How Engineering Drives Agility

As mentioned at the book Accelerate: “Many Agile adoptions have treated technical practices as secondary compared to the management and team practices that some Agile frameworks emphasize. The research shows that technical practices play a vital role in achieving these outcomes.” Agility can never be achieved with crap software. Any attempt to implement Scrum in your team makes you feel uncomfortable when you have tons of technical debt in place but never prioritized.

In this talk, four important topics will be covered:
1. Why is technical excellence one of the most important area for reaching agility?
2. What are the strategies to transform the engineering team?
3. What are the technical practices to follow?
4. What is the roadmap through agility from technical perspective?

All the answers will be supported with real-life cases, with failures and successes. The workshop is highly recommended for the audience who wants to hear how and which technical practices can have impact on agility and how a technical roadmap can be designed.

Transcript

1. HOW ENGINEERING DRIVEs agility LEMi ORHAN ERGiN HAKAN ERDOĞAN SABRİ ONUR TÜZÜN
3. Building software is a journey from complexity to generate business value
5. idea emerge feature, bug, improvement
6. problem identification f*ckups and lessons learned qualitative research methods (kpi’s, metrics, etc.) unstructured data analysis (interviews, surveys, etc.) funnel analysis user needs identification storytelling, brainstorming product backlog management idea emerge
7. idea prioritized idea emerge plan, schedule, order
8. prototyping proposed mvp / mvi cost of delay analysis sprint and release planning voting, poker planning portfolio planning (big room planning) idea prioritized idea emerge
9. development started idea prioritized idea emerge research, code, test, deploy
10. monoliths /microservices evolutionary architecture, emergent design hexagonal architecture / ports and adaptors branching mechanisms / trunk based development automated tests (unit, integration, functional, etc) pair & mob programming code review, team standards continuous integration design patterns & refactoring test driven development (tdd, bdd, atdd) development started idea prioritized idea emerge consumer driver contract testing transaction management static code analysis event handling / messaging non-blocking io, data streaming monitoring & traceability resilient architecture asynchronous communication cache management rest / grpc api management
11. harnessing development started idea prioritized idea emerge making ready to release
12. load and performance testing manual user acceptance penetration testing release and rollback procedures exploratory testing harnessing development started idea prioritized idea emerge
13. going live harnessing development started idea prioritized idea emerge deploy, release, test, monitor
14. deployment strategies feature flagging monitoring, tracing, profiling disaster recovery & chaos testing canarying & a/b testing journey tests going live harnessing development started idea prioritized idea emerge
15. idea PLAN DEVelop RELEASE going live harnessing development started idea prioritized idea emerge
16. idea prioritized development started harnessing going live idea emerge What business understands about agility
17. idea prioritized development started harnessing going live idea emerge What engineering understands about agility
18. idea prioritized development started harnessing going live idea emerge What agility is totally about
19. idea prioritized development started harnessing going live idea emerge Product development is based on fail fast, fail early and fail safe That requires discovery by doing fast experiments
20. AGILITY DEV-SEC-OPS CONTINUOUS DELIVERY LEAN STARTUP PROCESS TARGET ENABLER THE RIGHT WAY RIGHT PRODUCT THE MINDSET SOFTWARE CRAFTSMANSHIP
21. Agile doesn’t cure INCOMPETENCE. You can coach teams to be more engaged and collaborative, but NO Agile framework, method, or mindset can save you from BLATANT FAILURE if your development team is INCOMPETENT in basic engineering practices. Technical excellence is a MUST! Mike Beedle @mikebeedle 7:48 PM · Mar 21, 2018 https://twitter.com/mikebeedle/status/976500772438409216 Mike Beedle (died at March 23, 2018) Agile Manifesto co-creator proposed the term “agile” to manifesto co-creators introduced “Enterprise Scrum” and “Business Agility”
22. First-Aid Strategy: Hire A-class talents Stop overtime, push for productivity and efficiency Increase transparency with the whole company Stop adding new features, start fixing bugs Add new communication channels with business Establish on-call procedure for engineers (Batman, Robin, Alfred) Define a roll-out plan for big refactorings/replacements Define a strategy for technical excellence HTCtechnologY hiring culture
23. Phase 1: Well-Crafted Base Phase 2: Robust and Maintainable Phase 3: Continuously Delivering Value Mindset: Slow down to go faster Phase 0: Development Sucks!
24. Phase 0: Development sucks! Following best practices without knowledge and experience Following GitFlow or having long feature branches Microservice acting monoliths Too much technical debt Finish all steps and deploy at the very end No production release for months Complex deployment procedures Having silos, individual work is more valuable Developers are just code-monkeys Jira based Scrums, Scrum-fall sprints Micro-management with Scrum No/few tests, huge manual test cost No continuous verification/testing, no CI Definition of Done: Development done, and tested at local
25. Phase 1: Well-Crafted Base Realizing the reasons behind best practices Master-Feature branching mechanism Weekly releases Code reviews via pull requests CI/CD pipeline, deploy to production from the first day PreProd and production environments Manual preprod deployment with one click Pair programming Mono repository for easy refactoring Test driven development Hexagonal architecture for all microservices No Silo, Lunch & learn sessions (BBS) Definition of Done: Deployed to preprod
26. Phase 2: Robust and Maintainable Can define why good practices are better than the bad ones Common standards, efficient team work Multiple releases per week, blue/green deployment Automatic PreProd deployment after merge with master Consumer driven contract testing Anomaly detection, recovery from failures Mob programming Automatic functional testing Simulation testing, Load testing Quality assurance Domain Driven Mono-Repo Definition of Done: Complete testing at preprod
27. Phase 3: Continuously Delivering Value Believe no practice is better than others On-demand environment creation at merge requests Multiple releases per day, canary deployment Version control for everything, like db and infra More pairing and mobbing Code review sessions with team No branches, just master, feature flags Reliable, robust, resilient architecture Trunk-based Development, No pull requests Automatic acceptance tests Resilient architecture Continuous Delivery & Deployment Definition of Done: Deployed to production, and verified
28. Phase 4: No Framework What you do is your framework Highly customized for your team, your domain Empowered teams, de-scaled organization Able to introduce new stacks New team for governing architectural crosscuts Definition of Done: Metric based verification at production
29. Many Agile adoptions have treated technical practices as secondary compared to the management and team practices that some Agile frameworks emphasize. Our research shows that technical practices play a vital role in achieving these outcomes. Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble, et al. Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B9F83WM
30. @craftbaseio craftbase.io HAKAN ERDOĞAN LEMi ORHAN ERGiN SABRİ ONUR TÜZÜN @sotuzun @lemiorhan @hakanerdogan