Presentation: Tweet"230 Iterations Later..."

Track: Agile Adoption / Time: Thursday 15:20 - 16:20 / Location: Fleming

In this session we will be looking at the history and the future of one of BSkyB's longest running agile teams.

The Sky Entertainment Team was formed in October 2007 and within 10 short months it had blazed a trail at BSkyB by adopting an iterative approach to product development by drawing on the influences of Scrum, XP and Lean and successfully launching a series of new editorially driven Web sites to support Sky's premium TV channels. But that was just the beginning. After four and half years the team continues to ship new features to its users each week, as it has done almost every week since the first launch of the Entertainment platform at the end of 2007.

It's been long ride, with many ups and downs. We'll take you through the challenges the team have faced over the years looking at what we got wrong, what we got right and where we continue to struggle. Going deeper we'll look at how continuous improvement and learning isn't just a steady march to perfection but sometimes stalls, or even takes a step back before taking a leap forward. Finally we will look at how we are taking a long deep look at where we are today as we look to re-energise the team so it is ready to take on another 230 iterations.

Along the way we will cover:

- adapting to the changing needs of the business
- measuring our performance
- responding to customer feedback
- maintaining shared knowledge, team values and process
- continuous integration and deployment of large mature application
- keeping up with adopting and integrating new technologies
- how we've dealt with technical debt and maintained a healthy code base

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Kris Lander, TweetTechnical lead and agile coach on web applications

Biography: Kris Lander

Kris Lander started his career in the middle of the dot.com boom and has worked with several major projects on both sides of the Atlantic. Exposure to the dynamic nature of Web application development led him to champion the adoption of lightweight open source frameworks as an alternative to heavyweight J2EE development.

With a strong sense of rigorous engineering principles he has sought out processes and technologies to support the development of high quality software. In the last five years he has concentrated on the technical practices of agile development such as Test Driven Development and Continuous Integration whilst working on projects using Scrum and XP.

For the last two and half years Kris has worked with Energized Work and has been deeply committed to their uncompromising approach to software delivery and their idea of "complete thinking" in product development.

Suki Bains

Biography: Suki Bains

Suki Bains has worked for BSkyB since 2004 and is responsible for the delivery of the Entertainment online portfolio of web sites. Starting with just a single proposition for Showbiz in 2007, this has grown over the years to include 5 other channel sites. Suki believes building great websites is not just about successful delivery for the business, but delivering in way that makes it a positive experience for all involved. As a Scrum Master / Coach co-located with the business stakeholders, designers, developers and testers her role is to encourage the team to understand the values and principles behind agile practices to ensure the best possibly delivery to the customer. Having being part of one of BSkyB's first successful adoptions of agile principles and practices she felt she found some solutions to a number of the big problems she'd seen and experienced in the past. Having been given an new perspective and inspired to learn more she has tailored her traditional Scrum Master role to a coaching role to help teams to get better at what they do. She believes the best way to do this is to creating an environment of trust and respect that provides the right kind of feedback so that people can learn and grow. It is a difficult task but one that is worth the investment.