I’m an Engineering Manager with a great passion for learning and continuous improvement. I’ve been interested in everything to do with agile and helping teams improve since the beginning of my career over 15 years ago. I’m currently Head of Software Engineering at giffgaff, where we use XP, trunk-based-development, continuous delivery, and team topologies to safely move fast and gain a business advantage from our technical excellence. I’ve worked both in large companies and small startups, where I’ve used kanban, lean and agile to help teams strive to get better. I am co-author of the book Team Guide to Metrics for Business Decisions.
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Mattia Battiston is talking about
Unlocking technical excellence as a business advantage at giffgaff
In this case study, I'll tell you the story of how giffgaff moved from a painful monolith released every few weeks, to doing over 15,000 releases a year.
I'll explain how we use Extreme Programming practices (most notably TDD, pair programming) to achieve technical excellence. By relying on trunk-based-development and continuous delivery, we have gained a business advantage that allows us to safely move fast, experiment, gather quick feedback, and iterate.
We used Team Topologies to form teams that are setup for high performance, and we broke the monolith into microservices and microfrontends that allow us to minimise dependencies and deliver faster.
I'll share the many learnings that we collected along the way. To name a few: how to encourage good technical practices, how to identify team boundaries, how to move fast without breaking things, how to use experiments and quick iterations to launch some of our recent products.
Key takeaways…
- How to encourage and use Extreme Programming practices (TDD, pair programming) to safely move fast
- Using microservices and microfrontends to break dependencies
- Using Team Topologies to organise teams