Agile architecture made real

Agile Architecture Made Real
Re-architecting the organization
for speed - Building a fast and
flexible architecture across 50
scrum teams

Introductions and why we are here
Alexis Hui
 Co-lead the Deloitte LEAN practice – Agile Advisory and
Transformation
 10+ years of agile experience - doing, advising and coaching
 Helping organizations make agile work @ scale (100’s-1000’s)
My goal is to share with you how agile can work at speed and
scale based on a case study to make it real

Who needs
architecture?
Scrum
XP
Kanban
Agile Modeling
Method
100’s 1000’s
# people
Ok… something is
missing
My toolkit worked great to help organizations become more
agile… until we started hitting larger organizations

Architecture is at the heart of making agile work @ scale
Move Fast and
Break Things
Self-organizing
teams
EXPERIMENT.
FAIL.
LEARN.
REPEAT.

Speed and scale – Oxymoron?
Large platform
 3M+ accounts
 $2B+ funds
 5.5M+ transactions / mth
 200+ product features with
multiple products
Distributed organization
 1000+ people
 60-70% outsourced
 7+ locations, 5 major
delivery centers
 5 time zones
Lots of Partners
 Co-branding
 FSI’s
 Enterprise back-ends
 Enterprise servicing
New Speed Demands
 Handle constantly changing
programs and business
development contracts
 Heavily regulated industry
with frequent changes in
regulations
 Highly competitive space
with “fast” competitors
 Enormous pressure to drive
big revenue growth and
acquire customers
 Desire to deploy and
release every two weeks
New business unit spun up 4 years ago to drive new revenue streams for a
much larger traditional parent FSI organization…

Rethinking the architecture – not just software
What is the real product?
 Reframing the world, the
product is the platform
How do we scale our architecture
to the next level?
 Organize teams around the
product architecture and let
teams do the work for you
How do we release faster than
ever?
 Re-architect everything we
have to release every two
weeks
…organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs
which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations
– M. Conway

Agile Architecture in Action
Refactored their platforms with componentization in mind
• Platform refactored into a discrete set of products and platform services
• Agile is enabling teams to focus on component stewardships and technical debt
reduction to drive quality improvements
Re-aligned the organizational structure
and delivery teams
• Product and technology is reorganized into
~50 cross-functional scrum teams
• Each scrum team has ownership of a
platform service / application and is
responsible for a set of platform KPI’s
Enabled an end-to-end agile process
• Prioritization, Intake, Program, Product,
Software and Release Processes are all
agile
• Enable releases to become a non-event
and occur every two weeks
• Rapid experimentation of testable
product innovation and features
Adopted new agile management
and automation tools
• Agile ALM tooling for managing
programs and product backlogs
• Continuous integration for
automating continuous builds,
testing and deployment
1
2
3 4
Case Study: 1000+ product and engineering division within a 10,000+ FSI IT organization

Principles of Componentization:
Define bounded contexts to enable:
 Single-purpose assembly components
 Social architecture build around explicit
contracts
 Independently releasable components
Expose an open source model to provide:
 Developers to freely modify code and deploy
 Stewardship and quality to protect developers
from “breaking it”
 Encourage cross-training and knowledge
sharing
Establish a common product language in the
architecture so:
 The system becomes self-describing
 Business SMEs and Technologists can both
speak the same language
 Architecture always stays aligned with the
product
Componentization

Re-organizing the architecture based on a set of independent
cells that can bond together to deliver greater value
Responsive Web
Customer and Account
Management Platform
Partner Integration Services
Developers can
freely contribute to
other code bases
but must abide by
the cells “rules”
Stable teams are
organized within
the cell based on
single purpose
components
Cells can
independently
release
components in
their bounded
context
H
BeLi
MgNa
K Ca
Sc
The cells help
establish a common
language in business
terms
Y
Lu*

Componentization – Case Study
Customer Channels
Platforms Integrations
Platform Platform Platform Platform
Mobile Web IVR Open API Servicing
Component
Component
Component
Component
Component
Component
Component
Component
Component
Component
The How – Key Highlights
 Defined clear responsibilities and boundaries for each product that could be managed, evolved and supported by one or
more scrum teams
 “Componentized” the architecture and code, each product had a set of components which can be independently tested
and released
 Refactored each component to avoid direct database calls and instead go through platform services
 Applied a package manager system to help manage and automate packaging and versioning of each component
Component
Component
Component
Component
Component
Component
Component
Component
Services
Component
Component
Abstracted product architecture from the case study

 Develop a coherent view of your architecture and start thinking how it can be
componentized into products
 Refactor the design and code as new features come in to increase decoupling and
expose discrete APIs for greater reuse
 Leverage domain driven design to start expressing the design and code in a
manner that traces easily to business and product language
What you can do tomorrow
Where to learn more:
 Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development – James O. Coplien
 Working Effectively with Legacy Code – Michael Feathers
 Domain Driven Design – Eric Evans

Building Software Product
Teams for the Architecture Establishing effective software product
management requires software product teams
that:
Sets the product vision for their components by:
 Owning and managing a product backlog
 Defining and driving product KPI’s to help
prioritize value and enable validated
experimentation
Owns, manages and deploys its code separately to:
 Deploy on its own schedule (no more “whole
stack deployments”)
 Build and execute its own test harnesses and
test cases
 Drives down its own technical debt and is
responsible for maintaining reuse, cohesion
and coupling with other components
Using cadence and flow to coordinate with other
software product teams to:
 Establish a big picture product architecture
view
 Pairs with horizontal specialist teams
 Plans and synchronizes with other teams
regularly

Establishing a network of software product teams that each
own product outcomes, technical quality and coordinate on a
cadence
Horizontal teams pair
with software product
teams to shape end-to-
end concerns
(architecture, UX,
features)
Each team is empowered to set their
own product vision and manage their
priorities via a product backlog
The product quality (customer features,
operational quality) are managed, tested
and deployed by the team
Based on flow, horizontal teams
and software product teams
collaborate to shape new work
Regular
cadences help
teams
coordinate
dependencies

Building software product ownership – Case Study
Feature/Experience
Designers
 Established product owners for each scrum team based on the product architecture and formed stable teams by
component
 Formed “one product engineering team” consisting of program owners, feature/experience designers, product owners,
and architects to work together to envision and deliver, resulted in ~50 scrum teams
 Empowered each team to work with other teams to decouple their code based on the product architecture and to drive
their own technical debt (60/40 backlog ratio)
Architecture
Program Owners
Product Owners and Scrum Teams

 Collect and funnel work into a single product backlog where there is a well defined
product boundary
 Establish a “technical product owner” as a proxy and increase collaboration with
business partners to increase communication and awareness of the role and value
 Work closer with stakeholders to express requirements in smaller units of value
(e.g. user stories) that can be developed and tested more independently earlier in
the process
 Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love –
Roman Pichler
 Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product
Development – Donald G. Reinersten
 User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development – Mike Cohn

Taking Continuous
Integration to the Enterprise
Level
To succeed in delivering speed @ scale requires a
set of disciplined technical practices:
Establishing an enterprise wide “definition of
done” (DoD):
 Integration testing and other forms of testing
needs to be pushed upfront into the DoD
 Nothing goes to the mainline or release
without meeting DoD
Shift from managing dependencies to deferring
them:
 Traditional code management practices needs a
rethink, feature branches vs main line and
feature toggles/switches to minimize conflicts
across developers while balancing early
integration
 Stubbing/mocking becomes more important so
teams can develop more independently of each
other
Automation needs to be norm:
 Automate the end-to-end development, build,
testing, testing architecture and engineering
plays a critical role in enabling components and
products to be independently testable
 Test automation becomes a first class citizen
where test frameworks and code becomes just
as important as feature code

Enterprise level continuous integration provides the tracks for
the agile release train to run and get to continuous delivery
Every two weeks, the train picks up product increments that
are “code clean” and tagged for pushing to production
In each sprint, teams work to get stories “code clean” and tag it
for release, it’s up to each team to make sure quality passes in the
CI process
Continuous integration process runs for
every commit and kicks-off a series of
tests to verify “code clean” is met
Features that are have dependencies with other teams
that are not ready for release yet, are toggled “off” or
dialed up or down for experimentation
S1 S2
R1 R2

Taking Continuous Integration to the enterprise level – Case
Study
 Leveraging componentization and extending coding practices to always use interface based development allowed for
easier mocking/stubbing to support testing in isolation
 Mainline code management was used with feature toggles/switches and API versioning that enabled each component to
merge frequently and push to production without being impacted by dependencies
 An enterprise wide baseline “definition of done” (code clean) was defined and followed that forced full testing to be
completed by the end of each sprint/iteration before work could be accepted
 A dedicated build environment was setup based on a testing architecture that supported full build automation,
continuous integration, notifications and reports on meeting the “definition of done” based on coverage and quality
metrics

 Setup or leverage an existing continuous integration server and work with your
team to implement
 Work with your team to define a baseline “definition of done” that is used for the
continuous integration process to assess go/no-go
 Refactor code to be more interface-based and work with others to improve and
speed up the test automation coverage for the end-to-end range of testing
including unit, functional and integration testing
 Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk – Paul M.
Duvall, Steve Matyas, Andrew Glover
 Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test and Deployment
Automation – Jez Humble, David Farley
 How Google Tests Software – James A. Whittaker, Jason Arbon, Jeff Carollo

Bringing it all back together and how to get started
Agile @ Speed and Scale is being
done by organizations out there by
taking an agile architecture
approach. Disney can benefit from
advancing the state of agile maturity
today in the organization and taking
a step wise incremental approach to
agile adoption.
1) Adopt agility and speed as a culture by looking at how the three practices can be
implemented
 Componentization
 Establishing software product teams for the architecture
 Taking continuous integration to the enterprise level
2) Refine and increase the scale of these practices across the organization to achieve
operational stability based on fast and frequent releases
3) Leverage the high speed agile engine and adopt a rapid experimentation
approach to think and act more like a lean startup

Thank You!
Q&A
Alexis Hui
Twitter: @alhui
Email: alhui@deloitte.ca
Blog: www.agileconsulting.blogspot.com

Agile architecture made real

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