Labs: An Experiment for You and for Us

Welcome to the Wild Wild West at CA Agile Central. Every quarter, our engineers do a hackathon: a designated chunk of time (usually, but not always, a week at the quarter’s end) where engineers can work on projects of their choice. All hackathons end with a big demo that showcases each individual project, ranging from changes in color schemes to grand projects: ones that might lead to full-fledged features our entire company backs with real cash.

Some hackathons in the past have been good enough for customers to start trying out immediately. But these projects hadn’t been made production-ready, meaning that they had small, cosmetic-type bugs or had less polish than the rest of our platform. Our developers have always been frustrated that these cool innovations — which could really help our customers — haven’t been releasable.

Until now! Enter Labs, a hackathon project to show off other hackathon projects. Labs was built by a passionate, good-looking (we think) team of developers, including myself and Omar Sulehria (who co-authored this blog post.) We decided to dedicate one day each week for the entire quarter to building the Labs page and infrastructure. We did one-day iterations, complete with mini-plannings and mini-retrospectives. It was a cool, fast-paced experience to do planning, development, release and retro all in one day. Enter the Wild Wild West.

Here’s a look at what we built:

We think you’ll find that Labs a terrific enhancement to your experience in Agile Central. Labs offer you the opportunity to experiment with new features and find what works best for you. As you can see from the image above, this screen allows you to enable any Lab you find interesting or appealing. You can use the “Feedback” button to send issues, feature enhancements, or praise directly to the developer (or team) that created the Lab. We do call it the Wild Wild West though to remind you that these are experiments and a chance for us to innovate, and therefore not covered by our support team.

Subscription administrators have the ability to turn particular Labs on or off. If a user sees a Lab that is disabled by their subscription administrator but really wants to use it, they can send a nice email to the admin asking them to turn it on. Sometimes, if a Lab is popular enough, it may get rolled into the product itself (though the final result might look a little different from the original. :)

There’s a bar to pass if a hackathon wants to become a Lab. The requirements are simple:

• Don’t manipulate data you can’t reverse
• Have a small number of tests to ensure that the Lab doesn’t break the app
• Monitor feedback provided by users

A lot of our success with this project came from our existing A/B testing infrastructure. If your company has an A/B testing infrastructure or a way to release experimental features alongside existing code, you too can build Labs for your product.

Just from our limited release we’ve heard a lot of positive feedback from our customers, specifically around Labs being a window into our engineering teams’ ability to quickly innovate and deploy ideas. We hope you’ll enjoy the results of our past hackathons, and we look forward to adding more hackathon projects to Labs in the future, yeehaw!

Visit our Help pages to learn more about Labs, and visit us here if you’re interested in creating your own Lab app. We help our customers run hackathons, too! So saddle up, and contact your account team to get started.

Originally published at www.rallydev.com.