Uswitch.com transitioned from a traditional waterfall development process to agile practices like Scrum and XP over three years. While this improved speed, they still found planning overhead and low velocity. They then evolved to a fully lean approach, removing roles like QA and PM, limiting work-in-progress, releasing on demand, and building quality in rather than inspecting. This led to quicker time to market, reduced waste, safer and more frequent releases, and quality built-in rather than inspected. Measuring value is difficult but they focus on revenue, customer experience, innovation, and efficiency gains.
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Spa2010 uSwitch
1. Creating a Lean business from the inside outTechnical innovation at uSwitch to reduce waste and become lean
10. Delivering the right stuffOur journey3 years ago…WaterfallLarge teams with multiple rolesProject ManagersBusiness AnalystsDevelopersTestersProduct ManagersLong projects (typically 6-12 months)BDUF
11. Our journey2 years ago…Decided to ‘go Agile’Came from new CTO and some developersDesire to deliver value more quicklyStrict Scrum 3 week iterations (3 weeks testing)Daily stand-upsPlanning meetings, retrospectives, etc
12. Our journeyEvolved Scrum with XP practicesTDDPair programmingContinuous integrationOverall, this worked quite well
28. Pull stories on customer demandGoing Lean: technologyRelease on demandTeam City and Subversion for CIBuilt a tool to move code to the live environment safelyExtra monitoring to reduce risk of frequent releases (conversion rate, error rate)Removed QA at the end - baked quality inBDDIntegration testsSmoke tests run on release and for monitoring
29. Going Lean: peopleWe reduced the number of rolesNo QA - Tester DevelopersNo Analyst - customer part of the teamNo PM or Scrummaster - self-organising teamsTeams understand context and objectives of initiatives and own solution. Use measures to define success.
61. Many ways to measure valueRevenueCustomer Satisfaction/ExperienceInnovationEfficiencyReduced riskVery difficult to work out…Measuring business valueAccept that value is subjective
62. It’s a judgement callMeasuring business valueEnsure the judgement is informedA/B and multi-variant testingMeasure the right thingsRetrospectivesThe process supports continuous re-evaluation through a quick feedback cycleFail FastTry new ideas quickly
63. We must ask the right questions to prove those ideas
65. Do it in a dayBird Cages1 day…Create a site with cages How many people click ‘buy’?1 week…Create a site that really sells cagesHow many cages can you sell?1 month…Create a business importing and selling cages
66. Do you want to go Lean?Get your technology sortedXP practicesRemove inspection, bake quality inMake releases cheap and safeDo them every day
67. Do you want to go Lean?Get your process sortedSome sort of Agile approachNo ‘one size fits all’Do what works for youForget about projects, concentrate on featuresContinually re-assess your assumptionsBe prepared to fail but do it quickly
Chart shows four iterations from August and September 2008 (car insurance team). Number of points delivered is increasing for each iteration as the team becomes more effective. Number of stories delivered is increasing for each iteration (less marked than points though). All good. Give ourselves a pat on our Agile backs.
For the same team at the same time we see something interesting with points planned and delivered against stories planned and delivered.Over 90% of points planned are delivered.Shows the team is effective at estimation and working at the expected velocity.For stories, it’s a different story.Only around 60% of the planned stories are delivered.40% of the time we’re doing other stuff (new stuff, rework, bugs, etc)Therefore a lot of waste in planning. Planning is lying?
Ideas – High level ideasBacklog – The next few high priority ideas broken down into MMF’sReady – The next high priority MMF’s that are ready to be worked onIn Progress – DevelopmentInventory - Features that are completed but not yet earning value (often but not always Features that are not yet deployed to live)Done – Live and earning value
This is a CFD from a team shortly after adopting some of the Lean principles.Flow is relatively limited (incline of chart is quite flat)Inventory is allowed to build up emptied on an irregular basis (releases)
This is a CFD from a team who have been following the Lean principles longer.Our technology and process had evolved to support Lean by this point.Much steeper incline (better flow).Smaller inventory (more regular releases).
Just over 1 month around April 2009Shows time from ‘ready’ to ‘live’ decreasing over the period.Around 17/04 we introduced more, faster releasesCycle time reduced to <10 days (remaining longer times are items already in the queue)Previous short cycle times (07/04) were the result of emergency releases.
Chart shows the time for the sales team to convert a leadStep change in 17/09 was the result of a release of some significant functionality.The team is delivering demonstrable value.