Continuous development - Growing Pains

Continuous developmentGrowing pains

1Saturday, 29 September 12

Who am I ?

Community developerSalesforce & Herokukanban, java, scala, clojure communities

@jr0cketblog.jr0cket.co.uk


Atlassian: In the beginning...


Success happens !

Software for software developers


Really big shed


How does that happen without pain ?


So the story begins...

startup cultureopen, no bull...practices evolved as necessary business growingeveryone is happy


Atlassian values


Maintaining the culture during growth


Many companies fail

Control over complexity

Restrictive management controls

Fear of innovation


Mafia


Atlassian stay “agile”

Trust in their peopleEncouraging collaboration Promoting innovation


Agree on Cadence

97 Days release cycle


Innovation encouragement

20% timeFedex Days ShipIt Days


Big Strategic Decision


Converging on the cloud

Make products more accessibleProducts have to be more integratedUnified product experienceEnterprise customer support


Culture influenced from the top

Ship on-demand & product at same timeSame short release cycle across the board

left up to teams on how to achieve it


Challenges


Team Culture(s)

Each team evolved its own wayJIRA team formed 2002Confluence team formed 2003

Team practices formed by its members


Fighting Conway’s Law

Culture shapes codediverse teamsa range of practicesevolving different tools

organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Adapt without loosing Culture

Make your culture visibledefine what you stand for


Atlassian values


Culture needs to adapt


Toward continuous deployment

Focus on smaller featuresbreaking down storiesno more epicsclearer understanding of what is valuable - by delivering it!


Developer cycle changes

Shorter dev cycleto fit into production dev cyclemore opportunities to consider whats valuablefeeling the pain regularly encourages improvement


Understanding Technical Debt

Work on something... with the intent to clean it up later

Ward Cunningham


Technical Debt in practice

Decisions get left behindApproaches get lost over timeUnavoidable growth via software inertia


Increasing awareness

Customer need over develop what’s coolfeedback from customersdevelopers engaged with those concernsavoid navel gazing & chasing shiny things


Wider engagement

Social media channels shaping imageCustomers more vocal about experienceCompetition growsBelief & Ambition grow


More extreme options

Breaking up productstoo costly and painful?


Missing elements

A realistic roadmapcustomers what to know where something is goinghard to give 100% guarantees on everything / anythinga diverse audience to please


Solving it together


Quality Assistance

Helping raise the quality barAsking “difficult” questions

how does x work?


Build team

Developers love learning maven, right?Puppet is more fun than beer, surely!


UX team

Helping developers understand value of UX

http://seb.ly/


http://seb.ly

http://seb.ly

Kick-ass team

Teams with in teamsfocusing on specific product challenges


Collaboratively Iterating

Empowering people to collaborate towards an understood goal that gives clear value


Leveraging the tools


Tools != process

Tools can support changeEncourage innovationsAllow understanding value


Public bug tracker

Ultimate form of “dogfood” Helps some of the audience understand company constraints & direction


DVCS saves the day !

Not a panacea, but very liberatingDevelopers allowed to experiment in a safe way

Social coding


Social Code reviews

Not just for new codeIdentifying technical debtLooking for opportunities to improve


Benefits


Atlassian as a platform

Engage with developer environmentDrive innovation on a wider scaleAdd value to developers as well as customers


Customer engagement

New features Dark featuresAB testingGive Feedback

making it really easy to give valuable feedback based on what the customer was doing!!


Refocus on user experience

Building on areas of strengthworkflow

Radical changes to areas of weaknessuser experience (UX)


http://semanticstudios.com




Constraints driving innovation

24 hrs to deliver something valuableno control over whatno say in who or howjust do it, evaluate the results

Formally known as FedEx days


Engaging the wider community


Community is the greatest asset

User & Developer communities

give valuable, actionable feedbackbecome an extended part of the organisationyour evangelists to the world


Opening up

Access to your platformCreating business driven market placeFocusing on developer experienceHelping customers succeed


Value of platform


Platform is the new framework

Facebook - social marketingHeroku - universal managed platformSalesforce - Sales, Marketing, Social Media analysis, Enterprise development platforms


In Summary


Success, agility & culture

AtlassianSalesforce & Heroku

successful companiesretaining their culture

Why not in your organisation?


Thank [email protected]

@jr0cketblog.jr0cket.co.uk


mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Continuous development - Growing Pains

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