Tales from the War Room
April 29, 2009
With out 3rd major software release due in 40 days success is really reliant on some pretty effective collaboration between the multiple moving parts that need to come together on the day like one big well-oiled machine. That’s why I’m so glad that we setup our ‘War Room’ meeting. Each morning at 9am 20 indivduals descend on Meeting Room One from their various teams and take stock of progress over the previous 24hrs.
From the top we have : the Delivery Manager, ultimately responsible for the successful implementation of the release into Production; the Project Manager, reponsible for coordinating the campaign and keeping us all revved up; the Test Director and test team leads, responsible for executing 500 test cases with 100% success rates through System Test, Joint System Test and Joint Acceptance Testing; the Trading System BA, responsible for design and development of the BlackRock Trading Platform component; the Data Management System team lead, responsible for the 40+ integration components they feed data throughout the solution; the Enterprise Services team lead, responsible for scheduling of data feeds; the Environments team lead, reponsible for servers, hardware and dealing with the spate of City-wide power-cuts we’ve had recently!!! Finally there’s the ‘Stats Guy’, responsible for compiling an impressive array of graphs and statistics that boil down the infite number of variables that all the other members generate during any given day into something that can meaningfully be discussed in under 45 minutes.
All up a motley crew and some might wonder how a large group like that can be productive. Well lets start with the ‘why?’ question - Why do we need to sit down EVERY morning - how much can happen in 24hrs to make it worth while??
The answer is that an enormous amount of things happen in 24hrs - mainly due to the fact we are now running ‘Prod-Like’ - ie. we are simulating in out Joint System test environment exactly what will happen in Production when we go live. This means running 2 batch cycles per day loading data from our Administrator and Trading Systems and send thing data downstream - TWICE!
We are also trading on 30 different security types - exactly as will be the case when we release the system to our Front Office users.
We are fixing 10-15 defects daily and executing a similar number of test cases.
On top of all that are the numerous daily issues, risks and surprises that make this such an interesting place to work.
Top issues, defects and risks are tracked, discussed and resolved on our ‘War Board’ - see picture :
The ‘health check’ is our ‘Spider’ which shows which interfaces between systems in the current code line are running ‘clean’ :
The session is usually over in less than an hour and everyone leaves the room with the right direction for the day. Without this process our ability to keep on track would be significantly more difficult - so if you don’t have a War Room of your own then it’s time to start thinking about it - Let Battle Commence!
ScrumMaster
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