Health

Boosting Efficiency with Sprint Velocity​

Sprint Velocity is the key metric in a Scrum framework. In Agile teams, it refers to the analysis of past workloads to calculate how much work can be done in future sprints. Velocity is calculated at the end of the sprint by adding up the points for all completed Users Stories or customer requirements. With this prior knowledge, businesses can plan future projects knowing how much work can be completed in the next sprint. This helps them to accurately allocate time and resources to complete projects and tasks.

Furthermore, Sprint Velocity estimates give customers and stakeholders a better idea of when they can expect the delivery of products and services.

This guide will cover the best ways to improve Sprint Velocity. The common denominator is that to move faster, you must make the effort now and “plant the seeds” to enable higher productivity in future sprints.

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Maximising Analytics & Machine Learning with Data Lakes

In today’s digital-first landscape, organisations are facing an ever-growing volume of data. This data can come from a variety of sources, including internal systems, external data sets, and user activity and trends. To capitalise on the valuable insights and competitive advantages that such data can provide, organisations need to have a robust and flexible data infrastructure in place.

One potential solution is the Data Lake. A Data Lake is fundamentally a large storage repository that can accommodate vast volumes of disparate data types. Its key advantage lies in its flexibility – unlike traditional storage solutions, which often require rigid schema specifications for each stored dataset, a Data Lake allows for very granular control over the exact type and format of the stored data. This makes it possible to store different datasets in their raw form, without having to them pre-processed or structured in any special way.

Another key benefit of using a Data Lake is that it allows for sophisticated analysis techniques like machine learning and analytics to be used effectively on large volumes of continuously growing data. By making it easier to retain all available relevant information in one place, organisations can reap the benefits of powerful analytical tools without being constrained by restrictive storage limitations or intensive computational demands. Ultimately, by choosing to

As of last year, global demand for Data Lakes is predicted to grow by 27.4%.

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Why Your Business Needs Site Reliability Engineering

In the age of digital services, system reliability is paramount. Conglomerates like Amazon deal with millions of online business transactions 24/7 and even a momentary system failure could cost them billions. Real-time customer expectations and the need for zero downtime have pushed the need for systems that are not just functioning, but also highly available and scalable. With so much money and data at stake, neither businesses nor customers can afford disruption to their online business exchanges. So how do we prevent, minimise, and resolve these errors? This is where Site Reliability Engineering comes into the equation.

Site Reliability Engineering is a discipline that combines software engineering and operations to build, deploy, monitor, and maintain systems that are both highly reliable and scalable. SRE teams are responsible for ensuring that systems are meeting availability SLAs, while also constantly improving performance and efficiency. To do this, they utilise a combination of code development, automation, and logging/monitoring tools. In addition, SRE teams often work closely with other engineering teams to develop new features and products in a way that doesn’t sacrifice reliability.

By utilising Site Reliability Engineering principles, businesses can build systems that are more reliable and responsive to customer needs.

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SRE vs. DevOps – What’s the Difference?

The terms ‘DevOps’ and ‘SRE’ are often used interchangeably, with SRE methods and techniques accompanying DevOps culture and practices, though there are several key differences.

The term ‘DevOps’ is short for ‘development and operations’, and it refers to the culture and practices of collaboration between software developers and IT operations professionals. The goal of DevOps is to shorten the software development life cycle and increase the frequency and quality of software releases. ‘SRE’, on the other hand, stands for ‘site reliability engineering’. SRE is a set of practices and principles for achieving operational excellence with cloud-based services.

SRE teams work to ensure that DevOps procedures create quality software and meet operational Service Level Objectives (SLOs).

SREs typically have a background in operations and software development, while DevOps teams can include QA experts, developers, engineers, and SREs.

While both DevOps and SRE are concerned with improving the quality and speed of software development, they are distinct approaches with different goals.

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Your 2022 Guide to Marketing Automation

As marketing experts, we are often asked for the best advice on practices and techniques. To help you make the most of your marketing in 2022, we created this guide to Marketing Automation.

In the guide, we share our experience, opinions, tips and suggestions based on our years of experience. We also look at key trends in marketing automation. In terms of specific functionality, we will refer to our Marketing Automation platform but even if you are not (yet!) using that, the information should still be relevant, particularly if you are using or considering using it – or considering another Marketing Automation platform.

With a highly experienced and engaged team and over 20 years’ worth of sales and marketing industry expertise, we have worked for, created, influenced and driven market leading organisations, platforms and tools. Because of this, we have helped a wide variety of clients to achieve great results using marketing automation.

We work closely with each of our clients to understand their businesses, aims, challenges and what matters to them, providing a personalised service that includes consultation, training and support.

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Delivering Value in 2022

Delivering Value in 2022 What to Expect in 2022 2021 saw the start of recovery and renewed focus as well as adaption, change and growth. Despite short term cuts and postponed plans, organisations as a whole still increased their technology spend, focusing their attentions on enabling remote working and customer servicing, reducing on-premises costs and

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