niksilver.com

…which stands for “just do it”, and was the unofficial name of one of the development teams which sat alongside the R2 teams.

One key principle we had from the start of the project was that other development work couldn’t stop for the sake of the site rebuild. There might be less of it, but it shouldn’t dwindle to zero. And while R2 was a major long term undertaking, the rest of the work that came up inevitably had a very different shape. Consequently we had different kinds of teams.

The JFDI team handled very short turnaround work. Mostly this consisted of bugfixes, but it also included minor enhancements. It worked in a traditional Agile manner, but due to the size of the individual tasks work was reprioritised every day rather than every fortnight.

Working on the JFDI team suits some people better than others. On the one hand it’s difficult to get your teeth stuck into anything because it doesn’t last very long (or at least it shouldn’t); on the other hand you get a sense of completion every day. A lot of the time people don’t relish cycling into that team, but once they’re in they find they learn a huge amount about how the software they’ve written actually gets used. I’ve written more on this subject previously.

Overall the JFDI team has been very successful, dealing with a large and constantly-shifting workload, but also demonstrating daily progress to our internal users. Since R2 finished we’ve kept the team running in the same mode, and it continues to bring immediate benefit to people inside and outside the development teams.

…which lasted two weeks and culminated in a full new release of our software. I’ve written elsewhere about what happened in one week of a particular iteration in June 2008.

However, our R2 iterations didn’t just involve implementing software. At the same time each team was also working with a business analyst and end-users to plan and clarify the work for the next iteration, and sometimes getting the last iteration’s work through its systems tests prior to release. As one of the team leads said to me, “we work in three timezones”.

At the end of an iteration the release went out. But our releases didn’t always reveal much that was different — either because we were waiting to reveal it as part of a forthcoming launch, or because it was part of our internally-facing systems. That can be an odd feeling for the development teams. In previous lives I’ve worked on projects where the launch has the whole team working right up to the last moment and so also signals the time when you can collapse with exhaustion. But our interleaving of “timezones”, and releases well ahead of launches, changed that. The launch of, say, the Sports section was a big moment for so many in the company, but most of the people on the development team had finished the work some time before and were spending more time thinking about the launch that followed.

…which was launched in May 2007 and incorporated a huge amount of flexibility to tell the day’s news in different ways.

There are two major aspects to the home page’s flexibility. The first, and most obviously, is a variety of templates. In our previous system the home page had almost no flexibility at all, which was a consequence of not separating the content from the presentation — the home page was effectively a small program and changing the layout meant changing the code. That’s not something you can do in the middle of busy news day. As part of the R2 project we created a variety of templates which could be switched in largely at will. I say “largely” at will, because switching layout also means the various areas of the page are spaced differently, some growing and others shrinking, so you need to make sure they all have the right amount of content in them.

The second kind of flexibility is in what you can do on the page. Any one template has internal logic which changes the layout subtly according to where a production staffer marks a break or places an image or video.

We launched our new home page early on 10 May 2007. Around midday Tony Blair announced he was stepping down as prime minister. The event gave the news desk the chance to make use of many alternative templates in various configurations. In the tech team we would check back at the home page throughout the day to see yet another template was on show for the first time. By the end of the day our new software had been given more of a workout than we could have guessed, but it served us all admirably.