IBM Rational Software
Continuous Delivery
Effective Software Delivery under ridged Business Constraints
Kai-Uwe Maetzel
kai-uwe_maetzel@us.ibm.com
Chief Architect and Lead of Rational Team Concert
IBM Rational
© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Overview
 Product
 What is cost?
 Influencing cost
 Our process
Many of the aspects have been discussed in the software
development methodology, project management and
management literature.
This is a concrete example of what we do and why.
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© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Rational Team Concert
 Team collaboration tool combining
– agile and formal planning
– task and defect tracking
– source code management
– build, packaging, deployment, and promotion
– dashboards: queries and reports on life and historic data
– configurable process
 From small teams to large teams of teams
 From MS Windows to z/OS
 Eclipse, MS Visual Studio, Web, command line, MSSCCI, Window Shell
integration, ISPF
 Open protocols, numerous integrations
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© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Technologies
 Java
 modeling technologies for persisted data and wire transfer
 C++, C#, .NET
 JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Dojo
 JDojo
 relational databases, SQL
 RDF triple stores, SPARQL
 REST architecture
 REX, DTL
 distributed object caches, ….
 …
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© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Team
Toronto
Portland
Costa Mesa
Ottawa
Paris
Boston Nantes Zurich
Raleigh
Beijing
Tokyo
Bangalore
Sydney
© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Other Facts
 IBM Rational’s flagship product
 Part of Rational’s Collaborative Lifecycle Management initiative
 We develop RTC using RTC with new deployments at least every 4 weeks, but usually
once a week
 We develop transparently on jazz.net
 We are an agile team using a mix of Scrum, XP, Kanban, … evolving since 1999
– strong skill set
– Hundreds of builds a day (person, team, team of teams, project)
– measure “everything”
– …
 ~ 80 developers
– development, L3, release engineering, deployment management, testing
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© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Business Measures
 Effectiveness
– Expense to Revenue (E/R)
 Budget
– Development budget is based on an E/R.
– Budget can be adjusted quarterly if deemed necessary but mostly relies on projected
revenue. Projected revenue combines historic revenue and market trends.
– Budget will become expense.
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© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Execution Measures
 Execution goals
– Grow revenue
– Increase team productivity
– Reduce team expense
 Execution measures
– Projected Revenue Impact of near future work
– Team Velocity to Team Expense ratio
– measured against the not yet released highest product version
 Controllable factors
– Selection of future work
– Team Velocity
– Team Expense
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© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Selection of Future Work: Growing Revenue
 Increase number of people who try the product
 Increase number of people who tried the product and then buy it
 Increase the number of people who bought and then buy more
 Decrease the number of people abandoning the product
 Controllable factors
– Quality perception
– Meeting the needs of the customers
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© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Selection of Future Work
 Ensure that the top of the backlog is prioritized to sustainably maximize revenue
– estimate revenue impact of each backlog item
• new revenue, incremental revenue, retained revenue, operational efficiency
– revenue overlap between backlog items
– work necessary to enable future revenue impacting plan items
• reduce technical debt
• re-architecting
• infrastructure
 Short feedback cycles allow for better revenue estimates
 Transparency to allow involvement
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© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Team Velocity
 Find effective composition and distribution of teams
– prioritize co-location
– ensure critical mass on all sites
– utilize time zone affinities
– mix of experience, culture, and skills
 Pay upfront to avoid costly unproductive work later on (optimization problem)
– customer critsits
– customer handholding
– maintenance work
– educating sales and support teams on already released versions
– manual testing
– waiting for test machines to be available
– waiting because of server down
– following stupid processes
 Track effort/cost for better future estimation by analogy
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© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Team Expense
 Geographic location
 Seniority of the team members
 Salary levels
 Hardware costs
 Travel
 …
 If the revenue is acceptable, all these are superseded by Team Velocity.
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© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Process
 Clear core values
 Prioritized product backlog of plan items as single source of truth
 Quarterly releases
 Comprehensive Definition of Done
 One Feature Team per plan item
 Feature Teams are shielded by Run team
 Feature Teams are supported by free-floating outstanding senior technical people
 Fully automated build, test, and deployment pipeline
 Monitor diligently
 Process is clearly communicated
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© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Core Values
 Simple. Fast. Elegant.
 Seamless task flows.
 Best of breed.
 Your way.
 Deep analysis.
 Team focused.
 Across teams, functions, projects.
 Multi-platform.
 Extensible.
 Scalable.
 Flexible deployment.
 Secure.
 Safe investment. (Open resource formats and stable APIs)
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© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Backlog
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IBM Rational Software
Definition of Done
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© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Tracking the Done State
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IBM Rational Software
Plan Item Cost
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© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Quality Goals
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© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
Work Item Age
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© 2012 IBM Corporation
IBM Rational Software
THANK YOU
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© 2012 IBM Corporation