This document discusses how technology can help accelerate business agility by presenting case studies of companies that addressed problems by adopting technical solutions. The case studies illustrate how microservices, shared services layers, asynchronous communication, automated deployments, and feature flags helped speed up development and delivery. Adopting these types of technologies, along with continuous attention to technical excellence, can enhance agility when process changes alone are not enough.

1. Accelerating
Agility With
Tech

2. Jon Haarmann
&
Blair Motchan

3. Jon Haarmann & Blair Motchan

4. Accelerating
Agility With
Tech

5. ● Increase Business Agility
○ Tighter Feedback Loops
○ Speed Up Development
○ Speed Up Delivery
Goal of Adopting an
Agile Mindset?

6. How?

7. What should you do
when process change
isn’t enough?

8. “Continuous attention to
technical excellence and good
design enhances agility.”

9. “Continuous attention to
technical excellence and good
design enhances agility.”
-agile manifesto

10. Accelerating Transformation
With Tech
Real World Case Studies
● What was the problem
● What process change(s) we tried
● How technology helped
● Demo

11. Separation of Duties
No Developer Access
Dev QA
Pre
Prod
Prod
Development
Speed Up Delivery (Case Study)
Problem: Deployment Lag Time
Infrastructure
IT
Promotion
Path
Separate
Infrastructure Team
Deploy
Requests
Systems Engineers cannot
keep up with demandDev Teams Iterating Quickly

12. What we tried:
● Improve request process
● Create tiers of products to
determine priority requests

13. Dev Team Infrastructure Team
QA Team
Tech Solution: Automated Deployments
& Push Button Promotions
Dev QA Pre
Prod
Prod
Negotiated to have
CI tooling granted
permissions
Promotion Button
QA Team Only
(Separation of Duties)
Auto Deploys in Dev

14. DEMO

15. Product 1
DB
UI
Service
Product 2
UI
Service
● New product being built
● New product needs much of
the same data as the others
● Need to rebuild same
services, DAOs, etc
● If business logic changes,
need to apply to all
products
Hundreds
of tables
Speed Up Delivery (Case Study)
Problem: New products take too long

16. What we tried:
Adopt Scrum
Work in Sprints
Vertical slices
Focus on value
I.N.V.E.S.T.
UI
Service
Data Model
DB
A B C D

17. Front end
1
Front end
2
Shared REST Service Layer
App 1
DB
UI
Service
DB
App 2
UI
Service
Tech Solution: Shared Services Layer
Split applications horizontally
New UI
apps can
be built
quickly

18. DEMO

19. Monolithic Application (Single Codebase)
DB
feature
feature
feature
feature
feature
feature
feature
feature
domain domain domain domain domain domain
Team Team Team Team
Teams stepping
on each others
toes
Codebase Complex
and Tangled
Speed Up Development (Case Study)
Problem: Codebase Too Big
Changes for one team
causing issues for
another
Teams cannot evolve
product independently

20. What we tried:
● Switch to git from svn for
easier merging
● Use and expert PR
reviewer to resolve
conflicts

21. Independently
Deployable
Back End Apps
Team 2
Independently
Deployable
Front End Apps
Team 1
DB
Domain
Service A
DB
Domain
Service B
DB
Domain
Service C
Split application
vertically
Tech Solution: Microservices

22. DEMO

23. App 1
App 2
Perform Calcs
(down)
Client App
Speed up development (Case Study)
Problem: Coupling
Hundreds of thousands
of requests daily
DB
Error
Tables
Write errors
Manually Triage
each error and
perform manual
corrections to data
loss when needed

24. What we tried:
● Maintenance windows
● Coordinating deployments
across teams

25. App 1 App 2
Client App
App 1
Client App
App 2
Synchronous
Communication
Asynchronous
Communication
Tightly Coupled De-coupled
Tech Solution: Asynchronous Calls
Introduce
Queuing
Technology
Messages will resume
when app comes back up

26. DEMO

27. Speed up delivery (Case Study)
Problem: Organizational Readiness
Development Team
Team is recognizing the benefits of
small, low risk changes
Sprint A
(2 weeks)
Sprint B
(2 weeks)
Monthly
Release
“We should just release
every sprint !”
Product Support
“It would be too much
work to prepare release
notes every two weeks”
“Customers don’t like it
when the app changes all
the time”

28. What we tried:
● Dev team modified
definition of done to add
release notes to each ticket
● Auto generate release
notes

29. DB
Front End
Service Layer Feature
Flag DB
My App
Feature A (on)
Feature B (off - hidden)
Feature On/Off
A On
B Off
C On
Feature C (on)
Tech Solution: Feature Flags
Roll out every change behind a feature flag
Allows “deployment” of the code to
be separate from the “release” of the
feature
Turn on the feature when the
organization is ready to support it

30. DEMO

31. Sometimes
process
change is not
enough

32. Understand the
problem you are
trying to solve

33. Seek Out and
Remove
Foundational
Impediments

34. Challenge your
teams to strive
for technical
excellence

35. Accelerate
Agility With
Tech Thank You !!