Apple’s gamble

At WWDC 2009, Apple’s then-Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Bertrand Serlet, took the stage and announced something that he called “unprecedented” in the computing industry: the upcoming OS X Snow Leopard would have “no new features.”

Whilst not strictly true and spun with some of Apple’s marketing magic, their decision to largely step back from delivering new features in OSX 10.6 in favour of ‘fixing things under the bonnet’ was widely praised in the development industry and by common consent helped them deliver the best ever version of the Mac operating system.

Apple had built up a huge backlog of legacy code and technical debt in the previous years, a problem familiar to all large companies but one few ever properly tackle. Apple felt the only way they could properly progress the platform was to take a pause from the frenetic delivery of new consumer facing features and fix the long standing code, quality and performance issues the platform was presenting both their developing and the consumers.

What Apple did was very clever, they sold what were traditionally things only interesting to developers — stability, performance, quality as consumer features in themselves. And it worked, the idea that a major new release would actually be smaller, faster and less buggy than the last one appealed to consumers too.

What about Sky Sports?

The Sky Sports website is so now so large that its not possible to redesign it in one go. In fact its not been possible to do this for nearly a decade, both because the site has massively expanded in size and scope and because the relentless demand for new features has meant it is not practical to resource a full redesign, and perhaps no longer desirable to do so.

This has lead to a situation where parts of the website were redeveloped at different times, often years apart. With the pace of change in the web development industry so fast this means the builds of these different sections differ significantly — in both backend and front end technology, in design, in navigation and in the general UX.

As this situation has become more exacerbated in recent years the amount of technical debt we have incurred has become increasingly problematic. This results in the roll-out of new features and general site development becoming significantly more costly and resource inefficient as we have to deal with the challenges of delivering the same feature-sets across multiple legacy code bases.

Insert graphic showing extra time/expense of not having one build

The advent of responsive design and a mobile first approach has also made the difference in UX between different parts of the site increasingly grating and the poor performance of older sections a major issue for mobile users.

The opportunity

We currently have a major opportunity to fix this issue once and for all and get the whole of skysports.com onto a single codebase. The benefits of doing this cannot be understated:

For the user:

• Better performance and faster load times
• Improved platform stability and less bugs
• More consistent navigation and UX across different devices

For the business:

• Faster rollout of new features and functionality
• Significant efficiency savings
• Cost reductions
• More time to innovate and produce richer user experiences
• Better equipped to keep pace with the opposition