This session focuses on the growing pains and successes of the software teams at Atlassian, when moving to continuous deployment and the opportunities they are creating towards continuous delivery. When a company takes a big strategic decision, the impact it has on its people is a mark of how well its leaders understand the principles behind the agile approach. The impact of this decision on the software development teams was to go from a 97 day iteration to a two week continuous deployment approach. Each team was given the responsibility on how they would achieve this and every team had different triumphs and frustrations Specialist teams were also introduced to build up to specifically transfer knowledge and disseminate useful practices (with context), from UX to build management and wider DevOps practices

1. Continuous development
Growing pains
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2. Who am I ?
Community developer
Salesforce & Heroku
kanban, java, scala, clojure
communities
@jr0cket
blog.jr0cket.co.uk
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3. Atlassian: In the beginning...
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4. Success happens !
Software for software developers
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5. Really big shed
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6. How does that happen without
pain ?
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7. So the story begins...
startup culture
open, no bull...
practices evolved as necessary
business growing
everyone is happy
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8. Atlassian values
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9. Maintaining the culture during
growth
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10. Many companies fail
Control over complexity Fear of innovation
Restrictive management
controls
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11. Mafia
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12. Atlassian stay “agile”
Trust in their people
Encouraging collaboration
Promoting innovation
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13. Agree on Cadence
97 Days release cycle
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14. Innovation encouragement
20% time
Fedex Days ShipIt Days
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15. Big Strategic Decision
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16. Converging on the cloud
Make products more accessible
Products have to be more integrated
Unified product experience
Enterprise customer support
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17. Culture influenced from the top
Ship on-demand & product at
same time
Same short release cycle
across the board
left up to teams on how to
achieve it
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18. Challenges
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19. Team Culture(s)
Each team evolved its own way
JIRA team formed 2002
Confluence team formed 2003
Team practices formed by its members
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20. Fighting Conway’s Law
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
Culture shapes code
diverse teams
a range of practices
evolving different tools
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21. Adapt without loosing Culture
Make your culture visible
define what you stand for
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22. Atlassian values
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23. Culture needs to adapt
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24. Toward continuous deployment
Focus on smaller features
breaking down stories
no more epics
clearer understanding of what is
valuable - by delivering it!
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25. Developer cycle changes
Shorter dev cycle
to fit into production dev cycle
more opportunities to consider whats
valuable
feeling the pain regularly encourages
improvement
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26. Understanding Technical Debt
Work on something... with the intent to
clean it up later
Ward Cunningham
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27. Technical Debt in practice
Decisions get left behind
Approaches get lost over time
Unavoidable growth via software inertia
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28. Increasing awareness
Customer need over develop what’s cool
feedback from customers
developers engaged with those
concerns
avoid navel gazing & chasing shiny
things
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29. Wider engagement
Social media channels
shaping image
Customers more vocal
about experience
Competition grows
Belief & Ambition grow
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30. More extreme options
Breaking up products
too costly and painful?
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31. Missing elements
A realistic roadmap
customers what to know where
something is going
hard to give 100% guarantees on
everything / anything
a diverse audience to please
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32. Solving it together
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33. Quality Assistance
Helping raise the quality bar
Asking “difficult” questions
how does x work?
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34. Build team
Developers love
learning maven, right?
Puppet is more fun than
beer, surely!
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35. UX team
Helping developers
understand value of UX
http://seb.ly/
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36. Kick-ass team
Teams with in teams
focusing on specific product
challenges
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37. Collaboratively Iterating
Empowering people to collaborate
towards an understood goal that gives
clear value
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38. Leveraging the tools
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39. Tools != process
Tools can support change
Encourage innovations
Allow understanding value
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40. Public bug tracker
Ultimate form of “dogfood”
Helps some of the audience understand
company constraints & direction
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41. DVCS saves the day !
Not a panacea, but very
liberating
Developers allowed to
experiment in a safe way
Social coding
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42. Social Code reviews
Not just for new code
Identifying technical debt
Looking for opportunities to improve
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43. Benefits
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44. Atlassian as a platform
Engage with developer environment
Drive innovation on a wider scale
Add value to developers as well as
customers
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45. Customer engagement
New features
Dark features
AB testing
Give Feedback
making it really easy to give valuable
feedback based on what the customer
was doing!!
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46. Refocus on user experience
Building on areas of strength
workflow
Radical changes to areas of weakness
user experience (UX)
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47. http://semanticstudios.com
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48. Constraints driving innovation
24 hrs to deliver something valuable
no control over what
no say in who or how
just do it, evaluate the results
Formally known as FedEx days
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49. Engaging the wider community
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50. Community is the greatest asset
User & Developer
communities
give valuable,
actionable feedback
become an extended
part of the organisation
your evangelists to the
world
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51. Opening up
Access to your platform
Creating business driven
market place
Focusing on developer
experience
Helping customers
succeed
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52. Value of platform
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53. Platform is the new framework
Facebook - social marketing
Heroku - universal managed
platform
Salesforce - Sales, Marketing,
Social Media analysis,
Enterprise development
platforms
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54. In Summary
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55. Success, agility & culture
Atlassian
Salesforce & Heroku
successful companies
retaining their culture
Why not in your organisation?
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56. Thank you
jstevenson@salesforce.com
@jr0cket
blog.jr0cket.co.uk
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