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Software Engineering For Startups
This document discusses software engineering practices at startups. It describes how the speaker's company, PlanForCloud, took an agile approach using Scrum methodology. Key aspects covered include informal design processes, sprint planning and metrics, continuous integration and deployment, and a focus on user metrics and testing to rapidly iterate and improve products. The benefits of joining a startup cited include a great learning environment and moving quickly.
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Software Engineering For Startups
- 1. Software Engineering for Startups Ali Khajeh-Hosseini @AliKhajeh, @PlanForCloud Nov 2012, University of St Andrews
- 2. Why am Ihere? Show you how we do… software engineering
- 3. Jan 2009: StartedPhD in St Andrews May 2010: PlanForCloud v.1 ready Feb 2011: Interned in California for 7 months Dec 2011: Hassan quit his job and joined Feb 2012: Launched PlanForCloud v.2 May 2012: Mountain View for YC interview
- 5. What the heckis… a cloud?
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- 9. 2500 Servers Electricity, Water, Internet
- 12. Taken from oneDave Cliff ’s talk on Cloud Computing
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- 14. 12 Staff 30 Megawatts = Perth (Scotland)! 140 Containers 38,500 m2 = 4 ftbl pitches 360,000 Servers 500,000,000 Dollars h#p://www.microso/.com/Presspass/emea/presscentre/pressreleases/February2012/23-‐02DublinDataCentre.mspx
- 15. Cloud Computing Infrastructure-as-a-Service Platform-as-a-Service Software-as-a-Service
- 16. PlanForCloud helps usersmake decisions RightScale helps users do it
- 17. How much wouldit cost to deploy my systems on Cloud X? Would it be cheaper if I use deployment option X or Y? What happens to my costs if: - my system grows? - cloud provider changes prices?
- 18. IT managers Software Engs Consultants Accountants Users
- 19. around 9,000 prices in PlanForCloud
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- 22. PlanForCloud Engineering In Godwe trust; all others must bring data. W. Edwards Deming
- 23. Engineering Roles Product Manager:what should we build? Director of Development: how should we build it? Architects: design it Interaction designer: improve the user experience Operations: deploy and monitor it Support: help customers use it Escalations: something just broke, who can fix it? Engineers: work with everyone to build and test it
- 24. In a startup,each person plays many roles Hiring Product manager Engineer Architect Marketing manager QA Operations Support Operations Escalations User Experience R&D
- 25. Dev Process: Scrum 1day planning 3 week sprints 3 weeks Go/No-Go Release Retro
- 26. Design It’s all informal Just a wiki page + Comments/emails No Word documents No UML diagrams
- 27. Planning Engineers breakdown storiesinto tasks Granularity: less than a day to complete Story: As a user I want to export report as PDF So that I can share it with others • Refactor simulation engine to… • Switch from Google charts to Highcharts • Generate PDF in background queue • … • Write tests • Code review
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- 29. Sprint calculations ================= Sprint Summary ================= Sprint Begins: 10/2/2012 Sprint Ends: 10/19/2012 Sprint DuraJon: 14 days Team: John, Joe, Jeff, Jack Development: VacaJon: 0 days Total Capacity: 300 hours -‐-‐ grooming/management: 30 -‐-‐ release issues: 10 Start sprinting… -‐-‐ priority bugs: 30 -‐-‐ tech debt: 30 -‐-‐ backlog: -‐-‐-‐-‐ must have: 150 -‐-‐-‐-‐ nice to have: 50
- 30. Daily standup Answer: 1. What did you do yesterday? 2. What are going to do today? 3. Is anything blocking you? Every day 9:30am sharp
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- 32. Release prematurely &often But you need protection: Good tests Exception handling Automate as much as you can
- 33. Good tests Positive tests Negative tests Fast tests
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- 37. Exception handling 1. On-call ops engineer 2. VP of engineering 3. CTO 4. CEO
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- 39. Automate, Automate, Automate Releasing new code: heroku pgbackups:capture --app planforcloud git push planforcloud master heroku run rake db:migrate --app planforcloud
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- 41. Let’s recap: You builtit and shipped it How is it being used? How can you improve it?
- 42. User metrics - Googleanalytics - Custom metrics from DB
- 43. User testing - Recorduser sessions - Ask for lots of feedback
- 44. User experience - Investigateuser flow - Wireframing tools help
- 45. Why you shouldjoin a startup • Great learning environment • Informal and fun • Young people with lots of energy • Take work seriously, but not themselves • Move quickly: Just F*ing Do It (JFDI)
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