The 3 Pillars of Remote Application Development

Editor's Notes

• #2: Welcome message
• #3: Agenda for today
• #5: 13 years in building an operating mission critical systems Across Microsoft, Oracle, and public cloud stacks 35 technical specializations 1,000 employee model – staffed 24x7 – at scale Established operations in US, Canada, India, Sri Lanka +$20M invested in IP to improve service and drive efficiency --- organized into ServiceBoost: ITSM platform for managed service and Techboost: Family of tools to improve IT operations
• #7: So without further ado lets jump into the topic at hand….and look into the reality of Remote App Dev
• #8: Application development is already challenging enough in the best of times—so how can you handle it when your entire development team is suddenly working from home? According to a survey by Gartner, 88 percent of companies have encouraged or required employees to work from home since March 2020. Unfortunately, too many AppDev teams have been cast adrift as a result, wholly unprepared for the new normal of telecommuting. Some businesses have adopted stopgap solutions that aren’t sustainable in the long run, while others are feeling the pinch of tightened budgets and stressed employees.
• #11: Just to set some context , let me just take a few minutes to talk about why we at Datavail care so passionately about Remote App Dev
• #12: At the core of it, we here in the Microsoft Business Unit of Datavail, are essentially the application experts……
• #13: Our customers come to us for providing them with a variety of app dev related services- whether its planning and Architecture, Cloud Modernization, Build New App or purely KTLO services
• #16: While there are some very compelling benefits of our offering, it did post us some key challenges that we needed to address
• #17: One of the key value propositions of our service offering is our ability to provide the right expertise in the right proportion at the right time to our customers as Our Agile Dev Teams are aligned to backlog and scale based on Demand This means that we needed to manage fractional Resources from the onset of our business. We needed to be able to onboard and offboard team members quickly while maintaining a core team. Moreover our app dev team members may be working on multiple engagements at the same time.
• #18: We have app dev team members in 4 countries and 6 Global delivery centers while our customers are all located in North America. We offer a variety of engagement models- Domestic Onshore ( though dispersed and remote), nearshore, offshore or Global Blended in order to ensure that we provide the benefit of labor arbitrage while meeting the time zone needs of our clients. This means that we need to managed Globally Distributed teams that are Remote by Design.
• #19: Given we have fractional resourcing and geographically dispersed teams that are aligned to backlog based development and scale on demand, Cohesion was a core need for our Elastic Remote Teams and was key for us to drive quality and velocity and in turn agility for our customers.
• #20: So the question for Datavail was- How do we drive Cohesion in Fractional Teams that are geographically dispersed while offering an elastic service ( new people joining in when needed) and delivering in an agile sprint based manner
• #21: As you can see, although remote work might be new to you, it's not new to us: our application development teams have been remote since Datavail was founded. Telecommuting isn't just a theoretical concept for Datavail—it's a workplace best practice that we choose to follow every day. With more than a decade of experience, we'll discuss in this webinar the three essential factors that we believe separate the high-achieving remote application development teams from those struggling to adapt:.
• #22: And those three pillars are….
• #23: Lets look at the 1st pillar-DevOps
• #24: So what is DevOps. Talking to a number of people I get various answers ranging from Its Development and Operations, to Its Agile Delivery but we see DevOps as a combination of….
• #25: Driven by a combination of DevOps Principles and practices, we here at Datavail have been able to embrace methodology that has allowed us to essentially provide Agile Planning, Agile Development, Agile Delivery and Agile Operations for our customers
• #26: If you look at our overall approach of how we engage with our customers, it all starts with Onboarding of a new customer moving on to an initial Backlog Grooming and Prioritization phase, then moving on to Ongoing Sprints and finally Ongoing Support and Maintenance
• #27: Each sprint begins with a planning meeting. The product owner and the development team agree upon exactly what work will be accomplished during the sprint. The development team has the final say when it comes to determining how much work can realistically be accomplished during the sprint, and the product owner has the final say on what criteria need to be met for the work to be approved and accepted.
• #28: As we work on delivering value for our customers via our App Dev teams, there are various stakeholders here as we see on this slide. From Datavail’s perspective, we typically have Product Owner, SA/Tech Lead and PMs , the developers, the QA, Offshore PMs etc and then we have customer team members as well ( BA/PM/Business).. With so many stakeholders, as you can see, there are many visions and many views. With these myriad views, myriad visions, how do we ensure that we are able to successfully deliver the promise of IT agility to our customers via our Remote App Dev Teams.
• #29: It all starts with some of the key DevOps principles that we have adopted into our overall methodology. So what are some of those key DevOps principles? Fostering a collaborative environment High Trust environment between the various stakeholders in a team Single source of truth Transparency End to End responsibility Not my problem no longer works Build quality into our process Focus on the customer’s need Product Backlog/Sprint Backlog Continuous Grooming of the Backlog Continuous Improvement Iterative Learning from each sprint Automate Everything Possible Automate testing Automate Builds Automate Releases
• #30: Infrastructure and Environment Management   Azure Shell scripts, Virtualization, Ansible based automation  
• #32: But we are flexible in working with our customers’ toolsets Azure Pipelines is a cloud service that you can use to automatically build and test your code project and make it available to other users. It works with just about any language or project type. Azure Pipelines combines continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to constantly and consistently test and build your code and ship it to any target. Why should I use Azure Pipelines? Implementing CI and CD pipelines helps to ensure consistent and quality code that's readily available to users. And, Azure Pipelines provides a quick, easy, and safe way to automate building your projects and making them available to users. Use Azure Pipelines because it supports the following scenarios: Works with any language or platform Deploys to different types of targets at the same time Integrates with Azure deployments Builds on Windows, Linux, or Mac machines Integrates with GitHub Works with open-source projects.
• #33: Infrastructure and Environment Management   Azure Shell scripts, Virtualization, Ansible based automation  
• #49: We can look at Test Failure Reports of these Automated Smoke Tests to quickly gain insights into the quality of the product
• #54: Sample pipelines from one of our engagements
• #58: Lets look at the 1st pillar-DevOps
• #59: Our Organizational Structure ALIGNED to deliver Sprint Teams as a Service via Collaboration
• #60: At Datavail, we use Microsoft Teams to manage communication between the members of our remote AppDev workforce. Teams is perfectly suited for our workflows as a communication tool: Teams is fully integrated with Office 365 and other Microsoft products such as Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint. • Teams lets users create individual channels for a certain topic, allowing team members to cut down on long email conversations and get answers faster. • Teams is available on a wide variety of devices, which makes it ideal for a remote workforce: desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone), and more.
• #61: We can leverage teams to organize ourselves. Our Project Leads will typically create a new Teams team or Channel to enable various team members working out of different time zones to collaborate.
• #62: We can leverage teams to organize ourselves. Our Project Leads will typically create a new Teams team or Channel to enable various team members working out of different time zones to collaborate.
• #63: Sometimes Channels are a better way to organize specially for programs that may have may projects underneath. Under each Teams Team or Channel, the Project Lead creates a folder structure for team members working out of different time zones to collaborate on the project.
• #65: Channels are a great place for discussions on specific work streams sharing files and even for onboarding. For eg The Project Lead can share clear, detailed onboarding steps for the team and eases the process.
• #73: Lets look at the 1st pillar-DevOps
• #74: stand-up meetings are often the best way to quickly identify and handle issues that crop up during a sprint, such as getting advice on a strange bug or expressing worries about scope creep. If someone starts working on a task that should actually be addressed further down the line, stand-up meetings also act as a guardrail, preventing team members from veering too far off the tracks.
• #77: At Datavail, we use Microsoft Teams to manage communication between the members of our remote AppDev workforce. Teams is perfectly suited for our workflows as a communication tool: Teams is fully integrated with Office 365 and other Microsoft products such as Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint. • Teams lets users create individual channels for a certain topic, allowing team members to cut down on long email conversations and get answers faster. • Teams is available on a wide variety of devices, which makes it ideal for a remote workforce: desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone), and more.
• #79: Steve: (messaging) How does our approach/methodology help make your life easier? Quicker? Cheaper? Automated testing Management structure…. How it drives cohesive teams & improved velocity Cloud experience… cloud enabled… etc.
• #82: Note for Cindy: Can we come up with a way to show the planning & arch as a horizontal that happens across all of the approaches. App monitoring- Custom Apps AppDynamics Techboost Dynacare
• #83: We get questions about… do you do java? Do you do angular? Don’t do…. Dynamics ERP Java development