Agile Development
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Agile, agile, agile. As a software as a service company, our customers expect us to be agile. Agile in responding to customer support. Agile in responding to feature requests. Agile in adding functionality to the base product.
Customers today expect monthly enhancements to their services on the web. They expect that they will be getting more for their money than they did the month before. And they expect that the service today will be faster than it was a month ago. And here at CloudShare, we expect to deliver.
This blog post (and others that will follow) explains how CloudShare delivers the incremental functionality that customers expect to get, on a month-by-month basis, without impacting the core stability of the service.
The development process in CloudShare rests on three legs:
- Staggered version releases every two weeks
- Automated branch merging
- Aggressive unit testing
- Final Testing
(well, OK, four legs.)
Staggered Version Releases
So how does the development team release a version every two weeks? By doing staggered versions. And what are staggered versions? Simple – the versions that are worked on by the development in parallel – the development team is always working on 3 versions at once. (I can hear you saying – “and that’s simple?” Well, bear with me.)
Let’s say we’re a new company, where the service was never deployed to the Internet. No customers whatsoever. The development team is developing the first version, which we’ll call A. After two weeks of development, the developers pass it on to final testing, and start developing version B. So now we have version A in final testing, and version B in development. Now version B is being developed, but version A is being tested. Invariably, final testing finds bugs (not many, mind you, but we’ll get to that when we discuss aggressive unit testing). So, while the developers are developing version B, they are also fixing bugs in version A.
Finally, after two weeks of testing and development, version A is ready to be deployed on the Internet, version B is ready to be tested, and a new version, C, is starting to be developed.
So in the next two weeks, development has to contend with three versions – C, being developed, B being tested, and A, in production.
So there you have it – three versions that are being worked on in parallel – the dev version, the test version, and the prod (production) version.
Now comes the interesting part – when the developers start working on version D. This is also when we start testing version C, and when version B is being deployed on the Internet.
I’ll let you work out what happens next (answers at the bottom of this blog post). After two weeks, the developers start working on version ___(1), starting to test version ____(2), and version ____(3) is being deployed on the Internet.
Automated branch merging
“Ha ha!” you say, “This procedure looks really good in theory, but in practice, each change you do for the test version, you also need to do for the dev version!” And it gets worse. If we patch the prod version, we need to do the same patch for the test version and the dev version.
As they say:
Yes, inconceivable, unless you have automated branch merging! Using this technique, we use our source control tools to automatically merge the changes we do in one branch to another branch.
The beauty of this approach is that if the versions were months apart, this would never have worked, but since the versions are a maximum of two weeks apart, the merge will succeed without any problem. And, in the rare case where the automatic merging fails, the developers gets an email asking them to do the merge manually, which they do.
But how do they know that the merge worked? Well, the answer to that brings us to the second leg of our agile development process…
Aggressive unit testing
How do developers know that the code they wrote is working? The obvious answer – test it. But how would we know that the code we wrote did not break other stuff? The same answer – test everything – doesn’t work here. There is just too much to test, and too little time. And throwing it at the testing team to check is also not going to work. Any bug found by final testing costs a lot of time for the team. Time better spent on coding.
So what do we do? Well, we do what any professional developer does – automate. This is a recurring theme in the CloudShare development team (and in any agile team). If you want to be agile, you need to automate.
How can we automate testing? Automated Unit Testing. I could discuss CloudShare unit testing for hours, and I will dedicate a blog post about this incredibly important subject, but suffice right now to say that we have tests for every conceivable customer scenario (and lots of inconceivable customer scenarios, just in case the inconceivable becomes conceivable).
Unit tests, in CloudShare, are a safety net – they make sure that even if a developer does something wrong, the net will catch the mistake. And it is not only the developer’s responsibility to run all the tests – the tests are run every day automatically on the three branches (dev, test, prod). We have tens of machines just waiting to run these tests in parallel, so that feedback about the change the developer did gets to the developer as quickly as possible.
So what happens when a bug was created in the UI, or in the way we use the cloud infrastructure? Or the file system? This is where we reach our last leg – and the most important one:
Final Testing
Our Quality Assurance team – the testing team – gets a very debugged version. It has passed all unit tests, and they are confident that most of the functionality will work. But still we test – for the reason mentioned above, and also to verify that nothing has slipped through the cracks.
Our Quality Assurance engineers test each of the new features that were implemented. But they also test all functionality. Given that we have two weeks to test a version – new functionality and old functionality – we also have to resort to automation here. The testing team has a comprehensive method to test and run the system just as the customer does – through the browser, and using the same infrastructure as in production.
Final Words
Agility is not just getting new functionality quickly out of the door. It is building a software development process, a company culture that supports agility. A company culture that understands that you have to work on multiple versions at once, build tools to enable this, and above all – aggressively test, test, test.
Quiz Answers:
1 E
2 D
3 C
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