Tales from the Agile battlefield

This talk covers some of the things we've implemented at onefinestay to optimise the sprints run within the engineering team, as well as a few lessons learnt in the process. It focuses on feature lifecycle from scoping, through development, to release and looks at some of the tools we use to keep the process running smoothly.

Transcript

1. Tales from the
   Agile battlefield
   Running productive sprints
   

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2. What this talk is and what it's
   not
   Highlights of some lessons learnt in moving to agile
   A description of our current working process
   An overview of some of the things we're working towards
   It is NOT a scrum master training session...
   

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3. onefinestay is a hotel operated out of other people's homes.
   1500+ homes across London, New York, Paris and LA
   100s of daily activities
   400+ concurrent guests over Christmas
   

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4. “The Airbnb For The 1%”
   

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5. A little bit about onefinestay
   Engineering
   Development teams of 2-10 developers
   ~20 developers running parallel sprints
   Building for internal clients as much as customers
   

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6. Sprints
   2 week parallel sprints for dev teams
   Monday-Friday
   Daily standups
   Sprint checkins / Team standups
   Sprint planning Thursday before the sprint starts
   Hack / Test days the first Monday of the sprint
   Retrospectives the last Friday of the sprint
   

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7. Tickets Overview
   Scoping
   Development life cycle
   Definition of done
   

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8. Scoping
   Meetings with the relevant stakeholders
   Developers write tickets
   Organised in Epics + the Backlog
   

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9. Development life cycle
   Branch ALL the things
   GitHub pull request ALL the things (?!)
   Code review ALL the things
   Build ALL the things
   

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10. The Battlefield
    Know the enemy (individual sprint plans)
    Team formation (blockers / dependencies)
    Decisive blows (closing out tickets)
    

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11. Definition of done
    Code review
    Jenkins
    User Acceptance Testing (UAT) - where necessary
    

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12. “... but, it's not done unless it's
    released!?”
    

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13. Releasing
    Separate to development sprint cycle
    More Jenkins
    Release branches individually or as bundles
    Gonzo / Fabric
    

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14. What did we learn
    Only add process where necessary
    Make sure "value" is based on the team scale
    Facilitate people doing what they're good at
    Iterate process changes sprint to sprint
    Make sure the tools work
    

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15. Moving Forward Overview
    Scoping
    Releasing
    

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16. Reviewing ticket scope
    Better peer review ahead of scheduling
    Reviewing with product to confirm requirements match
    

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17. Releasing
    Continuous Integration / Delivery
    Cinch
    UAT environments
    

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18. The tools we use
    atlassian.com/software/jira
    atlassian.com/software/hipchat
    /
    jenkins-ci.org travis-ci.org
    ... on GitHub
    onefinestay/gonzo
    onefinestay/cinch
    github/hubot
    

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19. /
    Fergus Doyle @junkafarian
    Where to find me
    twitter.com/junkafarian
    github.com/junkafarian
    speakerdeck.com/junkafarian
    ... or grabbing a drink after this talk
    

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