Julian Simpson recommends practices to bring together development and operations, like: collaboration, don’t use email for internal communication, respect everyone, have lunch with the other team, discuss problems, joined retrospectives and stand-up meetings, co-locate sysadmins and developers, teach sysadmin to use VC, use CI and continues deployment, separate binaries and configuration files.
When we write software, we're very good at getting requirements and turning them into code. To turn that beautiful code into working software we need to deploy and test it. Often, we fail to emphasize the latter as well as the former. Do you have a backlog of "code complete" software waiting to be deployed, tested, signed-off and made live?
Many organizations will tell you that they are "doing" continuous integration. A boat anchor of a PC in the corner running an old version of CruiseControl might tick a few boxes, but is it really effective? As we get better at CI, we should see our feedback loop extend out past development. But what strategies do we have for doing this and keeping the feedback loop tight for the developers?
