In this post I share an experience from a recent project where I influenced the senior management team to change strategy & tactics, by moving away from the standard Development->Integration->QA Team 1->QA Team n (which lasted anywhere between 2-4 weeks) approach to a more controlled Agile, Iterative/Lean approach of weekly Build & Test cycles, to a build-every-three-days, in order to make the deadline (that was fixed). We did this entirely manually, where our Agile processes were still coming of age, and had little in terms of real-world continuous integration. What I wanted to share really, is the way in which I influenced and got people to change their mindset, by using simple metaphors that were actually quite powerful, and can be used to sell similar stories:
- Bankable Builds - Reusing concepts from The Weakest Link
- Surgical Mode - Taking a page from medicine - Surgery is about precision, don't do more than what's required
It is interesting that these concepts really stuck with the entire department, so much so that it's become part of the common vocabulary - almost every project now talks about Bankable Builds & Surgical mode!
The post is presented as follows:
Note: Like any high-profile project with intense management focus, the decision to make these changes came from senior management, which put a spanner in the works with respect to granting our "Agile" team autonomy & empowerment. Although a little resistance was felt at the lower levels, the teams nevertheless remained committed to do-what-it-takes to ship the product. The teams and vendors did share their concerns in the retrospective feedback that the one-week release cycle was quite problematic to the point of chaotic with large overheads.
The facts can't be disputed though, that our agility was indeed flawed from the get-go by not having a solid continuous build, integration & regression test environment (lacking automation) in place. It was a struggle, with a lot of manual overhead, but it was a necessary intervention, that got us to launch on time. Not having done so, would have meant us missing the target deadline, the project was too high-stakes to ignore this intervention.
Going forward however, the principles of bankable builds is still a solid one, one that is well known to teams with mature software processes, I can't emphasise the value of investing in up-front automation with continuous build, daily regression testing & automated component / system tests will help make life so much easier for software development teams.
Invest time and effort getting the foundations set up at the expense of churning out code, continuing to do so will build a huge backlog for QA down the line, teams ending up spinning-their-wheels in putting out fires that would've been avoided, had the right discipline been set in place.
Invest time and effort getting the foundations set up at the expense of churning out code, continuing to do so will build a huge backlog for QA down the line, teams ending up spinning-their-wheels in putting out fires that would've been avoided, had the right discipline been set in place.
is a novel attempt at describing life as a practising project manager in the software development industry. Choosing fiction as a means for distilling this experience was the right call, since many books on software project management talk about mostly the process, but less so on the fundamental human experiences.