Author: Jason St-Cyr
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4 ways to change so you can deliver more often
I am a big fan of continuous delivery and deployment. You might have seen me write about it a few times before. When I first bring the idea up with clients, there is hesitation. One might even call it fear. The benefits are huge, allowing you to reap the return on…
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How Visual Studio Online won me over in under 90 minutes
For the last year or so, I’ve been living in a mostly Atlassian world: JIRA OnDemand, BitBucket, SourceTree… likely more before the year is done. Sure, I still use our on-premise TFS 2010 at work along with Visual Studio of various editions, but my ALM world has really been rocked by…
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4 Tips for Optimizing Incremental Sitecore Content Publishing
For the past few years, I have not been a big fan of incremental publishing. In fact, I’ve often recommended if there was one publishing mode to never use, it was incremental publishing. I didn’t know all the facts, but the truth was that every time I tried to implement…
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Getting started with Agile ALM for Sitecore
Over the last few years, I’ve been trying to iteratively improve our own processes at nonlinear to deliver better Sitecore solutions and set our clients up for maintainable and sustainable ALM processes. Some of my posts on automated Sitecore deployments with TFS or TeamCity outlined some of the initial steps we…
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Sitecore Continuous Deployment: Conditional sublayout logic
In a previous post, I discussed handling the continuous deployment of templates and layouts, but mentioned that you also need to worry about conditional business logic in your sublayouts. The primary issue is this: if the data model is constantly in flux and the system is in a state of…
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Sitecore 7.2: Related Item Publishing
A lot of new stuff dropped in Sitecore 7.2, so our team started taking a look at some of the bits that interested us most. I did a little bit of testing and review of the new related item publishing enhancements, and they are quite nice. Peek on over at…
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Et tu brute? Of cargo cults and agility…
I’m not sure what triggered it, but at some point while I was on vacation a few folks started getting really ticked off about the state of “Agile” these days. People adhering to rules or tools, not understanding what it means to bring agility to a project, or building giant…
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Making the case for Continuous Deployment
Over on the corporate blog, I’ve tried to make the case for executing continuous deployment for Sitecore solutions. In reality, the concepts apply to any web applications being developed, but the particulars of how you will accomplish it will depend on the technology platforms being used. I’d love to get…
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Feeling the Product Owner’s pain
On Friday, a large group of us gathered in the office for a full day of looking at how we are currently managing our requirements over the course of a project. In the room we had folks who play the roles of technical leads, scrum masters, and product owners, all…
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Sitecore 7: Unit Testing fake indexes with MSTest
I recently posted a prototype solution to our corporate blog showcasing unit testing against Sitecore 7 indexes. I have made a solution available for download to show you how to use MSTEST to execute unit tests against fake indexes in Sitecore 7, and also how to do this without a…
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Cloning issues in JIRA OnDemand using Atlassian SDK
Recently, I wanted to start spinning up new projects in JIRA with some common epics and stories that we see on a lot of our projects. This seemed like a great way to capture some of the best practices and planning items that our teams have gathered over the years…
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Sitecore Continuous Deployment: Templates and Sublayouts
If you have decided to move to a continuous deployment model with your Sitecore solution, you now have several hurdles that you need to overcome to get your solution from development into production without risking the stability of the user experience. One of these is the introduction of new ‘building…
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Sitecore 6.6: Custom error pages do not display when Sitecore database down
With some versions of Sitecore, there is a known issue where a 500 error will be shown if the connection to the Sitecore database is down. A Karbyn blog post details the confirmed versions and how to reproduce, as well as a potential fix via Sitecore support ticket 377391. We…
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Sitecore Technical MVP Award 2014!
A few months ago I submitted my candidacy for this year’s technical MVP awards and this month I was notified that I had been rewarded for my efforts in 2014! I am now officially a Sitecore Technology MVP. I have joined a small group of excellent folks from around the…
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Tracking hours burndown in Trello
In the past, I’ve written about some tools for doing Scrum inside of Trello, as well as some guidance on creating Scrum boards using these plugins. Recently, I received a question about how to accurately track hours spent in Trello. Zig Mandel, the man behind Plus for Trello and Spent for…
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Sitecore Continuous Deployment: Video presentation from SVUG
I had planned on kicking off a short series on how to tackle the challenges of Sitecore Continuous Deployment, but after I had written my post the Sitecore Virtual User Group (SVUG) held an online Q&A presentation by Jason Bert on Continuous Integration & Deployment. The presentation is a great…
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Git branching model
I haven’t really had the chance to work with Git much over the years, other than creating a GitHub account and performing some simple merges on my own projects. For work reasons, however, I’ve been looking into sustainable models for using Git as an enterprise source control for larger, long-running…
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The NFR Dilemma: Capturing Nonfunctional Requirements in the Backlog
Development teams using Scrum, or similar agile forms, will find that the constraints on the system that are represented by Nonfunctional Requirements (NFRs) can be a pain to capture and reference in product backlogs. The NFRs aren’t acceptance criteria, but the “story” isn’t really done unless it meets them. The…
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Sitecore login performance slows down over time
On a recent project using Sitecore 6.6, we ran across a strange performance problem with logging in visitors to the site. As the day went along, the response time for logging in a visitor to the site would slow down. Combined with Windows Authentication being required, this meant that initial…
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7 Tips for Agile ALM
Jurgen Appelo posted a great slide share a few years back on Agile ALM. While there is a lot of great content in the slideshare, including covering the difference between ALM 1.0 and ALM 2.0, my favourite section is the 7 tips for Agile ALM. These tips provide guidance on…
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Questions on getting started with Scrum
Even though the web will have many resources available to users on how to get started with Scrum, some folks do find they need help sifting through the massive amounts of information to find what they need. Recently, I answered some questions for a person in just such a situation…
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Sitecore 7: Buckets scare me
This week, I returned back from a client site to join my colleagues in a planning workshop for Sitecore 7. Our group already has one client moving to Sitecore 7, and we’ll likely have several other Sitecore 7 projects coming down the pipe in the next year, which means we…
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Release Management with InRelease
I saw InRelease back at the 2013 ALM Summit and the short demo Claude gave was quite impressive. Now that it’s been folded into the Visual Studio project suite by Microsoft, this just enhances the ability to use Microsoft tooling for DevOps. This post by Jasper Gilhuis covers the basics…
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How to set up Trello board for Scrum
In the past, I’ve written about how to use Trello for agile task tracking, and also about some tools that allow you to use Trello for Scrum. Recently I started up a little side project for a personal application I wanted to write, and I decided to run the project…
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Preparing for success on your next website launch
I recently blogged over on Nonlinear Thinking about the 9 steps to a successful Sitecore website launch. While targeted at a Sitecore audience, these steps do apply to pretty much any website launch. So, if you are about to plan the site launch for your most recent project, putting together…
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Baby Steps to SOA: A retrospective on the blog series
One of the key needs in lean, scrum, and other agile processes is for continuous improvement. We constantly review how we do things to do them better. The most common method of doing this is the retrospective. After 5 months of writing the Baby Steps to SOA series, I decided…
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Sitecore: Taking on the Top 10 Reasons to A/B test
The practice of A/B testing follows the Lean methodology of Build, Measure, and Learn (BML). By using tools capable of performing these tests, we can build a quick test, measure the interaction with the tests, and learn from the results gathered. This is fundamental to improving your content and your…
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Baby Steps to SOA – Step Ten: Riding the ESB
In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and the IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. In this final stage, the team moves to using an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to handle the inter-application communication. This step allows for an increased…
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TDS: Deploy failed – “This software is protected to provide copy protection”
Have you encountered a failure while executing an automated Sitecore deployment with TDS where the type initializer throws an exception and you are asked to reinstall the TDS application? Apparently, if your TDS installation becomes corrupted somehow, you need to get rid of the web service and let TDS reinstall…
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Sitecore: Publishing stuck on Initializing after applying Scalability settings
I recently came across this issue after applying some scalability settings, and couldn’t initially figure out why the publishing was no longer working. Accessing the Desktop and using site publishing would display the dialog, but would hang on the Initializing… stage. After some preliminary investigation, it turned out that the issue…
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Baby Steps to SOA – Step Nine: Moving beyond the website
In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and the IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. Up next is expanding the use of the new services layers to their other applications within the business. While focus is usually given to…
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A starters guide to Git for TFS GitWits…
Originally posted on The Road to ALM: When I started my development career way back in 1999, the first Source Control System I ever used was Visual SourceSafe. After a few years I switched to SVN for a while and I liked that. The, in 2005 came Team Foundation Server…
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TDS deployments slow with Sitecore 6.6? Upgrade versions!
Have your deployments to Sitecore 6.6 installations been taking a very long time? Do your build logs show 3-4 seconds for every template item that is deployed? Are you seeing the following warning in Sitecore logs? All caches have been cleared. This can decrease performance considerably. If so, you are…
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Baby Steps to SOA – Step Eight: Sharing the Business Tier
In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and the IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. Up next is the centralization and sharing of the business layer to allow all applications to use a single source for business logic.…
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Configuring a Sitecore Preview Site for Anonymous Users
In some situations, there is a requirement to be able to preview unpublished content without logging into Sitecore. Perhaps a marketing director needs to review the page before it launches, or maybe a partner needs to review a press release prior to the official publish. The traditional Sitecore preview capability…
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Baby Steps to SOA – Step Seven: Centralizing eCommerce
In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and the IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. Previously, we introduced the problem and the team, started planning and analysis, decided on some metrics, and refactored the website applications. Most recently, the team has tackled…
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Scaled Agile: Bringing Kanban to the Executives
In my normal cadence, this week would be another installment in the Baby Steps to SOA series. However, with a few weeks of vacation under my belt, I was not prepared to tackle the important discussion of centralizing eCommerce business logic quite yet. That being said, my vacation time did…
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Risk Management on Agile Projects – The Risk Burndown chart
For most small Agile projects, I haven’t needed to track risks as explicitly, since the standard agile structure with impediments identified daily tends to highlight immediate problem areas. However, for larger projects and for projects working within a more traditional client environment, tracking risk logs and project risk status are…
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Baby Steps to SOA – Step Six: Data Services
In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and the IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. Previously, we introduced the problem and the team, started planning and analysis, decided on some metrics, and refactored the website applications. Most recently, the team has tackled…
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Microsoft completes acquisition of InRelease software
While I was at the ALM Summit in January, Claude from InCycle (now with Microsoft) was doing demos of their InRelease software. The deployment software allowed for a massive amount of deployment configuration, moving a build between labs and retaining environment-specific configurations using a tokenized language. The workflow definition for…
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Baby Steps to SOA – Step Five: The Move to a CMS
In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and the IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. Previously, we introduced the problem and the team, started planning and analysis, decided on some metrics, and refactored the website applications. Most recently, the team has tackled…
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Sprint Discipline: Releasing each iteration
Originally posted on Scott's Thoughts: One of the things that I always hear about agile development and scrum in particular is the idea of creating a releasable piece of software at the end of every sprint. This is usually redefined into “a potentially releasable piece of software” at the end…
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Baby Steps to SoA – Step Four: Single Sign-On
In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and his IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. Previously, we introduced the problem and the team, started planning and analysis, decided on some metrics, refactored the website applications, and now we continue on our…
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Sitecore 6.6: Unable to find an embedded skin with the name ‘Telerik’
I’ve been going through the process of getting a project setup on my machine that has recently been upgraded from Sitecore 6.5 to Sitecore 6.6. Mostly things have been uneventful, but then I tried to load the Content Editor. I encountered the following error caused by the Telerik controls: Telerik.Web.UI.RadToolTipManager…
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Baby Steps to SoA – Step Three: Three Tiers for the Website
In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and his IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. Previously, we introduced the problem and the team, started planning and analysis, decided on some metrics, and now we continue on our travel through the…
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Using Trello for Scrum
A lot of the traffic that comes through this blog is related to folks looking to use Trello for agile development. If you are using a Kanban/Lean approach, it works really well out of the box. However, if you are using a more Scrum-like approach, you may have noticed the…
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Baby Steps to SOA – Step Two: Measure It
In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and his IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. Previously, we introduced the problem and the team, started planning and analysis, and now we continue on our travel through the road map with measuring…
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Sitecore 7: Available for download!
It’s official, the new 7.0 is out there! You can download it off of the Sitecore Developer Network at: http://sdn.sitecore.net/Products/Sitecore%20V5/Sitecore%20CMS%207.aspx Coinciding with the release have been a blast of emails, twitter posts, and blog posts, including the following series from my colleagues: Sitecore 7: Upgrade considerations Sitecore 7: What’s new for…
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Baby Steps to SOA – Step One: Analyze and Plan
In the continuing Baby Steps to SOA series, we follow Doug and his IT team behind BuyMyWidget.com as they take steps to renovate their digital asset architecture. Previously, we introduced the problem and the team, and now we start on our travel through the road map.
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Performance tuning your Sitecore installation
I’ll be continuing the Baby Steps to SOA topic next week, but for this week I’m jumping back into the world of Sitecore. I’ve just spent the past few weeks performance tuning another project, and there are so many rabbit-holes one has to jump down to find the culprit of…
St-Cyr Thoughts 