Introducing Agile in the Very Large: Microsoft Developer Division’s Journey
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Add to calendarIn 2005, Microsoft’s DevDiv (with 2000 participants and 40 million lines of code) overhauled its engineering practices to improve agility, quality, and customer satisfaction. Four years into the journey, customer satisfaction has increased dramatically. Product quality improved 10x. Velocity improved 2x, with schedule time for major releases was cut by eighteen months and quarterly releases of “power tools” allowed incremental delivery to external customers. Practices that change include planning, org, quality gates, branching, testing, tooling, reporting, backlogs, transparency.
I will use a combination of presentation and discussion. Wherever possible, I’ll center the presentation around real examples, such as cumulative flow graph, heat map, usability study, or other actual artifact. I expect to do these primarily as screenshots, although I may use a live database if possible (and network connectivity allows).
- Leadership has to create an example of transparency in decision making, metrics, rules of the road, and execution
- Teams need to focus on the flow of customer value and feel empowered by its regular delivery
- Incremental adoption can overcome some of the cultural barriers
- Rules of the road, quality gates and feature teams enable healthy practices to be visible and rewarded
- Use the iteration cadence to celebrate the successes and reinforce the values
- Connect internal and external perspectives
- Isolation and integration of feature teams need to be balanced in the branching and build process
- Success does not always breed success and regression can occur when the leadership lowers its vigilance
- Planning matters, starting with value propositions
- Backlogs need to be visible at multiple levels, not just as stories or features
- Tooling matters to eliminate the overhead and create trustworthy communication
