Agile at Well.ca

Agile at Well.ca How we think + do development

This is Our Process There are many like it, but this one is ours

There is no silver bullet.

With that said...

What is Well.ca?

We are deﬁned by our culture and service

Well.ca How do they work?

The Agile Manifesto Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan

Agile can be a cargo cult It’s a means, not an end

Getting Stuff Done

Getting Stuff Done stuff, |stəf| noun: whatever makes the most business sense in a given situation

Super Happy Well Point #1 Always be doing the most valuable thing you can

Process Herding cats for fun & proﬁt

Weeklong sprints

Daily standups

Five meetings a month

No fancy scoring

No fancy scoring Self-score on a Fibonacci scale

The simplest thing that works

Architecture Our philosophy

Many loosely coupled projects

Standard-ish LAMP

ssh http, https public manage haproxy private assets www01 wwwn jobs redis solr mysql queue

Aggressive upfront caching

We will hit a wall eventually

Thanks to metrics, we have a good idea when that will be

Refactoring into services over time

Keep the APIs clean

Code Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty

Mostly PHP ...some Ruby, some Java, some Python

Heavy reliance on Open Source

Lots of ugly heritage

Rewrite considered harmful

Rewrite considered harmful A better way forward is to isolate and marginalize bad code

Give prizes for net negative commits No code is better than no code

Many projects have a ‘clean’ side and a ‘dirty’ side

Super Happy Well Point #2 Sometimes, all you need is a graveyard for hacks

Super Happy Well Corollary #1 Know where the bodies are buried

Super Happy Well Corollary #1 Know where the bodies are buried (and try to keep them close to one another)

Development Tools

on the desktop

2*.*8+!';5&<"%&-+'()='+0&>> !"#$%&'()&*+'(,% *+'(,% on the in the desktop datacenter

Trac + Mike

We provide a common toolchain

We provide a common toolchain homebrew, templated dotﬁles, doo

Developers use whatever IDE/editor they like

Developers use whatever IDE/editor they like vi, TextMate, Eclipse

Developers are comfortable, but get accelerated for free

Those who accelerate others are worth more than those who drive fast

Version Control

A conundrum

Serving two masters On the one hand, you need stable code On the other hand, you need to be able to hack with impunity

Branches, and process

hotﬁx_z 14bcad production 569fdc 879025 239d7a 11acbe master 2c8b84 5f43c4 1a4b5d 05eb1a 365adf feature_x 48ffd1 04cfea feature_y 37614a 903daf 4745fd

Have your cake and eat it too

Super Happy Well Point #3 Lean on your tools to free your mind

Environment Our philosophy

“Can’t someone else do it?” Balance the ﬂexibility of DIY against it being someone else’s problem when things break*

* When things break it’s often your problem, even if it isn’t “your problem”

Super Happy Well Point #4 Outsourcing risk is itself a risk

Environment and architecture are inseparable ...but our architecture is always changing

We solve this by owning everything

WHAT DOESN’T BEND, BREAKS

Crazy ﬂexible environment

99% vendor-free

Relentless Automation

20% time

Super Happy Well Point #5 Innovate on top of the golden path, not beside it

Environment The nuts & bolts

Crazy ﬂexible environment

We’re not bajillionaires (yet)

VMs, and lots of ‘em

kvm (remember about the golden path?)

Relentless Automation

doo http://github.com/mtrudel/doo

Buy one, get the rest free

Buy one, get the rest free (including dev & test environments)

technology focused redis, solr, smtp, beanstalk, etc.

this is wrong

service focused CDN, search, related products, etc.

consistent with a focus on APIs

scale horizontally forever

scale horizontally forever (for small to medium values of ‘forever’)

Deployment

This is one thing to get right

Super Happy Well Point #6 If something hurts, do it more often

10 AUTOMATE 20 GOTO 10

Our deploys take twelve seconds

We deploy multiple times a day

“On WordPress.com we deploy code to production twenty or thirty times a day and anyone in the company can do it. We measure the deploy time to hundreds of servers and if it gets too slow (more than 30-60 seconds) we ﬁgure out a new way to optimize it. In that short rapid iteration environment the most important thing isn’t necessarily how perfect code is when you send it out, but how quickly you can revert if you need to so the cost of a mistake is really low, under a minute of brokenness. Someone can go from idea to working code to production and more importantly real users in just a few minutes and I can’t imagine any better form of testing.” - Matt Mullenwag

capistrano http://capify.org

minicap http://github.com/well/minicap

Metrics You can’t improve what you can’t measure

At Well.ca, real business processes depend on metrics

We consider metrics a production grade service

speedtracer

100% live data

Out of band JSON payload (via X-Traceurl: header)

Gather data in Chrome

...or with a small graphing client

speedtracer will be open sourced soon

A/B Testing

Philosophy: It should be too easy to add an A/B Test

Philosophy: A/B testing should add no load to the site

Make testing part of the dev process

php ab testing http://github.com/aliasaria/PHP-redis- A-B-Testing vanity (for rails) http://vanity.labnotes.org/rails.html

Dashboarding and Reporting

We tried a lot of different tools MS-SQL, BIRT, hand-made SQL queries

ali@well.ca mat@well.ca http://labs.well.ca http://github.com/well

We’ve learned: Make one dashboard for the whole company

We’ve learned: Give outside teams access to raw Excel

We’ve learned: Measure everything that matters

We’ve learned: Spend your weekends on reports

People Tools

Email, IRC, Twitter, Campﬁre It doesn’t matter, just talk. A lot.

Partychat A very well kept secret

Partychat IRC over Jabber, painlessly

Partychat IRC over Jabber, painlessly http://partychapp.appspot.com/ or github.com/well/well-partychat/

High Trafﬁc FTW Many eyeballs make problems shallow

Stay in touch. http://labs.well.ca http://github.com/well

http://www.freshbooks.com	167
http://static.slidesharecdn.com	2
http://www.billingsoftware.biz	1
http://radbox.me	1
http://www.newsisfree.com	1

Agile at Well.ca

by Ali Asaria on Nov 11, 2010

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

5 Embeds 172

Statistics

Agile at Well.ca Presentation Transcript