Agile Development at Esendex
Who am I?
Dr Nicholas Bruce,
Development Manager,
Esendex
[email protected]
What am i going to be talking about?
Who are Esendex
What do we do
How do we do it
Development methodologies
Waterfall
Agile
Flavours of Agile Scrum & eXtreme
Paired development
Continuous integration
Test Driven Development (TDD)
Are you a potential candidate?
Who are Esendex
Esendex is an international business communications provider
established in 2001
Currently employing 30 people in offices in the UK, Ireland,
Germany, France, Spain and Australia
What we do
We facilitate business communication for a wide range of
customers from large corporations to SME's
We have in excess of 6000 customers inc..
Ocado
Virgin Media
RAC
Parkers
BAA Gatwick
Distributing over 1.5 million SMS messages per week
How we do it
We have direct connections with all the UK and a high number of
Int'l networks and allowing us to guarantee delivery and provide a
quick reliable and stable service to our customers
The in-house development team have written 95% of our services
in C# .Net, this gives us high level of control
The developed architecture needs to be available 24/7/365 and be
over 99% reliable
It also needs to be adaptable extensible and be able to respond
rapidly to strategic, customer and market demands.
Development methodologies
Which supports our purpose?
Waterfall an traditional development methodology
Agile
Scrum
eXtreme programming (XP)
Waterfall
A linear process, sometimes...
x months x years
Agile Development
An iterative and incremental process
Scrum
Each sprint is between 2-4 weeks
At the conclusion of each sprint the team produce a potentially
shippable increment, that is working & tested.
The sprint are taken from a prioritized collection called the
backlog.
You are not allowed to change the sprint backlog during a sprint
( no change in priorities)
After a sprint the team must demonstrate the software
eXtreme
Requirements will change
,but will become refined
Time
eXtreme, a combination of Agile components
Paired Programming
Test driven development
Continuous integration
Sociable team
Paired development
Shown to produce 75% of the work of two developers
With a higher quality of code
Continuous code review
Shared responsibility
Test Driven Development
Benefits?
Continuous integration
Integrate early and often
Taking small steps
Progress at a steady rate
No large integration points
Code
Build
Test
Integrate
The Esendex flavour
Combination of Extreme and Scrum
Stand-ups every day
Weekly release cycles
Continuous integration
TDD
Paired development
In summary
Esendex are a profitable ambitious company
Employing only the best graduates and developers
Practice eXtreme development
In a Friendly & sociable environment
Encourage you to expand your knowledge and experience
Esendex recruitment- do you fit?
Intelligent (min 2:1)
Confident
Articulate
Motivated
In addition knowledge of C# .Net, Source code control and Agile
methods
Triathlon experience would be a bonus
Recommended reading
Extreme Programing Explained
Kent Beck et al
Addison-Wesley
ISBN 0-321-27865-8
Extreme Programming Adventures in C#
Ron Jeffries
Microsoft Press
ISBN 0-7356-1949-2
