The Misappropriation of Terms: Andon Cord

Software developers tend to be a bit hipsterish in that we seem to have an inherent attraction to novel things - especially when those novel things are lifted from the old things of other disciplines. The Andon Cord is one of those nuggets lifted from the same corpus that brought us much of what is now termed “agile”: Automobile manufacturing - specifically, the manufacturing practices of Toyota. While more thoroughly described by others, the Andon Cord was a physical cord that ran along side Toyota’s entire production line and when pulled, stopped the assembly line.

The Role of QA in Cloud DevOps

[Warning: Potentially Inflammatory Topic] Today was a bit of a rough day for me in that I did something that is generally a bit aggressive for me. I abruptly closed an issue that was opened by one of our QA folks, thereby halting the discussion. The issue wasn’t really a bug - even though it was opened as one. It was more of a questioning of the API’s resource naming strategy (more specifically, a question around the use of singular and plural nouns for a specific path segment).

Our Development Pipeline and Process

I’ve been going around to different teams inside of my company recently and talking about how we’ve gone about the task of selecting different tools and technologies for our projects. I figured that if this many people inside the company were curious, there may be some value in sharing it with you good folks as well. So here, I’ll attempt to cover the principles, strategies, and technologies for both our development process/pipeline and our projects themselves.