So, in my daily work I have been Architecting Security solutions for years. Now ... abstractly speaking, architecture is a defined activity. We have customized it often to suit different development theories over years...depending on how your company does things. My company has been embracing Agile for a couple years now, and based on several other project successes is pushing it throughout the organizations.
Here is the first lesson I have learned ... you will never have time to learn every aspect of the process in time to start your work.
I think this is a typical case among anyone in IT. You are always being introduced on the fly to new technologies / processes / and tools to enable you to do your job.
That said, the internet is an abundant resource for finding base information on new development methodologies...and it can give you some very basic information. The thing about agile is the definition schematics. These are all new words to me, Squads, tribes, guilds, sprints , story points, backlog, etc.
Now, as much as you can learn through reading, my first implication is that .. the critical challenge is not the tooling, structure and process alone. Its a process of thought. more and more I keep finding myself accidentally thinking about a code release....traditionally as in full code releases and going back to the individual environments to update the full code. Agile demands that you think iteratively...try, try, try, try, over quick time periods and eventually you will get to a successful release. This allows you to take an iterative approach in smaller chunks to show progress, it also allows you to quickly learn and improve something without taking months to get there. The critical piece here is to work in manageable sized chinks. this way you can fail small things quickly and recover quickly to get it right.
This brings another interesting approach to things.... DEV/OPS. now Dev/Ops is different than agile, however it is often used in conjunction as they are complimentary activities. I will explore this later in later blogs.
a first glimpse.
ME: dont we have to come back to datacenter ABC in Month 3 because all the dev code will just be closing then
ME: grrrrrrr... nevermind. next time just say "its DEV/OPS dumb@$$"
HIM: its DEV/OPS dumb@$$
ME: eventually i will get my head around this :)
