BOSE - Josh Steckler - Automating Automation: Build environments, on-demand

Editor's Notes

• #5: We are a privately held 51 year old company based in Massachusetts. Our founder was a MIT professor, and he left a legacy of creating products to make people’s lives better. You all know our headphones & wireless speakers etc., but we’ve also developed some things that may surprise you, such as an automotive suspension system and a vibration reducing seat for long-haul truckers.
• #6: Although we’re based in Massachusetts, our engineering community is global. Having such a wide footprint obviously has its challenges. We have people working around the clock. How do you support engineers in the most efficient way? How do you work around the time difference? How do you train users, sites and processes you may never see? Unfortunately I can’t fix all of these – but automating our processes whenever and wherever we can is a good place to start.
• #7: At bose, we’ve centralized our engineering support functions. It has its challenges, but we feel that the centralized approach allows us to provide more value by allowing our product engineers to focus on product development. Since we work in these tools day in and day out, we become experts quickly and we continuously improve our ecosystem with things we’ve learned from each new effort we embark on. There’s challenges of operating like this of course, the chief being the struggle between the whole company’s need to streamline development processes and the individual’s desire to have their environment be exactly what they want, and to control it themselves. You’ve got to find the right balance. We empower people to use self-service whenever we can in an effort to reduce overhead. This allows us to focus more on high-value initiatives. My group provides a full environment from version control, issue tracking, project management, code reviews, static analysis tools and an automation platform.
• #8: Our team is 5 people, and we’re all located in Bose’s corporate headquarters in Massachusetts. In the past five years, the team has had a steady headcount, but Bose’s product output has exploded., We bring more products to market each year now than we ever have in the past.
• #9: The music industry has, like many others, changed rapidly. It wasn’t too long ago when cars still came with tape decks, even though CDs have been around for quite a long time. But when audio devices like the ipod became popular, the game started to change. Very quickly, we went from having dedicated music devices to, storing the files locally on a hard drive, to using our phones and streaming the music from the internet. Streaming has taken over and there’s so many different choices and variations to keep up with. Spotify only launched in the US in 2011. So, in a matter of a few years, we went from fairly standardized sources, like a CD or a 30 pin ipod connector, to a huge number of variations in devices and services. And the way we actually listen has changed too. I suspect most of us no longer use multi-component systems. We use Bluetooth or other connectivity protocols to control the experience from our phones. The amount of software, and the complexity of the software in our products increased dramatically too.
• #12: Details about the deployment resonates with engineers
• #13: Did not start with focus on security
• #16: Version Control – can Roll out enhancement globally – all changes are instantly applied to all projects Make it in terms of the story we’re telling – what challenges we had when expanding We made our library procedures smart enough to handle the same operation on all operating systems
• #21: Got this from https://globalpressroom.bose.com/us-en/assets/view/8380 it’s public material
• #28: Management of the data is automated
• #30: System won’t let you build with invalid options
• #32: What’s the pain?
• #33: Eating our own dogfood