Entry by Adam Monago

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Software teams, in the broader sense, are complex adaptive systems.  They live within organizations populated by many actors, influenced by the methods, practices and behaviors that coexist with them.  Most of all, they have the capability to learn and adapt to each new entrant into their world.  It is for this reason that, we tend to avoid recommending ‘best practices’ that all software teams can follow for success, let alone ‘agility’.

At ThoughtWorks Studios, we have defined our ideal state as being one of continuous delivery: one in which the customers and users of software have maximum ownership and influence of the development process.

Read the full article at Tech Journal South (http://www.techjournalsouth.com/2010/09/best-practices-for-adaptive-software-teams/)

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Entry by Jez Humble

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Even though Go 2.0 was only released one month ago, we've already been hard at work adding features for our forthcoming Go 2.1 release. Since Go is supposed to enable rapid, reliable releases, we thought we should demonstrate that we are practicing what we preach. The team is ensuring that Go remains production-ready throughout our development lifecycle, and to prove it - and give you the ability to try out the latest features - we're planning on releasing early access builds every few weeks throughout the development lifecycle.

Find out more about the first 2.1 Early Access build.

The 2.1 release is planned for Q4 2010, and we are currently hoping to include the following features, along with a number of smaller improvements:

• The ability to authorize people to administer the configuration of pipeline groups. This is especially useful if multiple projects/teams share a single Go server - it means boxes can be centrally managed, but teams are in control of their build configuration (DONE)
• Go automatically detects agent collisions (for example when you clone a VM) and prevents thrashing (DONE)
• Pipeline level Atom feeds
• A GUI for creating and configuring environments and for server and user management (a GUI for configuring pipelines will follow in 2.2)
• Including test failure information in email notifications
• Enhancements to distributed test failure history reports (commit and stack trace information)
• Go Pipeline Gadget with Outh 2.0 so that you can embed a view of a pipeline in any compliant OpenSocial container
• Ensuring that when check-ins affect multiple pipelines, changes propagate through the pipeline dependency graph correctly
• An option to force agents to perform a clean build, and to bypass version control operations
• The ability to parameterize templates
• Authorization to trigger, cancel and re-run automatically triggered stages (DONE)

We look forward to getting your feedback on Go 2.1.

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Cruise End Of Life

According to our EULA, we provide support "for the then-current release of the Product, the most recent prior release of the Product, and all other releases of the Product, if any, during the six (6) month period prior to the support request." That means that releases of Cruise will be supported up to 20 January, 2011. So if you're using Cruise, it's time to start planning your upgrade to Go. Our documentation contains information on how to upgrade.

In particular, we announced back in 2008 that we would be discontinuing support for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 (Microsoft discontinued support for IE6 in July this year). Go no longer supports IE6, so if you're using it with Cruise, we request that you begin looking at preparing to use one of our "recommended" browsers as soon as possible.

Thanks again for your continued support. Please feel free to contact us at support@thoughtworks.com should you have any questions about making the transition.

Entry by Adam Monago

Greetings,

It has been such a busy month for us here at ThoughtWorks Studios, with three product releases, the Agile 2010 Conference in Orlando, Florida, and quite a bit of activity happening here on the community website.  Just in case you were just as busy as we were, we have decided to provide a recap of what has been going on.

To provide a few highlights, if you visit the ThoughtWorks Studios Community, you can:

• Learn more about how Automated Testing just got better with the parallel execution capabilities of Twist 2.1.
• Find out why we are passionate about telling the world about Continuous Delivery.  Recently on the community, we announced the launch of Go 2.0;  This week we featured a great article by our own Jez Humble on the difference between Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment.
• Get the details on our latest release of our Agile Project Management solution, Mingle 3.2. Enterprises using Mingle with previously unsupported source control management systems will be excited to know that we have now published documentation for building your own Mingle SCM plugin along with reference source from our Mercurial (HG) implementation. You can share plug-ins that you develop with other organizations in our Add-Ons and Extras space.
• Discuss with us the challenges that we ourselves face when developing software in our Agile Engineering Practices discussion area. This week we featured an article on Visualizing Code Complexity in Ruby Projects along with some nifty software that your team might find useful.
• Join the discussion about Agile within a non-Agile ecosystem in our Agile Transitions community.

We hope to keep up the momentum that has built up this month, but cannot do it without your participation.  Please stop by and see what we are up to.

Regards,

The ThoughtWorks Studios Team

Entry by Jez Humble

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The Go team is delighted to announce the release of Go 2.0, ThoughtWorks Studios' Agile Release Management platform. Go enables organizations to incrementally automate the entire build, test and deployment process and release software faster and more reliably. For an overview of Go, including a number of videos demonstrating the new functionality, click here.

Go now comes in two editions. Community Edition is designed for teams and small organizations - supports unlimited users and remote agents. You can download it for free here, and purchase packs of remote agents, and support, here. Enterprise Edition is designed for medium and large organizations - it includes support for up to 50 remote agents (you can buy support for more), and advanced functionality such as support for environments, templates, and fine-grained authorization. Request a quote.

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Go 2.0 includes all the features in Cruise, which it replaces, and adds many more. The most important of these is first-class support for modeling environments. Define each of the environments in your organization, and perform push-button deployments of any selected version of your application to the environment of your choice. You can of course see what is currently deployed into each of your environments, trace back from each deployment to the exact versions in source control that went into it, and control who can deploy to which environments.

Go 2.0 also features ground-breaking parallel test intelligence. Run your tests on multiple boxes across Go's grid, and Go generates an aggregated report that tells you not just which tests are currently failing across all your suites, but which check-in originally broke them, and who was responsible for that check-in.

Go features a beautiful and completely new UI designed for managing large numbers of pipelines, agents and environments. There is also be better insight into dependencies.

Finally, we've made a large number of smaller changes to make Go more powerful and productive, including:

• A completely new UI for agents which allows you to manage them in bulk;
• Comprehensive environment variable management;
• Kill the process tree on the agents when you cancel a stage;
• Templating to create re-usable workflows so as to make tasks like creating and maintaining branches and managing large numbers of pipelines easier;
• Triggering pipelines on a schedule using cron syntax;
• The option to constrain a pipeline instance to run to completion before a new one is triggered;
• The ability to run a job on all matching agents, not just one.

Go 2.1 will follow in Q4, with an early access program coming soon - watch our announcements page for more information.

Entry by Adam Monago

It is no surprise that developing a mobile application strategy has become a part of many an organization's technology portfolio.  The ubiquity of the Blackberry, the iPhone and iPad, and even Android phones have changed discussions from if a mobile project should be launched to when.

We have found that our clients are asking for the best way to move their existing applications onto mobile platforms, yet there is little guidance in the market for the enterprise. There is also an open source software development community that is innovating just as fast, if not faster than the primary vendors in the space.  Collectively, these factors present an overwhelming range of choices to those responsible for delivering applications for their organizations.

The industry needs to bring the best thinking together in one place if it is going to move forward.  Using our measures of what it takes to release quality software in the enterprise, we have begun to provide a close look at the technologies that are leading the charge along with their supporting ecosystem for Continuous Delivery.  Our attempt to coalesce the distinct voices and give them a place to congregate starts with a single conversation; in a nutshell, conversation is what Go Mobile is about.

The Go Mobile project will evolve in the days and weeks to come, but you can expect to hear more from our experts in the way of developer support, testing and deployment on the relevant platforms.  You will also hear about our experiments, successes and failures in the Agile mobile development space.

As our first contribution we welcome you to read and discuss our recently published white paper, Agile Practices for iPhone Development.

Entry by Adam Monago

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Greetings Community Members,

In the last couple of weeks we have been proud to roll out a new section of the community called Agile Transitions.  The focus of this portal is to provide an open forum for the leaders of today's organizations that are tasked with making Agile work in their enterprise. 

The site allows members to discuss a range of executive-focused topics, including IT governance, organization, budgeting and financing, risk management, HR issues and enterprise adoption and integration, and the major themes we are currently highlighting are: Agile Budgeting and Finance, the Agile Executive and Transitioning to Agile. Each will feature content from not only our colleagues, but clients and peers in the world of Enterprise IT. 

In this initial launch, we would like to showcase some articles by our colleagues Ross Pettit and Steven List, along with material by our distinguished guests Rebecca Porterfield and Kevin Briedenbach. You can expect to see the content in these areas grow and evolve with contributions from the broader ThoughtWorks and Agile communities.  What is more, we expect new themes to emerge along with our thinking and yours.

We invite you to join the community and participate in the discussion. Make yourself at home.

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