Professional Drupal DevelopmentHow The Economist is building a Drupal website

Stewart Robinson

@stewsnooze

30th June 2009

Why we moved to Drupal

• Being a part of a Community improves your quality.

• Unlock innovation at a fraction of the cost.

• Old site is publishing based rather than socially based.

Environment & Practices

• Test Driven Development (TDD)

• Manage TDD with Hudson CI on Amazon EC2.

• Unit test with Simpletest.

• Browser test with Selenium.

• Load test with JMeter.

Scrum

• 7 with +2 or -2 on a team.

• 3 week sprints 3 teams.

• UX work in current ahead of next sprints.

• Go live at the end of the sprint.

• Development branch has to be clean.

Operations

• Use swatch to collate errors.

• Use ELOG to make production changes.

• Acquia support.

• Managed service hosting.

• ITIL o Problem management.o Incident management.

Team structure and philosophy

• Talent focussed.

• ColdFusion developers cross trained into PHP/Drupal.

• Consultants hired, only from presenting at DrupalCon or from following work at Drupal.org.

• New Drupal developers hired.

Questions

• Why we moved to Drupal

• Environment & Practices

• Scrum

• Operations

• Team structure and philosophy