Dec 08 2009
Shock therapy agile adoption at 7Digital
Dan Rough, Rob Bowley, Hibri Marzook and others from 7Digital presented an experience report of agile adoption by the services team at 7Digital, a media distribution company, today at XPDay 09. What’s really interesting about this experience report, compared to others at technical conferences, is that their CEO and commercial director were sitting on the panel.
The effort to introduce agile development was provoked by lengthy releases, often with half-finished features. With random work assignment, no clear prioritisation or plan, Rough described that previous development culture of the company was as “JFDI” (just f* do it).
The change started with a “shock therapy” scrum, introducing one week iterations with scrum by the book. Bowley said that the initial gain from this was very quick feedback. They implemented strict XP development practices, enforcing unit tests, integration tests and as much as possible acceptance tests for any new work. They also clearly defined team principles and communicated them. All work was done with a single stream without work-in-progress limits. In addition to scrum by the book, they implemented analysis workshops with the whole team around a whiteboard, converting to BDD scenarios after the meeting.
Development team was unable to do any longer term planning at this stage, explaining it by not having enough data. (However, they started collecting data at that point, and their average cycle time was 45 days). Doing very rough projections, they realised that “if we did it the way we were doing it, we wouldn’t do it in time”, said Bowley. The work was split between two teams to achieve the goal faster.
Ben Drury, the CEO of 7Digital, says that he was scared by the transition, especially as Bowley and Rough announced that it will get worse before it gets better. However, he said that in retrospect doing it was the right decision. “When you’re a smaller company competing with giant, one of the things that’s really important is speed”, said Drury, adding that the change in the process has improved their speed of innovation. They were able to build and release an open B2B API, which is now their competitive advantage. They now have the ability to for different teams to build products in parallel, where they only had the capability to work only on one thing at a time a year ago.
Stephen Somerville, the sales director of 7Digital, said that it was a steep learning curve to understand this new approach. “There was a period of great uncertainty and a real reluctance to give any estimates, which was a difficult thing to sell to our customers. Now we built up data [...], we’re in a really good place”, said Somerville, adding that the visibility and the statistics are really useful for him now. He also said that the new development approach is beneficial because “there are so many places where you can adjust the direction, so you don’t end up going too far [in the wrong direction]“.
Drury said that his initial concern was that they were having far too many meetings, which was later adjusted by the team. Instead of weekly retrospectives, they do a retrospective every two weeks, although the iterations still run weekly. The analysis meeting is merged with the prioritisation session, and is now run on demand. The team is now more proactive and also proposes features, and they implemented a fully automated production deployment.
Their average cycle time today is 20.4 days. They now have a dedicated tester, who leads testing and assists developers, partially leads analysis sessions and is responsible for pre-approval before a feature goes to the stakeholder for sign-off. Compared to six months ago, they spend more time on acceptance tests. They now run three streams with work-in-progress limits.
As one of the downsides, Drury said that there is a lot of jargon around the process and terms that they don’t understand so having more clarity in that area would be beneficial.
See other articles from XPDay 09. I’ll be posting more articles about this conference, subscribe to my RSS feed to get notified about that.
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[...] Finally, Gojko Adzic was kind enough to post some notes and his thoughts on the session that we gave which can be found here. [...]