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From twice a year to twice a month - the story ...

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!

Thierry de Pauw

September 12, 2019
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  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 Theseos 15

    development teams (150 people) Central in-house application since 2005
  5. www.co-learning.be Sept 5th 2018: Can you help us achieve Continuous

    Delivery with fortnightly release cycles by end of December 2018?
  6. www.co-learning.be “In preparing for battle I have always found that

    plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” -- Dwight Eisenhower, 1957
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. www.co-learning.be Theory of Constraints Every system has a bottleneck. Spending

    time optimising anything other than the bottleneck is an illusion.
  10. 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
  11. 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
  12. 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
  13. 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
  14. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Jul 2018 Sep 2018

    The last major release ever? Nov 2018 Dec 2018
  15. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Jul 2018 Sep 2018

    First new release Nov 2018 Jan 2019 Dec 2018
  16. www.co-learning.be 2016 Nov 2017 Feb 2018 Jul 2018 Sep 2018

    First new release Nov 2018 Jan 2019 Dec 2018
  17. 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
  18. 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
  19. 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
  20. 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
  21. 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
  22. www.co-learning.be Why did it work? Open and pro-active communication Great

    people Spend time building the core team Short deadline
  23. 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
  24. www.co-learning.be “I tell you in solemn truth that no prophet

    is welcomed among his own people” — Jesus