Engineering at the BBC

1. Gavin Barton
Group Engineering Manager
BBC Future Media, K&L & Content Discovery
e: gavin.barton@bbc.co.uk
t: @gav_bar

2. 171 million

8. Homepage and Search vision is
to instigate and deepen each
BBC Online visitor’s journey
through the stories that spark
their interests and capture
their imagination

9. building our team culture
ENGINEERING AT THE BBC

10. K&L Product Vision – Brilliantly Curious
Unlocking learning potential in everything we do. The BBC’s knowledge and learning products make learning feel effortless
because they wake and sustain your natural curiosity with connected services built around world-class BBC content.
Development Team Mission
To deliver great software and products for the K&L Product vision keeping audiences at the heart of what we do.
Quality Craft Delivery
Our Commitment
• Our Team Charter is our guiding principles
• Collaborate and deliver as team
Our Team
• No showstopper bugs in our live code
• 99.95% availability for all our continuous
delivery cloud based projects
• We deliver high
quality software
• NFRs from the
out set
• Treated as a first
class citizen
• Great engineering
practices adopted
throughout team
• Share our code
• We hold each
other to high
standards
• We adopt great
continuous
delivery practices
• Deliver our
products when
we say we will
• Our team builds
great culture
• Keep Innovating
• Enjoy what we
do
• We don’t work in
silos

11. PDM
Right people around the same table
TPM BA UX DEV DEV DEV DEV TEST
TEST
DEV
LEAD
UX
TPM BA UX DEV DEV DEV TEST
PDM
DEV

12. our delivery mindset
ENGINEERING AT THE BBC

17. Tracking Progress

18. Visibility is everything

19. continuous delivery
ENGINEERING AT THE BBC

20. Continuous Integration ≠ Continuous Delivery
- Smaller features
- Regular live releases
- Increased Automation
- DevOps
- Mindset change…
“Always ready for release”

21. Operational Concerns
• Quality from the outset
• Deal with Monitoring, support etc early
• Measure and track NFRs
• Releasing to live before audience go live
• Failure scenarios and group prep

22. Delivering Value
• Small features with value
• Team focused on few features
• Limit WIP

23. Quality of Build
• Use branching to keep the master clean
• Fast, automated tests
• Test everything
• Code reviews enforced through GitHub
• Build run on code review candidates

24. Publically Advertise our Status

25. Defects
• Daily triage
• Now or never
• Blockers
• Belief in next live release

26. Surface Quality
• Pass rate
• Defect Age
• Live Status

27. Unfinished Features
• Hide from live users
• Manage via content
• Feature flags

28. building software – the fun stuff
ENGINEERING AT THE BBC

29. How we Engineer Software
• Responsive Web Software
• Cut the mustard
• HTML Standards
• NFRs
• Accessibility
• Keep it simple
• SOA – RESTful services

30. Journey of a feature to live
Tech Discovery Build Feature CI
Feature Level
Testing
App Level
Integration
Testing
Regression
Testing
Live Release
Product
Definition
Feature
Build
Testing
Phase
Release
phase
Pre Release
Activities
Post Live
Release
Dev/UX/Test
Review
Push to Test
Feature
Elaboration
Feature
Definition

31. Journey of a feature to live
Product
Definition
Feature
Elaboration
Feature
Definition

32. Journey of a feature to live
Product
Definition
Feature
Elaboration
Feature
Definition

33. Journey of a feature to live
Feature
Build
Tech Discovery Build Feature CI
Dev/UX/Test
Review
Push to Test

34. Journey of a feature to live
Feature
Build
Tech Discovery
Technical design
Technical architecture
Updating story points
UX design considered
Accessibility considered
Test considered
Tech spike

35. Journey of a feature to live
Feature
Build
Build Feature
Create feature branch
Create Tests including mock data
Write code
Pairing
TDD
Write Manual Test Cases
TestRail Updated
Test cases reviewed
Identify automation test candidates

36. Journey of a feature to live
Feature
Build
CI
Run test suite on sandbox
Code Sniffer
Code coverage
NFRs

37. Journey of a feature to live
Feature
Build
Peer review
Fix early bugs
DoD Update
Pull request & code review
Build
Push to Test

38. Journey of a feature to live
Feature Level
Testing
App Level
Integration
Testing
Regression
Testing
Testing
Phase

39. Journey of a feature to live
Feature Level
Testing
Testing
Phase
Test supported device/browser list
Fix bugs triage only when needed
Accessibility testing
Exploratory testing
Manual testing

40. Journey of a feature to live
App Level
Integration
Testing
Testing
Phase
Test supported device/browser list
Fix bugs triage only by exception
Exploratory testing
Manual Testing
Integration
Load test
Accessibility testing

41. Regression
Testing
Journey of a feature to live
Testing
Phase
Manual regression
KDF Run
Update KDF Pack
DoD Updated
Automated Regression

42. Journey of a feature to live
Live Release
Release
phase
Pre Release
Activities
Post Live
Release

43. Journey of a feature to live
Release
phase
Pre Release
Activities
Content release
Co-ordinate with other teams

44. Journey of a feature to live
Live Release
Release
phase
No blocker bugs
Features and dependencies must be tested
before a release can go
Fix none blocker bugs as next priority above all
DoD Completed

45. Journey of a feature to live
Release
phase
Post Live
Release
Post release activities
Live Sanity check
Release note
Live Regression
KDF Run
Stats analysis / RUM

46. Journey of a feature to live
Live Release
Release
phase
Pre Release
Activities
Post Live
Release

48. Thank you
e: gavin.barton@bbc.co.uk
t: @gav_bar