What is the Labs Practices Site?

Purpose

The Labs Practices Site is a resource for people who want their project teams to become as high-performing as possible. The project team might be a software development team, a management team, or even a group of doctors in a medical group.

Though the practices and workshops, pragmatic and practical guides, and in-depth learning content originated from agile software development consulting projects, most are relevant for almost any team.

Who Owns This?

Anyone and everyone.

The original site code and editorial content, including this distribution of it, are open source and distributed under the Apache License Version 2.0.

How to Contribute

Formal options include:

Informally: if you’re using this site you likely know me or know someone who does. Get ahold of me.

History

Once upon a time there was a software consulting company named Pivotal Labs.

The Pivotal Heritage

Over the decades many amazing people worked at Pivotal Labs, legal variations of that company, and the companies that acquired and employed a “Labs” consulting and the Cloud R&D division that emerged, including VMware Tanzu Labs and Broadcom.

These incredible software developers, product managers, UX designers, and managers developed many effective practices, workshops, and processes to help software projects be successful. These were documented almost exclusively in internal company sites and documents. Thus, while effective, their impact was limited to proprietary R&D and client consulting projects.

The Give-Back Campaign

Then, while under the stewardship of VMware, the organizations of Pivotal heritage undertook a campaign to Give Back to the software, product management, and design communities by publishing their wealth of knowledge on the public Internet under an open source license. For several years this content lived on the Tanzu Developer Center (“TDC”), owned by VMware.

To be fair, this was a match made of convenience, as the TDC’s primary purpose was to promote VMware products and related technologies, not guides to agile software team morale-building workshops, but the TDC was more than welcoming and provided a home and support for this content. Additional context here: How Pivotal/Tanzu Labs Works and Why.

After VMware was acquired by Broadcom, most of the non-Labs oriented content was migrated from the TDC to other properties, and having served its purpose the TDC was decommissioned. This left in question where the Labs-oriented content might live. While the Labs content did find a home on other VMware/Broadcom sites, it again didn’t feel like it was quite at home. In addition, the contribution and maintenance process was unclear.

A New Hope Home

But, good news! All of the TDC’s code and content was open source, allowing for it to be redistributed. I decided to publish a focused, restyled version of the TDC site and content, centered around the agile software team (e.g. Labs-oriented) content, so that it remains a resource for all and has a clear process for contributions and change.

Who is Maintaining this Site and Content?

Who is this guy?

This site and content is currently maintained by Joe Moore.