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Hackathons build community

diet-cokeA hackathon – like the debut LSO Hackathon held in November 2015 at the MEF’s GEN15 conference – is where magic happens. It’s where theory turns into practice, and the state of the art advances. Dozens of techies sitting in a room, hunched over laptops, scribbling on whiteboards, drinking excessive quantities of coffee and Diet Coke. A hubbub of conversation. Focus. Laughter. A sense of challenge.

More than 50 network and/or software experts joined the first-ever LSO Hackathon, representing a very diverse group of 20 companies. They were asked to focus on two Reference Points of the MEF’s Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Reference Architecture. As explained by , Director of Certification and Strategic Programs at the MEF and one of the architects of the LSO Hackathon series, these included:

  • LSO Adagio, which defines the element management reference point needed to manage network resources, including element view management functions
  • LSO Presto, which defines the network management reference point needed to manage the network infrastructure, including network view management functions

Read more about the LSO Hackathon in my story in Telecom Ramblings, “Building Community, Swatting Bugs, Writing Code.”

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Bimodal IT — safety and accuracy vs. speed and agility

gartner-bimodal-itLas Vegas, December 2015 — Get ready for Bimodal IT. That’s the message from the Gartner Application, Architecture, Development & Integration Summit (AADI). It wasn’t a subtle message. Bimodal was a veritable drumbeat, pounded home over and over again in keynotes, classes, and one-on-one meetings with Gartner analysts. We’re going to be hearing a lot about bimodal development, from Gartner and the industry, because it’s a message that really describes what many of us are encountering today.

To quote Gartner’s official definition:

Bimodal IT is the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and the other on agility. Mode 1 is traditional and sequential, emphasizing safety and accuracy. Mode 2 is exploratory and nonlinear, emphasizing agility and speed.

Gartner sees that we create and manage two different types of projects. Some, Mode 1, being very serious, very methodical, bet-the-business projects that must be done right using formal processes, and others, Mode 2, being more opportunistic, quicker, more agile. That’s not to say that Mode 1 projects can’t be agile, and that Mode 2 projects can’t be big and significant. However, we all know that there’s a big difference between launching an initiative to implement a Black Friday sale on our website or designing a new store-locator mobile app, vs. rolling out a GAAP-compliant accounting system or migrating critical systems to the cloud.

You might argue that there’s nothing revolutionary here with bimodal, and if you did, you would be right. Nobody ever claimed that all IT projects, including software development, are the same, and should be managed the same way. What Gartner has done is provide a clear vocabulary for understanding, categorizing, and communicating project differences more efficiently.

Read more about this in my story “Mode 1, Mode 2: Gartner Preaches Bimodal Development at AADI,” published on the Parasoft blog.