Going beyond the pitfalls of agile to create a learning, improving organisation

1. Software on the High
Seas
Soren Harner
Atlassian
Sunday, 8 May 2011

2. Sydney 1887
Sunday, 8 May 2011

3. Longitude.
Challenge of 1750.
(die geographische
Längengrad)
Sunday, 8 May 2011

4. 1. Set the time on
clock at known
longitude
astronomically
Sunday, 8 May 2011

5. 2. Determine local
time with Sextant
from Sun or stars
Sunday, 8 May 2011

6. Assume a Clock
3. Compare local
time to time on the
clock.
1 hour difference is
15 degrees.
Sunday, 8 May 2011

7. First Venture Fund
•Powder of
Sympathy
•Grid of
cannons
Sir Kenelm Digby
Sunday, 8 May 2011

8. Breakthrough
John Harrison
Sunday, 8 May 2011

9. What could this possibly
have to do with Software?
Sunday, 8 May 2011

10. • Surviving on the high
seas of software
• Building a clock
• Team
• Activities
• Rhythm
Sunday, 8 May 2011

11. Meet the Atlassians
2005
• Latest frameworks • Exciting releases
• Rock-star coders • Agile champions
Sunday, 8 May 2011

12. Smooth sailing
Sunday, 8 May 2011

13. • Straying off course
• Dead reckoning
• (Koppelnavigation)
• Consider all forces
• Winds
• Currents
Sunday, 8 May 2011

14. Harder to stay ahead
Sunday, 8 May 2011

15. We grew
• Complexity • Infrastructure • Firefighting
• Code debt • Dependencitis • n(n-1)
Sunday, 8 May 2011

16. Doing things right
Sunday, 8 May 2011

17. Survey staff
• Feature through-put dropping
• Accepting “tolerable inefficiency”
• e.g. 66% have daily infrastructure
problems
• 73% felt more productive at Atlassian
than last job
Sunday, 8 May 2011

18. Effort to Build a Feature
Sunday, 8 May 2011

19. Effort to Build a Feature
Relative Person Days
Green Fields
Sunday, 8 May 2011

20. Effort to Build a Feature
Relative Person Days
Technical debt cycle starts
Green Fields
Sunday, 8 May 2011

21. Effort to Build a Feature
Innovation crawls
Relative Person Days
Complexity
Technical debt cycle starts
Green Fields
7 years
Sunday, 8 May 2011

22. There is a better way to do it.
Find it.
— Thomas Edison
Sunday, 8 May 2011

23. Landing party
Sunday, 8 May 2011

24. Death by 1000 Cuts
Sunday, 8 May 2011

25. Things that happen in minutes.
Sunday, 8 May 2011

26. Things that happen in hours.
Sunday, 8 May 2011

27. Things that happen in days.
Sunday, 8 May 2011

28. Things that happen in weeks.
Sunday, 8 May 2011

29. Activity Clock
Sunday, 8 May 2011

30. Activity Clock
Sunday, 8 May 2011

31. “It takes a slow descent into the
subject, requiring fifteen minutes
or more of concentration before
the state is locked in.”
— Peopleware, Lister & DeMarco, 1987
Sunday, 8 May 2011

32. • Achieve a “state of
flow”
• Bottom up
dehassling
• Spread knowledge
• Measure each step
Sunday, 8 May 2011

33. 30 second rule
• Minor code or UI change < 1s
• Class signature rule < 20s
• SVN checkout < 3m
• App startup < 10s
• Unit Tests < 5m
Sunday, 8 May 2011

34. Tune-Up Guides
• Intellij IDEA / Eclipse
• Web Development
• SVN, GIT
• Maven
• Command-line scripts
Sunday, 8 May 2011

35. Measure
Median 90th Percent 99th Percent
One month measured each hour via a Groovy script
Sunday, 8 May 2011

36. Measure
Median 90th Percent 99th Percent
Project in FishEye
Big JIRA Issue
SVN Log of JIRA file
0 12.5 25.0 37.5 50.0
One month measured each hour via a Groovy script
Sunday, 8 May 2011

37. Measure
Median 90th Percent 99th Percent
Project in FishEye
Big JIRA Issue
SVN Log of JIRA file
0 12.5 25.0 37.5 50.0
One month measured each hour via a Groovy script
Sunday, 8 May 2011

38. Measure
Median 90th Percent 99th Percent
Project in FishEye
Big JIRA Issue
SVN Log of JIRA file
0 12.5 25.0 37.5 50.0
One month measured each hour via a Groovy script
Sunday, 8 May 2011

39. Measure
Median 90th Percent 99th Percent
One month measured each hour via a Groovy script
Sunday, 8 May 2011

40. Measure
Median 90th Percent 99th Percent
SVN CO JIRA Trunk
Maven sources
0 225 450 675 900
One month measured each hour via a Groovy script
Sunday, 8 May 2011

41. Measure
Median 90th Percent 99th Percent
SVN CO JIRA Trunk
Maven sources
0 225 450 675 900
One month measured each hour via a Groovy script
Sunday, 8 May 2011

42. Measure
Median 90th Percent 99th Percent
SVN CO JIRA Trunk
Maven sources
0 225 450 675 900
One month measured each hour via a Groovy script
Sunday, 8 May 2011

43. Capture Hassles
Sunday, 8 May 2011

44. Sunday, 8 May 2011

45. Picture Emerges
• IDE slow scanning files
• Making small code change to SAL takes days
• Maven stalls downloading dependencies
• Wiki running slowly
• CI Server builds hanging
• Releasing product is manual and slow
Sunday, 8 May 2011

46. Initiative
• Fix up IDE
• Tomcat
• Maven
• Upload sources for
maven dependencies
• Improve unit tests
writing with Mockito
Sunday, 8 May 2011

47. Improvements
• Stay in the zone
• Atlassian connectors for IDEA and
Eclipse
• Number of clicks
• Short-cuts, quick-nav
Sunday, 8 May 2011

48. • Get closure on task
• Test execution
time
• Four eyes
• Complete
automation
• Dial-tone reliability
Sunday, 8 May 2011

49. Measure time to fail
• Functional tests < 20 m
• Failure notifications early and visible
• Platform tests done overnight
• Simultaneously build trunk and branch
Sunday, 8 May 2011

50. Selective testing
Before: 40 minutes After: 7 minutes
Sunday, 8 May 2011

51. Four Eyes
• Four rules for code
reviews:
• Ego-free
• Don’t be pedantic
• Problems not
solutions
• Embrace feedback
Sunday, 8 May 2011

52. Initiative
• Speeding up Bamboo builds
• Parallelising Functional Tests
• VMWare templates
• Reliability
• Artifact passing
• CI Maven sandbox
Sunday, 8 May 2011

53. Improvements
• Activity streams in all
products
• Bamboo
enhancements
• Using Amazon EC2
• Queue
prioritisation
Sunday, 8 May 2011

54. “Eat your own
dogfood”
— Larry Ellison
Sunday, 8 May 2011

55. • Tangibility
• Rhythm of a
meaningful
deliverable
• Real-world
acceptance testing
early
Sunday, 8 May 2011

56. • For each iteration
• slack time
• ship a milestone build
• founder and expert reviews
• run in production
Sunday, 8 May 2011

57. 20% Slack
Let personal
projects flourish
Sunday, 8 May 2011

58. Use it daily
“After using it for a week or so, I’m starting
to notice quite a few things about the new
FishEye/Crucible.”
Sunday, 8 May 2011

59. “Foundered”
Sunday, 8 May 2011

60. • Fixed bandwidth to
repay technical debt
• Introduce new tools
and frameworks
Sunday, 8 May 2011

61. Nibbling around the edges.
Sunday, 8 May 2011

62. ‘Instead we have to look at
architecture, design,
development and toolset of the
products themselves.’
Sunday, 8 May 2011

63. The Groovy
Sunday, 8 May 2011

64. Engine Room
Sunday, 8 May 2011
Iterations

65. Tired of waiting
Sunday, 8 May 2011

66. Plugins 2 / OSGi
Sunday, 8 May 2011

67. Effort to Build a Feature
Sunday, 8 May 2011

68. Effort to Build a Feature
Relative Person Days
Green Fields
Sunday, 8 May 2011

69. Effort to Build a Feature
Relative Person Days
Technical debt cycle starts
Green Fields
Sunday, 8 May 2011

70. Effort to Build a Feature
Innovation crawls
Relative Person Days
Complexity
Technical debt cycle starts
Green Fields
Building the clock
7 years
Sunday, 8 May 2011

71. We built the clock
Forever tune and refine
Sunday, 8 May 2011

72. Thanks!
http://blogs.atlassian.com/developer
Sunday, 8 May 2011

73. Sunday, 8 May 2011

74. Inner loop stuff is good but
people looking for big-win, which is CI
Sunday, 8 May 2011

75. Cost of Change
RUP XP Atlassian Agile
Sunday, 8 May 2011

76. Cost of Change
RUP XP Atlassian Agile
Cost of a 1/2 day code change (gut feel).
Sunday, 8 May 2011

77. Cost of Change
Use Cases
RUP XP Atlassian Agile UML
QA suite
Horizontal
Gantt Chart
20
Inception Construction Test RC
15
Hours
10
5
0
June July Aug Sept Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar
Sunday, 8 May 2011

78. Cost of Change
RUP XP Atlassian Agile
20
15
Hours
10
Ship early and often
5
Evolution
Pairing
Refactor
0 CI
June July Aug Sept Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Reflection
Sunday, 8 May 2011

79. Cost of Change
RUP XP Atlassian Agile
20
User Story
15
Iteration-0
Dogfood each iteration,
Reviews
Beta1 & Beta2
Hours
Vertical
10 Blitz Test
+ XP
5
0
June July Aug Sept Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar
Sunday, 8 May 2011

80. Dev Speed Iterations
Sunday, 8 May 2011

81. Sunday, 8 May 2011

82. Reckless O Soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,
For we are bound where Agile Team has not yet dared go,
And we risk the ship, our selves and all
— Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”, with apologies
Sunday, 8 May 2011

83. “The Hoff”
Sunday, 8 May 2011

84. Test Optimisation
Sunday, 8 May 2011

85. Sunday, 8 May 2011

86. Grails Experiment
Sunday, 8 May 2011

87. Grails Experiment
Sunday, 8 May 2011

88. Foundered
Sunday, 8 May 2011

89. Reduce Test Duration
Sunday, 8 May 2011

90. Summit
Sunday, 8 May 2011

91. Pampering
Sunday, 8 May 2011

92. Sunday, 8 May 2011

93. 100 km wall
Sunday, 8 May 2011

94. Summit
Sunday, 8 May 2011

95. Sunday, 8 May 2011

96. Sunday, 8 May 2011

97. Blame Game
Sunday, 8 May 2011

98. Sunday, 8 May 2011

99. Posse parallelizing JIRA Tests
Sunday, 8 May 2011

100. Posse: Test Optimisation with Confluence
Sunday, 8 May 2011

101. Sunday, 8 May 2011

102. Sunday, 8 May 2011

103. Sunday, 8 May 2011

104. Sunday, 8 May 2011

105. But how fast?
Sunday, 8 May 2011

106. Mission Dolores 1880
Sunday, 8 May 2011

107. Dev Speed Posse
Sunday, 8 May 2011

108. Disturbed!
Sunday, 8 May 2011

109. EOL
Sunday, 8 May 2011

110. Automation
• CI Server is the “face”
• One Button
• Elastic
• Centrally owned and managed
• Cover supported platforms
• Reliable
• Continuous deployment (coming soon)
Sunday, 8 May 2011

111. Sunday, 8 May 2011

112. Tough times
Sunday, 8 May 2011

113. Does it matter?
Sunday, 8 May 2011