A Final Check-in with the Team

Setting: The team conference room.

(SUSAN, MARK, ROBIN, JANE, and SAM are sitting around the conference table looking at the screen, where JONAH is videoconferenced in.)

JONAH: Hi, everyone! Happy New Year! So, what’s been happening in the last nine months since we talked?

SUSAN: Hi, Jonah! Well, a few weeks ago we successfully pushed out our fourth major release, with a bunch of new exciting features. I’m really happy with how everything has gone. It’s been our best year yet.

MARK: To give a bit more detail, the executive team has been super happy with the improvements in productivity, and our Net Promoter Score for the application is well above average now, compared to painfully low this time last year. We’ve even won an award from a library journal because of the improvements reported by our library patrons. I’ll let Raj tell you the story about our legacy system.

RAJ: Right. Through the new development work, we’ve actually been able to decouple some key application capabilities—both new and old— away from legacy. And we made some modularity improvements and simplifications to the legacy codebase too.

It’s been difficult and tedious in places, and we’ve still got a long way to go, but I’m pretty happy with how it’s been progressing. The approaches you taught us have helped a lot.

We’ve been able to start applying BDD with Cucumber in other projects and introducing it to other teams, which has kept me busy. I’m glad you taught us to take it slow at the start with a team, like you did with us; otherwise, I’d probably have given up with some of the teams!

SAM: Raj has been a big help. Jessie moved over to another team a couple of months ago, but together she and I started a community of practice around BDD. We’ve seen quite a bit of interest and have been able to help the other teams get better at collaborating because of what we learned on this project. We’ve also been helping teams at our new office as they’ve come on board.

RAJ: Since this approach led us to release more frequently, we realized how inefficient and slow our deployment pipeline was, so we’ve made some significant improvements, with continuous deployment for the new components and more automation for legacy releases. Robin did a lot of that work.

JONAH: I’m so glad to hear all that! Sounds like you have many positives. I’m sure there’s been some struggles too?

MARK: We’ve certainly had more than our fair share of challenges, especially around management changes and our recent hiring spree in adding ten new junior developers to the org these last few months. It’s become clear that this new way of working maybe isn’t always for everyone, and some people take longer to get on board than others. With some of them working remotely, we’ve had to adapt some of our practices as we’ve grown. And legacy is still slowing us down more than I’d like, though it’s much better than this time last year, for sure.

SAM: I haven’t had to spend nearly as much time ramping up these new hires on library processes and how the software works as I would have in the past without Cucumber. And Jane and Robin have done a great job of getting them up to speed with Cucumber and our new way of working, not that it feels that new anymore.

JANE and ROBIN: Thanks, Sam!

JANE: I’m much happier now that I can focus more on exploratory testing. Bug rates are way low now, since talking through examples as part of development helps us identify issues before they show up in code. Plus, the shift in my role with this team has freed me up to provide testing guidance to the other teams, especially with Jessie and Sam’s support through the community of practice. Robin and I even ran our first internal open space conference last month, and we were able to share a lot of our learning that way.

ROBIN: It was a blast! The energy level was pretty high. Even Sam ran a session on BDD for BAs. Right, Sam?

SAM: Absolutely, it’s probably fair to say BDD is more the “new normal” for us now. I couldn’t imagine going back to how it was before.