Slides from my talk at Agile Lean Ireland 2019

1. “The Agony and the Ecstasy of being Agile
when the Schedule is Not.”

2. Aidan Casey
Head Of Engineering - Johnson Controls Cork
@aidanjcasey
https://medium.com/@aidanjcasey

5. Connected Converged Security

7. Typical Customer Profile
● large organisation with many offices across the globe (50-1000 buildings)
● dedicated security operations centre’s (SOC)
● billion(s) alarms annually
● different building and security platforms in different offices
● highly regulated and security conscious

11. Team Structure

12. Team Mercury Team Mariner Team Beara Team Torc Data Science DevOps UX
cross functional teams specialist teams
event
processing &
machine
learning
alarm handling
workflows &
editors
Incident &
alarm
management
data ingestion &
mediation
other roles
product management
lead architect
security champion

13. Team Mercury Team Mariner Team Beara Team Torc Data Science DevOps UX
2 week sprint 2 week sprint
continuous 4 week milestones
end of
sprint
demo
end of
milestone
demo
Team Mercury

14. Team Mercury Team Mariner Team Beara Team Torc Data Science DevOps UX

15. Team Mercury Team Mariner Team Beara Team Torc Data Science DevOps UX

16. Team Mercury Team Mariner Team Beara Team Torc Data Science DevOps UX

17. Team Mercury Team Mariner Team Beara Team Torc Data Science DevOps UX
short lived team

18. Backlog Grooming
- single shared backlog
continually groomed
- weekly sync between product
owners and product managers
- 3 month horizon
- team’s follow the work

19. - each monthly milestone start with a team huddle at the physical team wall
- combined end of sprint demo to close out each software release
Our Organisational Heartbeat

21. Evolving Product Architecture
● microservices architecture
● ongoing rationalisation and simplification
● inherited codebases have been redeveloped
● prematurely scaled microservices
● pivoted from multi-tenant to single tenant

23. DevOps Practices
● religiously practice continuous delivery everywhere, except production !
● 30+ microservices
● from zero to full environment in under 60 mins
● shared dev & test environments for all teams
● automated regression test suite runs in in QA each night
● milestone releases promoted to staging & production

24. Continuous Integration Pipelines
● functional testing ( BDD)
● security testing (static code analysis & container scanning)
● regression testing (hourly & nightly)
● soak testing
● performance & benchmarking

25. ownership of a shared environments is hard

26. (In)Sanity Tests
● “as many end to end tests as you can
physically run in under 10 mins!”
● runs every 15 mins… everywhere
● fast feedback on failures
● teams self organise to react and fix

27. UX Community
● early on the UX designs got ahead
of the product
● evolving into a community of
practice
● UX epics are first class citizens of
the backlog - evenly split between
current and futures work

28. Data Science Community
● machine learning & AI are our
secret sauce
● features are discovered using a
data first approach
● multiple patents in place for
machine learning & anomaly
detection techniques
● exploring ways to involve data
science tean more in acceptance
testing of machine learning
algorithms CRISP-DM methodology

29. Statements of Work

30. ● enabled incremental revenue before product has been fully built
● pain point when SOW don’t align with product roadmap
● if not articulated well - the customer will expect more !

31. Culture of Continuous
Innovation

35. 10 Lessons Learned

36. t-shaped teams counteract siloed thinking
#1

37. if you aren’t good at something do it more often
#2

38. don’t let team boundaries limit how you work together
#3

39. refer to frameworks but don’t rely on them
#4

40. ownership of a shared environments is hard
#5

41. follow the yellow brick road
#6

42. the best teams lunch together
#7

43. statements of work are awesome and awful
#8

44. if your business isn’t ready for continuous delivery
practice it anyway
#9

45. make space for innovation & hack days
#10