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        Flexibility is the biggest selling point that we have over our larger rivals. We give our clients the freedom needed to thrive in today’s fast-paced business world, organisations say to us that they often see higher quality work from independent consultants like us, this reason is the primary motivator when choosing us over a big firm. This means that we have the same skills and experience as the big firms, with added freedom and flexibility to let us focus and resolve client requirements.

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        Pros of implementing SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework)

         

        Lets explore the Pros of SAFe as I see them. In a future article would look at the cons 

        The biggest benefit of adopting SAFe is the opportunity to tap into a relatively lightweight framework that creates efficiency in software development while maintaining the centralized decision-making necessary at the enterprise level. 

        Pros

        In large organisations with multiple teams and vendors spread across locations, this is far from reality. SAFe has an excellent way of ensuring the teams recognise the dependencies (during PI Planning), discuss and negotiate them, visualise them and plan for them. 

        SAFe is a solid way of engaging Business Stakeholders on a regular basis with the teams. SAFe's PI Planning process (and other mechanisms like PI System Demo, Product Sync etc.) literally force the teams to engage the business stakeholders, customers and even vendors in the Planning process. 

        Business to Business, Business to IT Alignment

        SAFe events like PI Planning, Product Sync bring together the business stakeholders, the product development teams, shared services teams and enterprise architecture teams into one place. 

        Business and IT - Joint Planning 

        In SAFe, all the teams within a particular group (called an Agile Release Train) start and end their Sprints on the same day. This brings a degree of synchronicity, efficiency and predictability to the delivery across the group.

        Implementation Roadmap

        SAFe has a solid, well proven Implementation Roadmap. This is something that SAFe has put together iteratively over many years drawing on experiences, lessons learned from hundreds of implementations.

        Structuring the Teams

        Many Agile teams do their best to deliver in a consistent, predictable way. But they are hampered because of the way the teams are structured and created. If Agile teams are created incorrectly - e.g. based on technology or component or location - they end up creating a huge number of Dependencies increasing the effort and the time to market.

        SAFe has a lot of literature and best practices and strongly emphasises structuring the teams on a feature basis. The framework strongly recommends undertaking a Value Stream Mapping exercise (as part of the Implementation Roadmap) to structure the teams properly and efficiently (with an aim to delivering as independently as possible). 

        Architecture and transition Design

        Architecture and Architects are sensitive topics within the world of Agility with widely varying opinions in terms of their role in Agile teams.

        SAFe tries to strike a sensible balance between completely centralised architecture vs completely de-centralised team based Architecture decisions for various reasons (in large organisations there could be a need to decide on certain tools centrally, purchase licenses on a global basis for certain applications / tools to optimise cost or decide on a central database decision etc.)

        SAFe's mantra is - Intentional Architecture and transition Design. SAFe also appears to provide the right amount of balance between letting teams do their own thing but establishes some guard rails. It also encourages teams to think about architecture somewhat ahead of time with a continuous transition architecture.

        Message processing vs stream processing architecture

         

        • A quick simple diagram differentiation between message processing and stream processing architecture.

        • The stream processing pattern bears many similarities to the message processing pattern that you are familiar with, but in stream processing, the processor looks at one or more streams as a whole, rather than at discrete messages

        • Streams are aggregated, combined and filtered to observe patterns and enrich data. The output of a stream processor is itself a stream, which may consist of filtered or mapped data or events.

        Reinforce application security developed on AWS/ Azure - Options

        Most corporations are adopting a DevSecOps approach - by maximising automation and trying to reduce manual intervention as much as possible.

        In continuous delivery environment , most companies dont have the resources and probably not possible to have a team out of project to proceed with security test in a continuous delivery approach.

         

        When looking for a solution , here are the requirements that you should focus on :

         

        Detection of application code vulnerabilities:

        1. Cover the entire application
        2. Be able to set security rules
        3. Ability to perform incremental scans
        4. Acceptable false positive rate
        5. Detection must not impact application performance
        6. anonymization of the name of the applications for the vulnerabilities reported

        Automation of detection:

        1.   Integration with Continuous delivery platforms (example: Concourse, Jenkins)
        2.   Build in case of discovery of vulnerabilities

        Reporting:

        1.   Integrate with bug management tools
        2.   Raising indicators specific to each application in a portal

        Dont build i think its a mistake, the market is moving towards solutions that are SaaS and most of these companies are building a blackbox type of security solution, buy a market solution and integrate it

        here is a starter list:

        1) Veracode https://www.veracode.com/

        2) Checkmarx https://www.checkmarx.com/

        3) IBM AppScan Entreprise https://www.ibm.com/security/solutions

        4) Contrast Security Assess https://www.contrastsecurity.com/interactive-application-security-testing-iast 

         

         

         

         

         

         

         

         

         

         

      • What we offer

        Business & Technology Consulting

        We offer clients specialised consulting in areas that we deeply understand. Our services include:

        • - Skills To Envision, Design And Develop Enterprise Apps
        • - Talent For SaaS/PaaS/IaaS In The Cloud
        • - API Architecture
        • - Data Science Talent
        • - ALM deployments – Agile/Devops
        Read more
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  • Tips for Keeping Productivity the Main Focus of Your Virtual Meetings

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Tips for Keeping Productivity the Main Focus of Your Virtual Meetings
28 September 2018

As today’s workforce becomes more mobile and diverse, the landscape of meetings as we know them is changing drastically. More employees are utilizing flexible schedules, spending part of their workweek at home, and workforces are also becoming diverse with employees in different geographic areas or even corners of the globe. Because of this, virtual meetings are becoming more of the norm and less of the exception in the modern workforce. And with that, it presents a host of new challenges for employees to keep these meetings productive for everyone involved. Take this video for example.

Anyone who has ever participated in a conference call or virtual meeting has probably had at least one experience like this! - had one yesterday :)

The next time you’re in charge of leading a virtual meeting, here are 7 tips to keep in mind to help make it worth the time of everyone involved.

Remember that Relationships Matter

When it comes to meetings of any kind, it’s important to remember that it’s not just all about business. It’s the people you’re interacting with and the cohesiveness of that group that can make or break the productivity of that meeting. If these meetings occur regularly with team members, make it a habit to work on improving relationships too and not just furthering matters of business. You may want to consider opening up the conference lines a few minutes early so team members can catch up with causal talk before the agenda begins. Or, as the meeting leader, you can even plan a few minutes at the beginning of each agenda to allow team members to update the group on what’s happening in their lives. Ask them about one of their other projects, how their family is, or what’s happening in their city or country. Working on building relationships with meeting attendees sets the tone for authentic conversation and a productive virtual environment where everyone feels like they’re part of a team.

Be Proactive about Potential IT Issues

There are a lot of different virtual meeting tools out there, and while you may assume that everyone who will be involved in the meeting already knows the ins and outs of your preferred meeting software, don’t take that for granted. Prior to the meeting, consider sending out a brief email reminding attendees about any updates they should make to their software beforehand, plugins they may need, etc. It also wouldn’t hurt to remind them that to keep things efficient for everyone involved, that they should have a fast/reliable internet connection, a headset or earbuds to prevent echoing, etc. The more you can do beforehand to prep attendees the more smoothly things will run during the meeting.

Create and Distribute an Agenda Beforehand

Making an agenda is also a crucial step to prepping for heading up any virtual meeting. Make a list of the topics you plan to discuss (along with any sub-topics or notes) and distribute them to attendees prior to the meeting so everyone can prepare accordingly and be more focused during the time you’re working together. For each topic you list, consider also including the answers to the following questions:

  • Why are we discussing this topic?
  • What are the ideal outcomes of this discussion?
  • What do we need from participants for this discussion?

Sending out your agenda ahead of time rather than just reviewing it quickly as the meeting is starting will help keep things on track during the meeting and produce far more effective outcomes.

Plan Extra Time

When it comes to virtual meetings, you almost have to plan for the unexpected. Someone may be late joining in, another may have technical difficulties mid-discussion, and you may find that you need more time to discuss a certain topic than you had originally thought. As a rule of thumb, plan 20% more time than you think you’ll need for each topic on your agenda. Allotting extra time than you expect that you’ll need is always a good idea for meetings, and you can always end early if you’ve covered everything on your agenda. You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who complains about a meeting ending early!

Set the Right Expectations

As the leader of the virtual meeting, it’s also important that you set expectations from the start about how you will be guiding the conversation. Make it clear that you will try to be firm about keeping the conversation on track and that you may call on people during certain conversations where their input seems appropriate. As the leader, it’s also a good idea to ask attendees to stay focused on the agenda at hand while leaving their other technology aside during the meeting, unless they have a good reason not to.

Encourage Participation

It’s common for most virtual meetings to have at least one “silent attendee”—the person who listens to the entire conversation, but only chimes in upon greeting or leaving the meeting. As you lead and direct the meeting, make participation paramount for everyone involved. Keep a chart of everyone who is attending the meeting so you can easily call on them by name. Whether you would like their specific input or just simply ask if they have any further questions about the topic, try to make sure that you’ve included every attendee by name at least once during the meeting.

Close Effectively

The way you close your virtual meeting can be just as important as the topics you discussed during its duration. Before you wrap things up completely, check for the following:

  • Completion – Does anyone have something else to add to the conversation or ask if things were unclear about a specific topic?
  • Alignment – Does everyone agree about where the conversation ended up?
  • Next Steps – Is everyone clear about their actions moving forward?
  • Value – Are you taking away something valuable from this meeting?
  • Acknowledgment – Is there anyone we should acknowledge before ending?

With a little bit of planning and extra attention to structure, virtual meetings don’t have to feel like they’re a waste of time ever again. As the meeting leader, it’s your job to make sure members of your group feel included as a team, that they know what their role is in the meeting, and that everyone leaves the meeting feeling like their time was well spent. Do you have any other tips for how you make virtual meetings productive? Please share in the comments below.

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Thank you for reading my post. I regularly write about Management, Technology and Enterprise Application Software. If you would like to read my future posts then click 'Follow' or send me a LinkedIn invite. And, of course, feel free to also connect via Twitter.

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