Bob Aiello

After fifteen years as a trusted source of configuration management information and best practices, CMCrossroads is halting its publication of weekly articles. While the current publishing model is changing, the site will remain active and will be updated regularly with relevant articles from our sister sites, StickyMinds and AgileConnection. Bob Aiello, technical editor of CMCrossroads, says thanks to our loyal readers and contributors and lets you know how you can stay connected.

If you want secure, reliable systems, you need all stakeholders actively communicating. This means involving both IT operations and developers in discussions after deployments, to ascertain if anything went wrong and can be avoided, and what went well or could be refined. Integrating your postmortems and retrospectives facilitates collaboration and improves processes.

Software development is an elaborate process, so many organizations follow defined procedures. But it can be difficult to keep track of every step. It is often helpful to try to visualize the complex processes involved; seeing them outlined can help you understand what needs to be completed and how to manage the overall effort.

Status accounting is following the evolution of a configuration item through its lifecycle. Using application lifecycle management along with agile helps prevent mistakes, but lets you have the minimum amount of red tape; the team achieves an acceptable velocity without being unduly burdened with too much process.

Containers are taking the virtualization model to greater heights by enabling a flexible way to programmatically provision the resources you need. New technology also means we need new processes and failsafes, though. Containers hold a great deal of promise, but are they really ready to be used in production environments?

Amid all the excitement of DevOps, continuous delivery, and the magic of single-push-button deploys, some folks have forgotten the prerequisites. You cannot implement continuous anything without effective configuration management. This article will help you reassess where you are and ensure that you have the basic building blocks in place to ensure success.

Many high-security institutions have guidelines that must be followed in order to comply with industry regulatory requirements. But these best practices can help any company avoid costly mistakes while enabling teams to work faster and more effectively. This article tells you how to get started establishing your own practical and reliable IT controls.

There is a lot more to DevOps than just single push-button deploys. While a DevOps maturity model can help measure where you are now and indicate where you need to get to as part of the DevOps transformation, it can be more useful to focus on the capabilities you need to measure: timely deployment and secure, reliable systems.

One of the principles of DevOps is to shift left by involving operations, quality assurance, testing, and information security early in the process. But it's also a good idea to have the team shift their knowledge right to help developers understand how the systems behave in real-world scenarios, including scalability, infrastructure architecture, and disaster recovery.

DevOps has it detractors, and they can send an enterprise back to the days when development and operations acted more like a volleyball game than a high-performance technology organization. This article will help you understand resistance to change involving DevOps and what you need to do in order to move that mountain.

DevOps is a set of principles and practices that are effectively used to improve communication and collaboration between development and operations. But how exactly does one implement DevOps, and, more importantly, how do we scale DevOps to meet the needs of a larger enterprise application development? This article will help you get started with scaling DevOps.

Many organizations struggle with understanding and implementing DevOps. The first question most managers ask is, “What is DevOps and how will it help me?” Organizations often refer to DevOps in several very different ways, and therein lies the confusion. Read on to find out what DevOps really means and what its practices can do for your work processes.

Bob Aiello explains that software engineers and architects do an amazing job designing a system’s architecture that fully represents all of the parts of the system that are created during the development lifecycle. However, one of the biggest challenges is understanding how each part of the system depends upon the others.

Target’s well-publicized disclosure that customers’ personally identifiable information (PII) had been compromised is the latest software “glitch” that is getting a fair amount of attention. Read on if you would like to know how to secure your systems without having to rely upon security scans that only detect the presence of a problem after it is already on your server.

In 2013, we saw a remarkable number of system glitches involving large trading systems and the exchanges themselves along with a significant number of large banking systems. Bob Aiello writes how these incidents put DevOps best practices and configuration management in the spotlight of many technology reports.

DevOps is helping development and operations teams work more effectively together. There are also other essential stakeholders who can benefit from improved communication and collaboration, including information security, QA, and testing teams. As every stakeholder needs to understand his role and assigned tasks, application lifecycle management (ALM) provides the essential best practice that ensures that every team member knows what he needs to accomplish and how to communicate effectively with the other members. This article explains how ALM can be best used to drive DevOps.

Corporations, government agencies, and other institutions need to embrace industry best practices that have been proven to help develop and implement reliable systems. One of the most important considerations is the need for a secure, trusted application base. This article will help you get started delivering systems that can be verified and supported while continuously being updated as needed.

Software development can often be a very complex endeavor, so it is no wonder that important details can sometimes get lost in the process. Here, Bob Aiello discusses how to implement configuration management (CM) and traceability in a practical and realistic way.

While we know the technology, some configuration management (CM) experts don’t always have a strong enough business focus, which can be a real problem. Read on if you would like to understand what CM professionals need to know about business requirements and how CM can directly impact the business itself.

Bob Aiello describes some of the essential techniques necessary to ensure that systems can be upgraded and supported while enabling the business through frequent and continuous delivery of new system features.

Software impacts our world in many important ways. Almost everything that we touch, from the beginning to the end of our day, relies upon software. Bob Aiello explains the importance of software safety for configuration managers. Remember, software safety requires that systems be built and configured in a secure and reliable way.

Environment management is an essential function in any complex, mission-critical system. Unfortunately, environment management is often overlooked and, even when addressed, usually only handled in the simplest way. Keeping an eye on your environment is actually one of the most important functions for IT operations. Bob Aiello explains how to get started with environment management.

A great way to establish your software engineering processes, training, best practices, reports, and metrics is to build a center of excellence (CoE). When complete, a CoE is a team, or entity, that provides the leadership and governance in a focus area.

DevOps puts the focus on automated application lifecycle management supporting development, test, integration, quality assurance (QA), user acceptance testing (UAT), and production. But how do you develop DevOps, and how do you know when you have achieved success?

In his Behaviorally Speaking series, Bob Aiello discusses hands-on software configuration management best practices within the context of organizational and group behavior. While conventional wisdom may say that "change comes from the top," Bob Aiello explains that change often needs to come from the bottom, that is the people doing the day-to-day work.

In his Behaviorally Speaking series, Bob Aiello discusses hands-on software configuration management best practices within the context of organizational and group behavior. Bob Aiello helps you enhance your existing CM best practices by applying the core principles that deliver excellent process and quality.

Small teams can be highly effective at creating big systems. In this "Behaviorially Speaking" feature, Bob Aiello explains how to be successful in a small team environment and also handle the growth often necessitated by success.