[email protected]: ibm software group's journey of agile transformation

Connecting a Smarter Planet

Agility@Scale: IBM Software Group's Journey of Agile Transformation

Adam Gunther Senior Development Manager WebSphere Application Server

© 2010 IBM Corporation

Welcome

Adam Gunther Senior Development Manager IBM WebSphere Application Server

§  Currently worldwide management responsibility for: – WebSphere Application Server Liberty Profile – WebSphere Application Server Community Edition

§  Over 9 years of experience in the WebSphere Application Server development organization

– Lead Test Strategist for WAS 8.0 – Global Function Test Lead for WAS 7.0 – System Test and End-to-end automation Leadership for WAS 6.0 and

WAS 6.1


WAS Global Distributed Development Environment

Business Challenge: §  Perceived lack of trust, support, or delegation to the appropriate level §  Plans committed too far in advance (18+ months) and in too much detail §  Disjointed plan content not linked with requirements or project execution §  Resistance to change despite new information – late requirements,

discovery, new requests is the norm §  Driver instability and delays caused by increased phased code

integrations

600+ employees China, Canada, Israel, India, United Kingdom, United States

WAS product family supports: •  60+ OS platforms •  10+ DBs •  wide range of other products


Three Things We Turned into Organizational Priorities

1.  Op%mizing teams for agility, speed, responsiveness, and predictability

2.  Crea%ng transparency for improved understanding, communica%on, and decision making

3.  A deliberate emphasis on flexible, loosely coupled architectures


Initial Agile Transition

Waterfall Cycle time = 7 iterations

Development Iterations

Code Comp FVT

Test Cycle

Auto FVT

Agile Cycle time = 1 iteration

Iteration 1

Code

Auto Dev

Iteration 2

Code

Auto Dev

Iteration n

Code

Auto Dev

Continuous Automated Regression

SVT Persona

SVT / Persona

Development

Component FVT

Cross Platform FVT

Information Development

Feature Teams

ü Regression detection down from 3 months to 1 day

ü Cycle time reduction from 7 iterations to 1 iteration

ü 60% reduction of resources for functional verification


Agile Transition Stage 2

§  Remaining Challenges after stage 1 §  Multiple tools needed for development with little integration §  Project planning done in silos resulting in no established release velocity §  Feature teams were not truly multidisciplinary

§  Pilot: The WAS 8.5 Liberty Profile Development Team §  Started in 2010 with 8 developers in the UK/US and grew to 50+ developers by 2012

spanning UK, US, Canada, China, and India. §  Use Rational Team Concert as a single integrated development environment with

100% integrated source code management, development, test and faster build times. §  Maintained separate scrum teams, but joint prioritization (single backlog), planning,

and demos. RTC made this easy!!! §  Resulted in increased productivity and increased moral §  Customer feature requests automatically populated into development RTC §  Provided management clear visibility to status with little effort. Engineers spend more

time innovating and less time preparing and providing status. Eliminate spreadsheets!!

§  Moving Forward §  Due to the success of our pilot in WAS 8.5, we are rolling out these changes to the

entire global organization


How We Use RTC

§  Feature → Epics → Stories → Tasks – Features contain the high level requirement e.g., Web Profile support for Liberty – Epics are a useable “customer” solutions – e.g. As a user I want to be able to write web

applications – Stories are individual pieces of function (e.g. Provide Servlet capability) – Tasks are the breakdown of the story into individual parts. E.g. write test cases, create

user documentation §  Design Issues

– Used for resolving technical issues. Once a design has been agreed, it is written into the issue

§  Risk/Issues – Any project related risk that needs to be tracked

§  Defects – Source code bugs

§  Release Plan – User Stories are prioritized relative to features – Stories are Must, Should, Could or Won't – Uses release plan type in RTC

§  Iteration Plans – Teams pull stories into iteration plans based on the release plan priorities

8 IBM Confidential September 8, 2011


The Right Tools Help Capture the Right Metrics

RTC + BIRT for release burn down Built-in Automated Defect Tracking

Built-in Build Health Monitoring

Custom HTML for Schedules/Scorecards/Images

Iteration Plans


The Fallacy of Developer Optimism


Leverage the Cloud for Success

Find Hardware

Setup Automation Deploy Validate Work

Deploy Pattern Work

After All That, What Are the Rewards?

ü  Doubled number of builds per week ü  Automation drives 1.3m test cases wkly,+70% ü  Regression testing complete in 1 day vs 3 mos ü  60% reduction in FVT resources ü  First beta drop delivered 7 months earlier ü 1.5x unique companies downloaded the Alpha/Beta 1 drivers at GA+25 weeks.

“Using the Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management tools has allowed my team to embrace the agile development process to meet aggressive

business deadlines while ensuring that we are achieving the highest quality that our customers demand today.”

Dave Klavon, Director, WebSphere Application Server Development

[email protected]: ibm software group's journey of agile transformation

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