coach is a critical role in helping leaders, teams or individuals…

I was unable to attend Agile Australia 2012 and as a result missed out on what looks like an awesome “Agile Coaching Workshop” presented by former colleagues Craig Smith and Adrian Smith. These guys have many years of practical experience between them, and as mentioned once before, when they speak it pays to listen.

The slides from the workshop are available on Slideshare and on Craig’s blog (which is where this post links to). Although these are only slides they contain a lot of content that will be useful for those unable to attend the workshop. A preview of the slides had previously been posted and shared by myself too.

For me the section on identifying personal areas of strength and weakness provided me with ideas for improvement – and where I could broaden my skills  in the coaching department. I shall be trying out the Agile Coach Competency Matrix and contacting one of the guys for some advice.

I am not an Agile Coach by title and never considered myself a coach – I feel I am more of a Agile practitioner trying to support teams and leave a legacy that will being maturity and delivery success long after I leave. These slides whilst not making up for missing the workshop may give you ideas for assessing and improving your own Agile skillset.

Am sure the guys would appreciate some feedback on the slides and would love to hear from anyone who attended the workshop. I wonder if either Craig or Adrian would fancy presenting a version of the slides at the Agile APN in Auckland some time?
See on craigsmith.id.au

Jenkins Continuous Integration Cookbook

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This new book from Packt Publishing has just been added to my collection of technical book purchases (joined by Sonar Code Quality Testing Essential – yet to be released).

This book contains more than 80 recipes describing practical ways to use Jenkins and the best of breed plugins from the over 400 available. The recipes are grouped and extensions are also covered in this must have book.

If you use Jenkins and want to get more out of it this may be just the book you are looking for. Improve your Jenkins security, get more effective use of code metrics and utilise remote testing with some of the many recipes provided. This book will soon  become the goto book for anyone administrating a Jenkins server.
See on www.packtpub.com

Automated Acceptance-Testing using Concordion

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This introduction to Concordion for acceptance testing is aimed at assessing the tools capabilities from a acceptance testing perspective. It uses a BDD concepts to enable comparisons between the tool and JBehave and as such I feel has missed the point of Concordion as a more specification based tool.

Saying that, the introduction is clear, clean and concise and is recommended for someone new to Concordion. I believe strongly that its strength is the ‘living document’ it provides – this is not a report but a ‘living, breathing representation of the specifications’ which is a cause for the ‘lack of reporting’ prescribed in this introduction.

Whilst it is great to see Concordion examples being posted online, I still feel it is a misunderstood and under utilised tool (something the writer allures to in this introduction). I shall add it to my list of candidate blog posts…until then I highly recommend reading ‘Specification By Example’ by Gojko Adzic.

I would also recommend those looking at BDD Acceptance Tests review easyB as an alternative to JBehave. easyB has the ability to do both BDD stories and specification  – whilst not providing the ‘living document’ that Concordion does, it provides the reporting comparable to JBehave.
See on blog.codecentric.de

An Introduction to Continuous Delivery, Rolf Russell | www.thoughtworks.com

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Finally got around to watching the first in a series of Thoughworks Continuous Delivery webinars. The series of webinars is set to run monthly from Aug 2011 to July 2012, so at the current time 11 are available online.

This ‘Introduction to Continuous Delivery’ by Rolf Russell provides a great insight into what Continuous Delivery means from a technical perspective and how to overcome some of the obstacles to Continuous Delivery.

Rolf points out that fast feedback, always being production ready and small incremental changes are important concepts for Continuous Delivery. Pipelines for delivery should consider not just code, but infrastructure, configuration and database.

A great introduction to this topic, refreshed a few concepts for me – and got me thinking once more about concepts I am familiar with and how I currently utilise them. Looking forward to watching the rest of this series over the next few weeks.
See on continuous-delivery.thoughtworks.com