Are you using pair programming to learn from your peers, write better code and save time spent on code reviews? In that case, you might want to make it visible on your digital issue board too. However, in Azure DevOps, you can only have a single assignee per task. Through customizing your process and board you can still show who are working together on a task. Here is how to do it.

Read more →

Do you sometimes feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day? Reliving the same day over and over again? I sure feel like that in some discussions with my team: revisiting the same discussion multiple times, because we fail to document decisions properly. Redrawing that diagram one more time, to come to the same conclusion. Searching for that one document in your email? Sifting through several versions of the same document, not sure which version is the latest? 

Next time around you can avoid these situations, using simple tools that your team is already using: Git and Markdown. Add Architecture Decision Records into the mix to capture the important decisions and the context in which those decisions were made.

Read more →

Did you ever find a problem of which you weren’t sure it was a bug? You probably thought it over, looked up the requirements or discussed with a team member. Perhaps you figured it out by yourself, the requirements made things clear or your team member could help you out. Either way, you needed some source of information to recognise the problem as a bug. You used your mental models and oracles.Read more →

Sharing knowledge is import to us at Xebia. It’s one of the four core values the company is built on. We share knowledge at our clients and with the community, through meetups and conferences. Every second week we organise a Xebia Knowledge Exchange (XKE), our bi-weekly mini-conference. Filled with lots of different sessions, on all sorts of topics. There is always something interesting to learn!

During a recent XKE we came up with the idea to do a peer conference. The topic of the conference was the consultancy work that we do. We all have our own approach and experience, so there is always a lot we can learn from each other. At the conference we experimented with using K-Cards.Read more →

Fast feedback loops are instrumental to gaining confidence in changes and achieving a steady pace of delivery. In many teams, Docker has been an important force behind removing delays in the pipeline to production. Taking control of your environments is a powerful move to make as a scrum team.

Seeing that Kubernetes appears to be becoming the leading orchestration platform, chances are that the containerized applications you and your team are working on will land on a Kubernetes cluster. That is why I was excited to see that in the latest version of Docker it is now possible to run a local Kubernetes cluster. In this blog you will learn how to start a local Kubernetes cluster with the latest Docker version.

Read more →