A guest lecture given at the University of St Andrews on how PlanForCloud does software engineering.

1. Software Engineering
for Startups
Ali Khajeh-Hosseini
@AliKhajeh, @PlanForCloud
Nov 2012, University of St Andrews

2. Why am I here?
Show you how we do…
software engineering

3. Jan 2009: Started PhD 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 heck is…
a cloud?

6. Server

7. Rack

8. Container

9. 2500
Servers
Electricity, Water, Internet

12. Taken from one Dave Cliff ’s talk on Cloud Computing

13. a cloud

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 users make decisions
RightScale helps users do it

17. How much would it 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

21. $1.7M/year

22. PlanForCloud Engineering
In God we 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
1 day 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 stories into 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

28. Estimation
Play planning poker

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

31. Sprint metrics

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

34. Good test coverage

35. Continuous integration

36. Name and shame

37. Exception handling
1. On-call ops engineer
2. VP of engineering
3. CTO
4. CEO

38. Issue tracking

39. Automate, Automate, Automate
Releasing new code:
heroku pgbackups:capture --app planforcloud
git push planforcloud master
heroku run rake db:migrate --app planforcloud

40. Performance monitoring

41. Let’s recap:
You built it and shipped it
How is it being used?
How can you improve it?

42. User metrics
- Google analytics
- Custom metrics
from DB

43. User testing
- Record user sessions
- Ask for lots
of feedback

44. User experience
- Investigate user flow
- Wireframing tools help

45. Why you should join 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)

46. RightScale

47. Employee

48. Meetup

50. Sunny

51. Santa

52. Barbara

54. Unplanned

55. release

56. (4AM)

58. We

59. like

60. to

61. eat!

63. Edinburgh

64. startup

65. party

67. RightScale

68. 2012

69.
We’re hiring!
www.PlanForCloud.com