Evolution of Agile Development at
Genius.com
Drew Stephens, Ryan Ausanka-Crues, Scott Mersy

Genius.com Overview
• Software-as-a-Service
• Sales & marketing products
• Languages
– PHP
– Perl
– Java
– C#
– JavaScript
• MySQL
• ExtJS & YUI
2

The Bad Old Days
• May 2007
– Unreliable release dates
– Low quality
– Unmaintainable code
– Poor ops/dev/QA
relationship
– 0% test coverage
3

What Was Wrong?
• Requirement waterfall
• Assigned silo development
• No automated testing
• Developing on quicksand
• No progress tracking
• Dev & QA separation
• Release piling
4

Comprehensive Agility
Organizational Structure
Process Framework
Development Approach
5

Comprehensive Agility
Organizational Structure
Eliminate Waste Empower the Team Collaborative Layout
Access to Execs Intelligence over Experience Allow Fun
Increased Expectations Reduced management Educate Execs
Process Framework
Development Approach
5

Comprehensive Agility
Organizational Structure
Eliminate Waste Empower the Team Collaborative Layout
Access to Execs Intelligence over Experience Allow Fun
Increased Expectations Reduced management Educate Execs
Process Framework
Iterations Demos User Stories Daily Sync-ups
One-piece flow Embrace Change Retrospectives
Development Approach
5

Comprehensive Agility
Organizational Structure
Eliminate Waste Empower the Team Collaborative Layout
Access to Execs Intelligence over Experience Allow Fun
Increased Expectations Reduced management Educate Execs
Process Framework
Iterations Demos User Stories Daily Sync-ups
One-piece flow Embrace Change Retrospectives
Development Approach
Coding Standards Collective Ownership Continuous Integration
Collective Design Automated Testing Technical Backlog
Design Metaphors YAGNI Pair Programming
5

Comprehensive Agility
Organizational Structure
Eliminate Waste Empower the Team Collaborative Layout
Access to Execs Intelligence over Experience Allow Fun
Increased Expectations Reduced management Educate Execs
Process Framework
Iterations Demos User Stories Daily Sync-ups
One-piece flow Embrace Change Retrospectives
Development Approach
Coding Standards
Collective Design XP
Collective Ownership
Automated Testing
Continuous Integration
Technical Backlog
Design Metaphors YAGNI Pair Programming
5

Comprehensive Agility
Organizational Structure
Eliminate Waste Empower the Team Collaborative Layout
Access to Execs Intelligence over Experience Allow Fun
Increased Expectations Reduced management Educate Execs
Process Framework
Iterations
One-piece flow
Scrum
Demos User Stories
Embrace Change
Daily Sync-ups
Retrospectives
Development Approach
Coding Standards
Collective Design XP
Collective Ownership
Automated Testing
Continuous Integration
Technical Backlog
Design Metaphors YAGNI Pair Programming
5

Comprehensive Agility
Organizational Structure
Lean
Eliminate Waste Empower the Team Collaborative Layout
Access to Execs Intelligence over Experience Allow Fun
Increased Expectations Reduced management Educate Execs
Process Framework
Iterations
One-piece flow
Scrum
Demos User Stories
Embrace Change
Daily Sync-ups
Retrospectives
Development Approach
Coding Standards
Collective Design XP
Collective Ownership
Automated Testing
Continuous Integration
Technical Backlog
Design Metaphors YAGNI Pair Programming
5

Agile Misconceptions
6

Agile Misconceptions
“We’re iterative so we’re agile”
“There’s no time for architecture design”
“Our features are too big to fit into sprints”
“Our code can’t be unit tested”
“The daily meeting is a waste of time”
“Agile is an excuse to micro-manage”
6

Genius.com Agile Milestones
...
September
2009
Split into 2 teams
January
Hired brilliant build engineer
May
Hired supportive VP
April
New collaborative workspace
2008 March
Introduce Scrum board
February
Scrum Master training
December
Start of on-time release streak
October
2007 August
Co-located dev & QA
Nightly builds
June
First unit tests
April
First “iteration”
7

Hiring
• Intelligence over Experience
• Cultural fit
• Enthusiasm
• Motivated
• Referrals
• From RIT or HMC
8

Collaboration
• Encourage non-work interaction
• Team breaks story into tasks
• Collective decisions
• Self-assigned work
• Co-located product management
• Remove barriers
• Hold team responsible
• Conducive workspace
9

May 2007
10

February 2008
11

June 2009
12

Daily Standup
13

Scrum Board
• 5 columns
• Swim lanes for stories
• Stories are color coded
• Team commits to stories every 2
weeks
• Production and previous sprint
bugs
• Team decides order of stories
• Can only be on one open story
• Don’t move on until entire story
is done
14

Definition of “Done”
• Task
– Unit tests written and run
– Code and tests checked in
– QA verify it’s bug free
– UI tests written and run
– Security code review
• Story
– Product management sign-off
– Potentially shippable
– No open non-validated tasks
– No technical debt
15

Prioritized Backlog
• Maintained by product management
• Aggregation of all features requested
(users, sales, marketing, operations, developers, QA, etc)
• Prioritized by product manager based on input
• Higher priority = increased definition and granularity
• Meet & greets w/ the team
• Phrased as user stories
“As a marketer I want to be able to schedule an email to go out in the future so that I
don’t have to be at my desk for the email to go out at a specific time”
• Acceptance criteria
“1 month maximum, 1 hour minimum”
• Everyone needs to understand tradeoffs
16

17

Process Evolution
• May 2007
– Unreliable release dates
– Low quality
– Unmaintainable code
– Poor ops/dev/QA
relationship
– 0% test coverage
18

Process Evolution
• May 2007 • December 2009
– Unreliable release dates – 13 consecutive on-time
– Low quality major releases
– Unmaintainable code – 90% reduction in
production bugs
– Poor ops/dev/QA
relationship – 72% unit test coverage
– 0% test coverage
18

1 Release (2007)
19

21 Release (2009)
21-a 21-b
New product
20

21 Release - Part 2
21
21-a 21-b 21-c 21-d 21-e
New customer!
21

22 Release
21 22
21-a 21-b 21-c 21-d 21-e 22-a 22-b
New product
22

Great Resources
• Our blog! - http://eng.genius.com
• Mike Cohn - http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com
• BayAPLN - http://bayapln.org
• Agile Alliance - http://agilemanifesto.org
• James Shore - http://jamesshore.com
23

Have fun!
24

Tools We Use
• 3rd Party • We Built
– PHPUnit – PHP DSL for Selenium
– Hudson – JS/CSS Packaging
– PhpUnderControl – PHPUnit wrapper
– Jira – DB Fixture Framework
– SVN – Automated deployment
– Eclipse
– TestRun
– Selenium RC
– Capistrano
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