Socialtext Distributed Agile

Ross Mayfield Adina Levin

Tracy Ruggles

Socialtext Distributed Agile• Distributed agile is a trend

– At BarCamp and D-Camp a few years ago

– Last year at PCamp

Socialtext Distributed Agile

Socialtext Distributed Agile• Why agile?

– Personal experience with waterfall– 300 page prds– 24 month product cycles– product obsolete when released– dev and pm mutual

incomprehension

•Agile sounds like better way–Small-a agile, not big-A agile–Lots of war stories requiring beer

Socialtext Distributed Agile• The basics

– 2 week iterations– Hosted service and SAAS

appliance– Hosted every 2 weeks,

appliance every month

Anatomy of a story• Anatomy of a story

Anatomy of a Story

Anatomy of a Story

Anatomy of a Story

Anatomy of a Story• Cross-functional

discussion• Real time teamwork

Anatomy of a story family• How to do planning with agile

– Leadership team direction for year and quarter– Stories fit into projects. – Occasional focused planning a project level– Occasional f2f and focus

Real Live Customers• ”Customer feedback blog"

Information radiators

Challenges - Teamwork

• “The swarm" – Started with multiple processes– Changed to one process, one dev group

• Emotional challenges – Can't fight and then play foosball, get beer

• Logistics– Need to be sensitive to timezone

differences or we'll miss people

Socialtext Agile Culture• Learning... retrospect every iteration, what

went well, what didn't, what can be improved• JFDI.. if you have an idea for improvement,

take the ball• Transparency - code, design, planning,

customer feedback, better in the open

•

Outakes

Challenges - Design• Harder to "whiteboard" ideas together

– voip and screen or vnc– communicate that it's a brainstorming meeting

and not tactical story definition• Design patterns

– could do more to make it easier to add additional stories with design variants

• Usability testing• Architecture

– Review stories in families– Appoint architecture steward

Socialtext Agile Development• No code ownership (but some

expertise)• Source code control - cvs > subversion

> git• Iteration capacity based on on

"yesterday's weather"• Pair programming with voip and screen• Standup 3x per week - what are you

working on, where do you need help

Socialtext Agile QA• Release testing is a considered combination of

automated and human testing with the goal of preventing unhappy experiences for our users.

• Story test cover expected behavior & corner cases– As stories are finished, QA validates and raises

concerns during the iteration.• Browser based testing with selenium

– UI tests run 24/7 just like unit tests. – Automated tests are maintained and always exercise

a majority of the functions exposed to the user.• Exploratory testing• Lightweight performance analysis