1.
Pain Is Over,
If You Want It
by Mike Bland
Practice Director, 18F
2015-10-19
Slide deck: http://goo.gl/CrCUii
This presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
This work is derived from Large Scale Development Culture Change: Google and the US Government,
which is Copyright 2014 Mike Bland, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License;
and from Solving the Total Problem of Software Quality and Government Services,
which is licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

2.
October 2013

3.
November 2013

4.
April 2014

5.
So now what?

6.
How I Learned To Stop Worrying
and Love the Bomb...Again

7.
Google 2005

8.
Inexperience

9.
Code gets added.
Tools get slower.
Builds take longer.
Tests take forever.
Code goes untested.
Dependency cruft builds.

10.
Large, infrequent changes frequently conflict.
Builds break overnight.
Emergency pushes common.
Fear is the mind killer.

11.
InertiaEnormous early success
Overconfidence, arrogance,
Impostor Syndrome
Insecurity
Inexperience,
“My code is too hard to test”
Ignorance
Old tools,
“I don’t have time to test.”
Friction

12.
(After-the-fact: goto fail; and Heartbleed)
Impact of testing is impossible to
measure a priori

13.
Priority Structure
If it can’t be measured,
(e.g. more clicks)
it doesn’t matter.
(i.e. won’t get me promoted)
Ignorance/Communication Breakdown

14.
How does culture change?

15.
Not like this…

16.
Or like this…
Beware of heroes, echo
chambers
Cultivate mythology as a
useful model

17.
What did we have to work with?

18.
Transparency
Employee directory, project
database, wiki/Sites
Freedom to experiment,
20% time
Autonomy
Grouplet system,
startup ethos
Collaboration

19.
Crossing the Chasm

20.
GWS tech lead Bharat Mediratta believed
automated testing would help…
…and it did.

21.
Started by
Bharat Mediratta
and Nick Lesiecki
Volunteers pooling
20% time
to drive adoption
of automated
testing
Testing Grouplet

22.
Testing on the Toilet (TotT)
Test Certified (TC)
Test Mercenaries
Ubiquitous,
incremental exposure
Clear, tangible path via
measurement, policy, goals
Hands-on help, tool
adoption and advocacy

23.
Company-wide events,
usually one day long
Address “important but
not urgent” backlog
Focus, motivation,
concrete goals, free stuff
Fixits

24.
Five years later…

25.
Rainbow of Death: Testing Grouplet
Intervene Validate Inform Inspire EmpowerMentor
Dependent Independent
Fixits
Test
Certified
Build Orbs
Lectures
TotT
CodelabsTool development
(w/ Testing Tech,
Build Tools)
Test Mercenaries
Tech Talks Testing Grouplet
All projects
Test Certified
Level 3
Revolution Fixit
(build tools)
Test Certified
Mentors
TAP Fixit
(CI platform)

26.
Google Stats 2013 via Eran Messeri
15,000 developers, working on 4K projects
All code is checked into one source tree
5,500 code commits/day
75 million test cases are run daily

27.
Power and knowledge to do the right thing
Thorough automated testing now the norm
Most breakages fixed before clients notice
Less fear, more confidence, flow, and joy
The Value to Developers

28.
David and Golaith

29.
18F 2015

30.
18F
Open-source development,
Agile methodologies
Educate, reform procurement,
not replace vendors
Savings as a natural side-effect
Founded March 2014 by
Presidential Innovation Fellows

31.
USCIS

32.
Every Kid in a Park

33.
College Scorecard

34.
Web Design Standards

35.
Web Design Standards

36.
Consulting

37.
limiting perceived risk
meeting regulatory requirements
job security
Internalization: Don’t rock the boat
Priority Structure

38.
Inertia
No quality incentives, PCSRA,
“successful company” people
Avoid risk/“accountability”,
“gov’t can’t attract talent”
Insecurity
Waterfall is familiar,
testing is someone else’s job
Ignorance
Outdated tools/procedures,
vendor lock-in of code, data
Friction

39.
Policy often mandated by nontechnical people
Development teams disconnected from end users
They don’t know what they don’t know
Ignorance/Communication Breakdown

40.
Employee directory
Code browser
Project data base
Wiki
EngEDU
Codelabs
First Day at Google, August 29, 2005
Tech Talks
Snippets
Objectives and Key
Results
20% time
Grouplets

41.
Where are the docs?
Who do I ask?
What do I need to know?
How do I get access to everything?
Who’s on my team?
Who’s working on what?
How can I contribute?
First Day at 18F, November 3, 2014

42.
18F Hub
Team API
.about.yml

43.
Working Groups and Guilds

44.
18F Pages
18F Guides
18F Edu

45.
Rainbow of Death: 18F
Intervene Validate Inform Inspire EmpowerMentor
Dependent Independent
18F
Consulting
Success
stories on
18F blog
Hub
18F
Delivery
Discovery
sprints
18F Guides
18F Edu
Workshops
18F Blog:
Useful
Mythology
Positive user
experiences
Digital Coalition
(18F, USDS,
CFPB…)
Working
Groups/Guilds
Onboarding
Revamp
18F Pages
Gov’t-wide
Hub
Cross-agency
collaboration
Team API

46.
TransparencyThe Hub, Team API, .about.yml
18F Pages, 18F Guides, 18F Edu Autonomy
Working Groups and Guilds Collaboration

47.
Yes.Can it succeed?

48.
“Never doubt that a small group…”
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world;
indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Margaret Mead

49.
Will it succeed?Yes, if we want it to.

50.
How can you help us?

51.
Validate
Inform
Inspire
Empower

52.
None More Black
https://18f.gsa.gov
https://github.com/18F
Slides: https://goo.gl/CrCUii