šØ Build It. š¢ Ship It. 1ļøā£ In 1 day.
Working at Vodafone, everyday can be different. Especially when you plan to build and ship a whole product in a day, which is what our team attempted.
The Challenge
Iām fortunate to work in a really great frontend team called āRaptorsā. We have primarily worked on the new broadband journey but have been given a few other challenges recently, including the āupgrades and offersā landing page. Having already delivered the upgrades side of this we only had a small amount to do to deliver offers (or ILS ā In-Life Sales). Thatās when Johnathan in our team commented: āwe could do that in a dayā.
That was it, the challenge was set, and we took the off-hand comment seriously. Could we all work together to build ILS in a day and get it live? Weād certainly try!
Planning was key, first the important things:
Can we be provided with š for lunch?
Yes?
Then weāre good to go. ;)
But seriously, there were several things that needed sorting, and itās only from starting to plan for it that all the details were discovered.
Planning š
What did we need?
- The route setup for our new page in all the environments;
- The API deployed in the right environments;
- Content added to the CMS;
- Approval from release management, to follow through with our plan on the day.
These dependencies were successfully met, with the last one at about 5 AM on the day. Close callā¦ phew!
We had also extensively planned and broken down our features into stories and tasks. We had plenty of post-its written for the Kanban board which weād set up in the room.
We were ready to goā¦ š
The Big Day
In the morning we started picking up tasks from the Kanban board. We broke our normal rules for working on stories, favouring to keep the room up to date rather than our VSTS stories. We also discarded our usual branching policies; we were all doing small pieces so decided to do one Pull Request at the end instead of slowing things down.
We had a playlist šµ weād all contributed to which was playing most of the day. The atmosphere in the room was brilliant, everyone wanted to get on with it and make things happen. And we had hourly check-ins, so we all knew what was happening and so no one was left quietly stuck for too long.
Was it a Success?
Yes ā and No ā
It was a great way of working, that made a change from the usual sprint work. Everyone enjoyed it and we got a TONNE of work done.
However, early in the day, we hit issues which we could not get around. It was the first time consuming the new API and a small bug was identified. The team behind the API were great and quickly got onto it. However, shortly after, the login service on our test environment went down, not always an easy thing to fix. However, some clever guys in our team mocked the responses and by-passed the login so we could still move forward, but we couldnāt test properly.
The Big Achievements
- We did get our code into the pre-live environment for testing;
- We did complete 2 features/ 6 stories and started on the final feature;
- After just 1 day of sprint, we were in a really good position on our commitment;
- We had a great team day;
- We identified the issues that stand in our way of getting work released quickly.
The support we received from other teams really helped us along on the day. The hourly catch-up really kept our momentum going and ensured we removed blockers.
What would we have done differently?
We ended up having one big PR (Pull Request) to do at the end of the day, and this did not prove easy to review. In future, weād go for smaller PRās during the day or reviewing a big PR as a whole team.
We also felt we jumped on using the API too soon after it was released. Going forward weād want to try it out at least a few days before to flush out any bugs. We can then be fully confident before attempting a full-on day of working with it.
The day did work really well and weāre already looking at what other pieces of work we can smash out in a similar way.
You canāt get a more perfect ending to a developerās day than when you have the whole team gathered around one screen anxiously watching the progress bar of a deployment. Everyoneās hopes pinned on its success or failure.
It was like the moment at the end of Apollo 13, where everyone is waiting to see if they survived re-entry.
Intense!
Oh, and I realise youāre all dying to know what our playlist was likeā¦
Well, here it is! ā Spotify Playlist
Enjoy! š
