BETTER SOFTWARE FASTER BLOG
We believe that brilliant technology can change the world for the better. We also know that the best way to help people, is for people to share ideas. So, the BSF Blog is where members of the Ammeon family share their views, insights and some secrets to our success.How do the leaders in your organization view a digital transformation? What is the ratio of technology vs human required to digitally transform your business? Read more to know the important things you need to consider before taking on a digital transformation
READ MOREIn order to prevent the chaotic nature of production environments that lead to outages, chaos engineering is the practice of facilitating controlled experiments to uncover weaknesses and help instil confidence in the system’s resiliency. Read more to know everything about Chaos Engineering
READ MOREContainers are revolutionizing the way we develop and deliver applications. Here is everything you need to know about containerization, virtualization and development life cycle with containers.
READ MOREA lot has happened around the world this year that has impacted jobs of many. Here are some tips from our technical & operations recruiter that can help you avoid some common interview mistakes that can cost you job opportunity
READ MOREWe’ve developed Agile Boot to help organisations successfully achieve the first step on their Agile transformation journey and move from customer delivery every few months to every few weeks.
READ MOREAt Ammeon, we are big fans of Kubernetes. In this post, Ammeon’s Lead Cloud Engineer talks through what is and why we use Kubernetes.
READ MOREAmmeon CEO, Stian Kildal, Starts the Sector Series with a review of software in the Telecoms industry. How is software innovation key to 5G and future networks?
READ MOREPentesting should be performed on an ongoing basis to keep up with the continuous developments
READ MOREHere we explore some of the ways one might go about implementing DevSecOps in their organisation to ensure confidence in security at scale.
READ MOREThe Recent Adaption Of Remote Working Has Seen Thousands Of Companies Adapt To Working From Home. This Can Cause Issues For Companies Who Are Not Prepared.
READ MOREDigital Transformation was always relevant and always needed. However, COVID-19 has made this strategic business opportunity a necessity.
READ MOREA key factor in working remotely is good and effective communication. Nowadays, there are many collaborative tools, such as Slack and Zoom, that make communication much easier. But of course, tools are only as effective as how they are used.
READ MOREOne of the most fundamental components of any agile project is the humble User Story. How to word a user story, how to break it down if it’s too big, and what not to do with user stories are common topics that arise in organisations.
READ MOREOur 5 tips for building a CI Pipeline that should help build a robust pipeline, regardless of the Continuous Integration tools chosen.
READ MOREEnabling Scaling Through Customer Feedback
READ MOREWe believe that the success of our company depends heavily on the performance of our employees, so our priority is to help and maintain our employee’s wellbeing.
READ MORENot every crisis must necessarily have a negative impact on our career. There are still opportunities out there and putting the progress on hold may only prolong the journey towards your career goals.
READ MOREMany businesses still don’t understand how vital onboarding is for new employees. Here are our favourite tools to help your remote onboarding process.
READ MOREOnboarding is a critical part of the employee experience and can have a knock-on effect not just in the short term performance of the employee but on their long term effectiveness.
READ MOREWith The Sudden Adaption Of Remote Working, Teams Can Face Unexpected Challenges. In This Post, We Outline 3 Common Problems And Steps To Resolve Them.
READ MOREDuring times of uncertainty, you may be wondering what tools and systems should we implement to assist with our internal communication and HR processes?
READ MOREIn 2018, Ammeon began the process of moving all of our operations over to the cloud. Learn how this process has improved our ability for remote working.
READ MOREFlow efficiency examines the two basic components that make up your lead time: work and wait time.
READ MOREInterested In a Career In IT WIth Ammeon? Hear How Daniel Went From College Intern To A full Time Engineer. Start Your Career Today.
READ MORECI/CD has the power to improve the flow of business value from the development team to production and also reduces the feedback time.
READ MORENew country, even new continent, 3975.08 Km’s of distance between Cairo and Dublin. This is the distance I had to take to move from my home country and join Ammeon. If you are making such a transition you are asking yourself a lot of questions: there is always the usual risk of changing your work environment by accepting a new job, how will I get along with the new team, management and team leaders? But moving to a different country …
READ MOREHow many e-mails have you received this week talking about the “digital transformation” going on everywhere around us? Businesses in any sector grow increasingly paranoid over digitally competent competitors, and/or excited about the possibilities. Google “digital transformation” and you’ll find as many definitions as search hits. The most respectable consultancy firms will be happy to help define your strategy (and take a lot of your money). If there has ever been a good time to talk to the geeks about …
READ MORE“Snake on the wall” The “Snake on the wall” technique is one that has been used by many Agile and Lean teams in various forms for many years. In its simplest form, the scrum master draws a snake’s head on a post-it on the wall, and as team members run into distractions, impediments and other frictions during the course of their work, they note it on another post-it, and join it to the head … further post-its attach to the …
READ MOREAmmeon recently appointed its new CEO, Stian Kildal. We are delighted to have him take the reins of Ammeon’s future. Stian has worked with us for over 3 years and he is well known for his passion and his drive for innovation. We sat down for Q&A recently so that you can all get to know him better. How does it feel to be the CEO of Ammeon? It is a humbling experience. On one hand, I feel lot of …
READ MOREIreland has always been on the cards for myself and my family for a few years, I just hadn’t gotten the courage to do the big 9000 km journey. I started applying for work from South Africa not expecting to find work easily. Straight away I noticed a trend that companies only saw that I was living in South Africa and completely skipped over me. Ammeon wasn’t one of those companies and they were more personable, I didn’t feel like …
READ MOREThe HR congress was on this week, I couldn’t attend but once again AgileHR was on everyone’s lips. In my last blog, I spoke about how adapting Agile concepts to HR can bring about some significant changes in the productivity and engagement of HR organisations. It sounds like Agile is great but why are more people not adopting it? Having spoken to some of my colleagues in the HR community it seems that the difficulty in adopting agile is in …
READ MORELately I’ve been working with OpenShift and its source-to-image capabilities and I must say I am impressed. How impressed you ask? Impressed enough to want to write my own “Hello World” app for it. Currently, there is a simple Python app available which is used for most demos/education material. Even though the app does the job, I think that it doesn’t fully demonstrate some of the more powerful capabilities of OpenShift and OpenShift S2I. And then of course there is the result. Let’s face …
READ MOREAmmeon Enables Cathx Ocean To Deliver Faster Through Agile-Lean Consulting Cathx Ocean design, manufacture and supply advanced subsea imaging and measurement systems. Software and hardware R&D projects in Cathx were challenged by lengthy development cycles and a lack of project visibility. In addition, Cathx was developing a business-critical product and needed help to set up new processes to plan and execute its delivery. Cathx selected Ammeon help overcome these challenges. Ammeon recommended that Cathx undertake an Agile-Lean Start programme. Over a 6-week …
READ MOREI was delighted to have been asked to talk about my journey into AgileHR at the Agile Lean Ireland event in Croke Park in Dublin in April. Despite overwhelming imposter syndrome talking about Agile to a room full of Product Owners and Scrum Masters, I was happy to see a connection being made with these experts by using language and terms which they were familiar. What was sad from my perspective was how few HR people were at the conference despite the …
READ MOREThe good folks at 3scale gave us access to the first beta version of the on-premise API Gateway application. This presented us with an exciting opportunity to test its applicability for a proof of concept IoT application we’re building. 3Scale and IoT Application The 3scale API Gateway lets us manage access to our concept IoT application in terms of who can access the API (through an application key for registered users) and the rate at which API calls can be …
READ MOREThe seven wastes of Lean, when translated from the original Japanese of Taiichi Ohno, are Transport, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Overprocessing and Defects [1]. The 8th waste, which was added later [2], is “under used skills” and is the least mechanical and most human of all the wastes. Often it is the most overlooked and, in my experience, the most important waste. Under used skills deliver no value A few years ago, I performed an analysis for a lean project at …
READ MOREAPI Management The management of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is a hot topic. Discussions usually include mention of phrases like ‘exposure of your customer data’, ‘monetizing your underlying assets’ or ‘offering value add services to your customer base’. If you have ‘assets’ or data which you think may be useful to other third parties or end customers, or if you are being driven by regulatory changes or market pressure, then an API Gateway has to form part of your solution …
READ MOREThe Scrum Guide, the official definition of Scrum, created and described the role of Product Owner (PO). The role is described as “responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the Development Team” [1]. It’s a challenging role; as it requires someone with technical ability, business analysis ability and authority to make decisions and deal with the consequences. It is often considered to be the most difficult role in Scrum [2, 3, 4]. There are a …
READ MOREThe 8 Wastes Snake is a continuous process improvement tool. It is a poster-sized sheet that allows people working on a process to record any perceived wastes and annoyances when they occur during process execution. This record can then be reviewed periodically by the teams and management identify changes to improve the process and conditions of the people working on it. The Purpose Of The Waste Snake The purpose of the waste snake is to embed a culture of continuous …
READ MOREThe great promise of DevOps is that organisations can reap the benefits of an automated workflow that takes a developer’s commit from test to production with deliberate speed. Inevitably, problems arise in the process of setting up and continuously improving a DevOps workflow. Some problems are cultural or organisational in nature, but some are technical. This post outlines three patterns that can be applied when debugging difficult failure modes in a DevOps environment. You Don’t Need a Debugger for Debugging While …
READ MOREIn a recent post, I wrote about how traditional companies are being disrupted by more nimble competitors. Banking is one sector taking an interesting approach to this challenge. Like their counterparts in other sectors (including telecoms, networking, media and life sciences), banks are turning to digital transformations to speed delivery and fend off competitive threats. Digital transformations are about DevOps adoption and infrastructure automation using public and private cloud. Banks are also adopting two other winning strategies: Spinning up digitally-focused ‘start ups’ that are free from old processes, oppressive corporate culture and technical …
READ MOREThis 2 day Business Agility Workshop you will use simulations to engage the intuitive as well as the rational brain while learning about the foundations of business agility. Date: 21st & 22nd November, 2018 Location: Ammeon Learning Centre, O’Connell Bridge House, Dublin 2 It is more than scaling agile (development) practices. It is more than the sum of different organisational units that each implement their own chosen agile method on their own little island, constrained by a traditional management system. It is a …
READ MOREWe are proud to announce the opening of our new Belfast office and the creation of 60 new jobs. The establishment of this new office will expand our Software Engineering and Consulting Capacity as well as taking advantage of the IT talent and experience within Northern Ireland. Our new facility is on the 5th floor, Norwich Union House, Fountain St, Belfast, this office brings us right into the heart of Belfast city centre. Alastair Hamilton, CEO of Invest NI said: “This sizable investment by …
READ MOREInstallation and upgrade processes can be a problematic and frustrating. Manual steps carried out on many different servers introduce the potential for human error – adding time, cost and risk. Ammeon Workflow Engine (AWE) is a collection of services designed to address the complexity of end-to-end installations and upgrades. Our workflow engine emphasizes reducing cost and effort by removing complexity and manual interaction. The core functionality of AWE is to automate the manual steps involved in any software application installation …
READ MORE
You need the ability to step on the pedal and hit the brakes, both at the same time.
Ammeon CEO, Stian Kildal, discusses why now is the time to reassess.
Ammeon recently appointed its new CEO, Stian Kildal. We are delighted to have him take the reins of Ammeon’s future. Stian has worked with us for over 3 years and he is well known for his passion and his drive for innovation. We sat down for Q&A recently so that you can all get to know him better. How does it feel to be the CEO of Ammeon? It is a humbling experience. On one hand, I feel lot of …
READ MORE
We are proud to announce the opening of our new Belfast office and the creation of 60 new jobs. The establishment of this new office will expand our Software Engineering and Consulting Capacity as well as taking advantage of the IT talent and experience within Northern Ireland. Our new facility is on the 5th floor, Norwich Union House, Fountain St, Belfast, this office brings us right into the heart of Belfast city centre. Alastair Hamilton, CEO of Invest NI said: “This sizable investment by …
READ MORE
A lot has happened around the world this year that has impacted jobs of many. Here are some tips from our technical & operations recruiter that can help you avoid some common interview mistakes that can cost you job opportunity
READ MORE
We’ve developed Agile Boot to help organisations successfully achieve the first step on their Agile transformation journey and move from customer delivery every few months to every few weeks.
READ MORE
Pentesting should be performed on an ongoing basis to keep up with the continuous developments
READ MORE
Here we explore some of the ways one might go about implementing DevSecOps in their organisation to ensure confidence in security at scale.
READ MORE
The Recent Adaption Of Remote Working Has Seen Thousands Of Companies Adapt To Working From Home. This Can Cause Issues For Companies Who Are Not Prepared.
READ MORE
Digital Transformation was always relevant and always needed. However, COVID-19 has made this strategic business opportunity a necessity.
READ MORE
A key factor in working remotely is good and effective communication. Nowadays, there are many collaborative tools, such as Slack and Zoom, that make communication much easier. But of course, tools are only as effective as how they are used.
READ MORE
One of the most fundamental components of any agile project is the humble User Story. How to word a user story, how to break it down if it’s too big, and what not to do with user stories are common topics that arise in organisations.
READ MORE
Our 5 tips for building a CI Pipeline that should help build a robust pipeline, regardless of the Continuous Integration tools chosen.
READ MORE
Enabling Scaling Through Customer Feedback
READ MORE
We believe that the success of our company depends heavily on the performance of our employees, so our priority is to help and maintain our employee’s wellbeing.
READ MORE
Not every crisis must necessarily have a negative impact on our career. There are still opportunities out there and putting the progress on hold may only prolong the journey towards your career goals.
READ MORE
Many businesses still don’t understand how vital onboarding is for new employees. Here are our favourite tools to help your remote onboarding process.
READ MORE
Onboarding is a critical part of the employee experience and can have a knock-on effect not just in the short term performance of the employee but on their long term effectiveness.
READ MORE
With The Sudden Adaption Of Remote Working, Teams Can Face Unexpected Challenges. In This Post, We Outline 3 Common Problems And Steps To Resolve Them.
READ MORE
During times of uncertainty, you may be wondering what tools and systems should we implement to assist with our internal communication and HR processes?
READ MORE
In 2018, Ammeon began the process of moving all of our operations over to the cloud. Learn how this process has improved our ability for remote working.
READ MORE
Interested In a Career In IT WIth Ammeon? Hear How Daniel Went From College Intern To A full Time Engineer. Start Your Career Today.
READ MORE
New country, even new continent, 3975.08 Km’s of distance between Cairo and Dublin. This is the distance I had to take to move from my home country and join Ammeon. If you are making such a transition you are asking yourself a lot of questions: there is always the usual risk of changing your work environment by accepting a new job, how will I get along with the new team, management and team leaders? But moving to a different country …
READ MORE
Ireland has always been on the cards for myself and my family for a few years, I just hadn’t gotten the courage to do the big 9000 km journey. I started applying for work from South Africa not expecting to find work easily. Straight away I noticed a trend that companies only saw that I was living in South Africa and completely skipped over me. Ammeon wasn’t one of those companies and they were more personable, I didn’t feel like …
READ MORE
How do the leaders in your organization view a digital transformation? What is the ratio of technology vs human required to digitally transform your business? Read more to know the important things you need to consider before taking on a digital transformation
READ MORE
In order to prevent the chaotic nature of production environments that lead to outages, chaos engineering is the practice of facilitating controlled experiments to uncover weaknesses and help instil confidence in the system’s resiliency. Read more to know everything about Chaos Engineering
READ MORE
Containers are revolutionizing the way we develop and deliver applications. Here is everything you need to know about containerization, virtualization and development life cycle with containers.
READ MORE
At Ammeon, we are big fans of Kubernetes. In this post, Ammeon’s Lead Cloud Engineer talks through what is and why we use Kubernetes.
READ MORE
Ammeon CEO, Stian Kildal, Starts the Sector Series with a review of software in the Telecoms industry. How is software innovation key to 5G and future networks?
READ MOREPentesting should be performed on an ongoing basis to keep up with the continuous developments
READ MOREHere we explore some of the ways one might go about implementing DevSecOps in their organisation to ensure confidence in security at scale.
READ MOREThe Recent Adaption Of Remote Working Has Seen Thousands Of Companies Adapt To Working From Home. This Can Cause Issues For Companies Who Are Not Prepared.
READ MOREDuring times of uncertainty, you may be wondering what tools and systems should we implement to assist with our internal communication and HR processes?
READ MORE
Flow efficiency examines the two basic components that make up your lead time: work and wait time.
READ MORE
CI/CD has the power to improve the flow of business value from the development team to production and also reduces the feedback time.
READ MORE
How many e-mails have you received this week talking about the “digital transformation” going on everywhere around us? Businesses in any sector grow increasingly paranoid over digitally competent competitors, and/or excited about the possibilities. Google “digital transformation” and you’ll find as many definitions as search hits. The most respectable consultancy firms will be happy to help define your strategy (and take a lot of your money). If there has ever been a good time to talk to the geeks about …
READ MORE
“Snake on the wall” The “Snake on the wall” technique is one that has been used by many Agile and Lean teams in various forms for many years. In its simplest form, the scrum master draws a snake’s head on a post-it on the wall, and as team members run into distractions, impediments and other frictions during the course of their work, they note it on another post-it, and join it to the head … further post-its attach to the …
READ MORE
The HR congress was on this week, I couldn’t attend but once again AgileHR was on everyone’s lips. In my last blog, I spoke about how adapting Agile concepts to HR can bring about some significant changes in the productivity and engagement of HR organisations. It sounds like Agile is great but why are more people not adopting it? Having spoken to some of my colleagues in the HR community it seems that the difficulty in adopting agile is in …
READ MORE
Lately I’ve been working with OpenShift and its source-to-image capabilities and I must say I am impressed. How impressed you ask? Impressed enough to want to write my own “Hello World” app for it. Currently, there is a simple Python app available which is used for most demos/education material. Even though the app does the job, I think that it doesn’t fully demonstrate some of the more powerful capabilities of OpenShift and OpenShift S2I. And then of course there is the result. Let’s face …
READ MORE
Ammeon Enables Cathx Ocean To Deliver Faster Through Agile-Lean Consulting Cathx Ocean design, manufacture and supply advanced subsea imaging and measurement systems. Software and hardware R&D projects in Cathx were challenged by lengthy development cycles and a lack of project visibility. In addition, Cathx was developing a business-critical product and needed help to set up new processes to plan and execute its delivery. Cathx selected Ammeon help overcome these challenges. Ammeon recommended that Cathx undertake an Agile-Lean Start programme. Over a 6-week …
READ MORE
I was delighted to have been asked to talk about my journey into AgileHR at the Agile Lean Ireland event in Croke Park in Dublin in April. Despite overwhelming imposter syndrome talking about Agile to a room full of Product Owners and Scrum Masters, I was happy to see a connection being made with these experts by using language and terms which they were familiar. What was sad from my perspective was how few HR people were at the conference despite the …
READ MORE
The good folks at 3scale gave us access to the first beta version of the on-premise API Gateway application. This presented us with an exciting opportunity to test its applicability for a proof of concept IoT application we’re building. 3Scale and IoT Application The 3scale API Gateway lets us manage access to our concept IoT application in terms of who can access the API (through an application key for registered users) and the rate at which API calls can be …
READ MORE
The seven wastes of Lean, when translated from the original Japanese of Taiichi Ohno, are Transport, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Overprocessing and Defects [1]. The 8th waste, which was added later [2], is “under used skills” and is the least mechanical and most human of all the wastes. Often it is the most overlooked and, in my experience, the most important waste. Under used skills deliver no value A few years ago, I performed an analysis for a lean project at …
READ MORE
API Management The management of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is a hot topic. Discussions usually include mention of phrases like ‘exposure of your customer data’, ‘monetizing your underlying assets’ or ‘offering value add services to your customer base’. If you have ‘assets’ or data which you think may be useful to other third parties or end customers, or if you are being driven by regulatory changes or market pressure, then an API Gateway has to form part of your solution …
READ MORE
The Scrum Guide, the official definition of Scrum, created and described the role of Product Owner (PO). The role is described as “responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the Development Team” [1]. It’s a challenging role; as it requires someone with technical ability, business analysis ability and authority to make decisions and deal with the consequences. It is often considered to be the most difficult role in Scrum [2, 3, 4]. There are a …
READ MORE
The 8 Wastes Snake is a continuous process improvement tool. It is a poster-sized sheet that allows people working on a process to record any perceived wastes and annoyances when they occur during process execution. This record can then be reviewed periodically by the teams and management identify changes to improve the process and conditions of the people working on it. The Purpose Of The Waste Snake The purpose of the waste snake is to embed a culture of continuous …
READ MORE
The great promise of DevOps is that organisations can reap the benefits of an automated workflow that takes a developer’s commit from test to production with deliberate speed. Inevitably, problems arise in the process of setting up and continuously improving a DevOps workflow. Some problems are cultural or organisational in nature, but some are technical. This post outlines three patterns that can be applied when debugging difficult failure modes in a DevOps environment. You Don’t Need a Debugger for Debugging While …
READ MORE
In a recent post, I wrote about how traditional companies are being disrupted by more nimble competitors. Banking is one sector taking an interesting approach to this challenge. Like their counterparts in other sectors (including telecoms, networking, media and life sciences), banks are turning to digital transformations to speed delivery and fend off competitive threats. Digital transformations are about DevOps adoption and infrastructure automation using public and private cloud. Banks are also adopting two other winning strategies: Spinning up digitally-focused ‘start ups’ that are free from old processes, oppressive corporate culture and technical …
READ MORE
This 2 day Business Agility Workshop you will use simulations to engage the intuitive as well as the rational brain while learning about the foundations of business agility. Date: 21st & 22nd November, 2018 Location: Ammeon Learning Centre, O’Connell Bridge House, Dublin 2 It is more than scaling agile (development) practices. It is more than the sum of different organisational units that each implement their own chosen agile method on their own little island, constrained by a traditional management system. It is a …
READ MORE
Installation and upgrade processes can be a problematic and frustrating. Manual steps carried out on many different servers introduce the potential for human error – adding time, cost and risk. Ammeon Workflow Engine (AWE) is a collection of services designed to address the complexity of end-to-end installations and upgrades. Our workflow engine emphasizes reducing cost and effort by removing complexity and manual interaction. The core functionality of AWE is to automate the manual steps involved in any software application installation …
READ MORE