From twice a year to twice a month - the story of No More Majors

The Belgian Federal Pension Service (SFPD) has a large IT department with more than a dozen teams working on the same application. Over the course of a few years, these teams developed an agile way of working at the team level but were struggling to work effectively on a larger scale.

Early 2018, a Scaling course and a LeSS course were organised to help tackle this problem. This inspired an experiment where part of the organisation started to prepare a LeSS flip. It also made it very clear that there were a few technical obstacles to overcome before any organisational change could be successful.

First thing on the list: getting rid of bi-quarterly major releases, instead of releasing all functionalities in biweekly increments. This was something that had been talked about for a long time, but never really attempted. So a community of practice was kickstarted, with the ambitious goal of finally making this dream a reality in just a few months.

This is the story of the No More Majors community: from its kickstart, through the obstacles they encountered, to the successes and failures they achieved. And also: the surprisingly fast organisational changes they caused!

Transcript

1. www.co-learning.be Thierry de Pauw Continuous Delivery coach in/tdpauw/ @tdpauw From twice a year to twice a month: the story of No More Majors Tom Jans Agile coach @ SFPD in/tomjans/
2. www.co-learning.be SFPD: Service Fédérale des Pensions - Federale PensioenDienst Belgian Federal Pension Service Calculate and pay most Belgian legal pensions 2500 employees www.mypension.be
3. www.co-learning.be SFPD: Service Fédérale des Pensions - Federale PensioenDienst Belgian Federal Pension Service Calculate and pay most Belgian legal pensions 2500 employees www.mypension.be 11.000.000 customers 40.000.000.000 € per year
4. www.co-learning.be IT @ SFPD 250 people 4 sub-departments
5. www.co-learning.be IT @ SFPD 250 people 4 sub-departments Theseos 15 development teams (150 people) Central in-house application since 2005
6. www.co-learning.be 2016 + Fusion =
7. www.co-learning.be 2016 + Fusion =
8. www.co-learning.be 2016 + = Confusion
9. www.co-learning.be “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” -- Seneca
10. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 We don’t like major releases
11. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Training
12. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 + Training
13. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Jul 2018 Lessons Learned Major Release Theseos 18.06
14. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Jul 2018 Lessons Learned Major Release Theseos 18.06
15. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Jul 2018 Sep 2018 No More Majors
16. www.co-learning.be Sept 5th 2018: Can you help us achieve Continuous Delivery with fortnightly release cycles by end of December 2018?
17. www.co-learning.be “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” -- Dwight Eisenhower, 1957
18. www.co-learning.be • Improvement Kata • Value Stream Mapping • Measuring Continuous Delivery • Theory of Constraints
19. www.co-learning.be Implementing Continuous Delivery is not easy nor cheap ! It is very difficult.
20. www.co-learning.be Technological changes Version Control Test Driven Development Trunk Based Development Acceptance Test Driven Development Deployment Pipeline Contract Tests Continuous Integration Exploratory Testing Automated Configuration Smoke Tests Automated Infrastructure Test Data Management Evolutionary Architecture Monitoring & Alerting Database Migrations Incremental Releases acknowledgment: Steve Smith
21. www.co-learning.be Organisational changes Small Batch Sizes Everyone does On-Call Empowered Product Teams Continuous Change Review Cross-Functional Teams Traceability of Changes Shared Incentives Upskilling and Empowering Employees Blameless Post-Mortems Conway's Law Alignment You build it, You run it Continuous Improvement acknowledgment: Steve Smith
22. www.co-learning.be The Improvement Kata
23. www.co-learning.be The Agency's Improvement Kata
24. www.co-learning.be Major release ~ 6 months lead time
25. www.co-learning.be Patch releases - every fortnight
26. www.co-learning.be Theory of Constraints Every system has a bottleneck. Spending time optimising anything other than the bottleneck is an illusion.
27. www.co-learning.be Where is the bottleneck? activity lead time activity failure rate VCS Branches
28. www.co-learning.be First experiment: the pipeline and its metrics
29. www.co-learning.be The Agency's Improvement Kata
30. www.co-learning.be The Agency's Improvement Kata
31. www.co-learning.be The Agency's Improvement Kata Establish a pipeline ✔ Daily evaluation of failing tests Dedicated environment for automated acceptance tests Recreate database before running acceptance tests Stub 3rd party services Auto collect lead time and failure rate metrics from the pipeline
32. www.co-learning.be “... but plans are worthless when the fighting is once begun, and all depends on the inspiration of the moment.” -- a war correspondent for the British newspaper “The Daily News”, 1877
33. www.co-learning.be Fear of Complexity
34. www.co-learning.be Complex branching strategy
35. www.co-learning.be Proposed branching strategy roadmap
36. www.co-learning.be Fear of Missing Key Steps
37. www.co-learning.be Meanwhile … 18/10: LT of 8h, 21/3529 failing tests 29/10: LT of 4h, 545/5390 failing tests 05/11: pipeline did not run for 5 days - CI upgrade 23/11: first green pipeline, all tests passing Afterwards the pipeline was red for 2 weeks
38. www.co-learning.be “If anyone can refute me - show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective - I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. ” -- Marcus Aurelius
39. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Jul 2018 Sep 2018 Time to go public Nov 2018
40. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Jul 2018 Sep 2018 Negotiations Nov 2018
41. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Jul 2018 Sep 2018 The last major release ever? Nov 2018 Dec 2018
42. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Jul 2018 Sep 2018 First new release Nov 2018 Jan 2019 Dec 2018
43. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Jul 2018 Sep 2018 First new release Nov 2018 Jan 2019 Dec 2018
44. www.co-learning.be “They did not know it was impossible, so they did it.” -- Mark Twain
45. www.co-learning.be But, but, but … are fortnightly releases considered to be Continuous Delivery?
46. www.co-learning.be It is possible to achieve Continuous Delivery without first reaching Continuous Integration.
47. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Jul 2018 Sep 2018 Effects on the organisation Nov 2018 Jan 2019 Sep 2019 Dec 2018
48. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Jul 2018 Sep 2018 Effects on the organisation Nov 2018 Jan 2019 Sep 2019 Dec 2018
49. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Jul 2018 Sep 2018 Effects on the organisation Nov 2018 Jan 2019 Sep 2019 Dec 2018 LeSS bubble
50. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Jul 2018 Sep 2018 So many conversations about quality & testing Nov 2018 Jan 2019 Sep 2019 Dec 2018
51. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Jul 2018 Sep 2018 Problems become very visible Nov 2018 Jan 2019 Sep 2019 Dec 2018
52. www.co-learning.be Why did it work? Open and pro-active communication
53. www.co-learning.be Why did it work? Open and pro-active communication Great people
54. www.co-learning.be Why did it work? Open and pro-active communication Great people Spend time building the core team
55. www.co-learning.be Why did it work? Open and pro-active communication Great people Spend time building the core team Short deadline
56. www.co-learning.be Why did it work? Open and pro-active communication Great people Spend time building the core team Short deadline External coach
57. www.co-learning.be “I tell you in solemn truth that no prophet is welcomed among his own people” — Jesus