The document discusses best practices for successfully managing twenty start-ups a year, emphasizing a lean philosophy, efficient communication, and continuous delivery within software development. Key points include minimizing documentation, developing a culture of craftsmanship, and ensuring constant peer review and collaboration among team members. The text stresses the importance of creating deployment pipelines and maintaining infrastructure as code to enhance predictability and reduce time from decision to deployment.

1. Twenty start-ups a year
Without going crazy
Christopher Marsh
Technical Architect, AKQA

2. Twenty start-ups a year
Without going crazy
Christopher Marsh
Technical Architect, AKQA

3. Effort to completion

4. Pain to completion

5. Effort to completion

6. Effort to completion

7. Predictability!

8. Predictability!
Lean philosophy

9. Predictability!
Culture of
code craftsmanship
Lean philosophy

10. Continuous delivery
Predictability!
Culture of
code craftsmanship
Lean philosophy

11. Lean philosophy
“Lean Startup isn't about being
cheap [but is about] being less
wasteful and still doing
things that are big.”
-- Eric Ries

12. Focus on producing output
Let software engineers engineer
Let project managers manage

13. Morning stand-up
Who’s it really for?

14. Meeting invitations
Auto-reject the unknown

15. “Can you spare me 5 minutes?”
...takes a minimum of an hour

16. Create design through doing
Things always change before
you’re finished anyway

17. Understand architecture vs design
Refactoring architecture is hard
“Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a
system, where significant is measured by cost of change.”
-- Grady Booch

18. Prototype responsibly
Destroy when done

19. Don’t build frameworks
Reusable code emerges naturally

20. Minimise documentation effort
Most documentation is a
liability, not an asset

21. Create architecture documents
Don’t create design documents

22. Write self documenting code
Self maintaining documentation
requires zero extra effort

23. Optimise communication efficiency
Create knowledge sharing tools

24. Culture of code craftsmanship
“You can’t take pride and
honour in something that you can’t
be held accountable for.”
-- Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin

25. Develop a green build mentality
No excuses, if you’re red - you’re dead

26. Don’t worry about it
Force a build, it will
pass next time

27. I didn’t break it
So I don’t need to fix it

28. That’s always broken
I can’t remember the
last time the codebase
was updated

29. I’m looking at it now
But it looks like it’s
going to take a
while to fix

30. The rules
Never commit on a broken build
Fix broken build within 10 minutes
The team is responsible for the build

31. Seek constant peer review
You work with smart people,
so help them to help you

32. Target collaboration effort
Eliminate coder’s block by
pair programming

33. Shout when you need help
It’s not a sign of weakness

34. Perform code reviews
Automate as much as possible

35. Create information radiators
Increasing technical debt is difficult
when no one wants to
give you credit

36. Look further than technology
Respect your colleagues

37. Reduce complexity
Communicate simply

38. Reduce complexity
Communicate simply

39. Use an existing tool
Or mix and match

40. Continuous Delivery
“Reduce [..] the time it takes from deciding to
make a change [..] to having it available to users.”
-- Jez Humble/David Farley

41. Create deployment pipelines
Make every commit a potential
release candidate.

42. Example pipeline

43. Example pipeline

44. Example pipeline

45. Example pipeline

46. Example pipeline

47. Example pipeline

48. Example pipeline

49. Number of tests
A sanity check
Manual tests
Integration tests
Capacity tests
Acceptance tests
Unit tests

50. Pipeline dashboard
ThoughtWorks Go

51. Maintain infrastructure as code
Consistency means that no server
is a snowflake

52. “Production-like” starts early
Configure development workstations
automatically

53. Include all infrastructure
Not just web and application servers

54. Look at Cloud options
Built-in configuration options
make things easier

55. Put deployments in the right hands
Deployments are business motivated,
but technology led

56. What the business has...

57. What the business needs...
Deploy me!

58. What the business (really) needs...
Deploy me!
Deploy me!
Deploy me!
Capacity
Deploy me!
Build
Production
QA

59. Script everything
Separate what changes
from what doesn’t

60. “Production-like” all the way
Even if this means less efficiency
in the pipeline

61. And finally...
“Theory is splendid but
until put into practice , it is valueless.”
-- James Cash Penney

66. Discuss!