Failures – Love ‘em or lose

János Tóth-Égetö / Software Consultant

2015-04-03

www.softhouse.se

Softhouse Consulting

Are you scared of failures?

Who am I?

János Tóth-Égetö• Twitter: @Janos_TE

Employers Ericsson 1999

UIQ 2006

Capgemini (Consulting @ Ericsson) 2008

Softhouse (Consulting @ Ericsson) 2014

Qvantel 2015

Been doing lately

Continuous Integration & Devops

Tech Lead in Jive Project

What I will talk about

• How do we learn new stuff?• What role has failures?

The learning process

• Speeding up development• Level up with DevOps

Fail fast – Succeed fast

• Discover requirements iteratively• Learn how to do the right things

Discover – With Lean Startup

The learning process

www.softhouse.se

Softhouse Consulting

The learning expert

Then we grow up…

And become afraid of failures

So embarrassing..

When it happen to companies

Failure prevention gone bad

"There wasn't a sense of urgency," a former Nokia executive told me. When dealing with a machine that pumped out millions of phones, a single mistake or bad call could cost the company billions of dollars. As a result, management was structured around many layers of approval bodies and meetings. "The whole structure was built to prevent mistakes.“From CNET article Farewell Nokia - The rise and fall of a mobile pioneer

The learning process

Try something new

Failure

Learn from failureApply knowledge

Success

The testing process

Execute test cases

Failure

Analyze failureRefactor/Redesign

Success

Good vs. Bad Failures

• Reproducible• Clear cause• Controlled

environment• Recoverable

• Intermittent• Diffuse

cause• Uncontrolled

environment• Fatal

Design for good failures

Test one thing per test case

Improves clarity

Make test cases

independent

Improves stability

Control your environment

Improves reproducibility

Good vs. Bad Failure Handling

• Stakeholders immediately notified

• Information analyzed

• Cause isolated• Action taken to

correct fault• Action taken to

correct similar faults

• Failures go unnoticed or ignored

• No analyze• Test taken out of

suite “temporarily”• Unclear process• Unclear

responsibilities

Key take-aways

Don’t be afraid of failures

Design for good failures

Control your environment

Create a strategy for failure handling

Fail fast – Succeed fast

www.softhouse.se

Softhouse Consulting

Speed up development

Execute test cases - FAST

Fail - FAST

Analyze failure - FAST

Refactor/Redesign - FAST

Succeed - FAST

Use the right tools for the job

Fast

Flexible

Easy to Automate

Easy to use

Expandable

Level-up with DevOps

What defines DevOps

• Collaboration between developers and IT operations/Quality Assurance

• Sharing information• Cross-process responsibility• Tear down fences between different parts of organization

Culture

• Extensive use of tools for automation• Shorten feedback loops• Continuous Delivery• Continuous Deployment

Automation

• Measure effects of automation• Base decisions on data, not opinions

Measurements

SharedGoals

AlwaysShippable

InformedDecisions

What is the goal of DevOps

Faster Time To Market

Improve deployment frequency

Lower failure rate on new releases

Shortened lead time for fixes

Faster mean time to recovery

What is driving DevOps

• Use of agile development processes and methodologies

Agile development

• Demand for an increased rate of production releases business stakeholders

Business requirements

• Wide availability of virtualized and cloud infrastructure from internal and external providers

Cloud computing

Fail & succeed fast with DevOps

Deploy

System Test

Integration Test

Unit Test

CI Environment

Stage Environment

Production Environment

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Automate Measure Feedback

Discover – With Lean Startup

www.softhouse.se

Softhouse Consulting

Discover

How do you know you’re building the right thing?

“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted they’d have said a faster horse.”

- Henry T. Ford

“Customers don’t know what’spossible. Most have no idea

about the enablingtechnology involved.”

- Marty Cagan

“You can’t just ask customerswhat they want and then try

to give that to them. By the time you get it built,

they’ll want something new.”

- Steve Jobs

Featuritis

Features used in a typical system

Credit: Standish Group Study reported at XP2002 by Jim Johnson, Chairman

Lean Startup Method

• Eric Ries – The Lean Startup (2011)• Business-hypothesis-driven experimentation• Iterative product releases

Applied Lean Principles

• Sidestep need for initial large development and need for heavy funding

• Reduces risk for large failures

Reduce market risks

• Initially targeted for high-tech startups• Applies to any individual/team/company that aims to launch a

product or service to market

Not only for startups

Eric Ries - The Lean Startup : How Todays Entrepeneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Business

Lean Startup Method Principles and Practices

Lean

• Reduce waste• Increase value

Agile

• Integrate customer feedback in product development

DevOps

• Continuous Deployment• Measure KPI’s

Lean Startup Terminology

• The minimum version of a product that can be used to test the business value of it

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

• Different versions of a product are offered to customers at the same time. Measure impact on actionable metric.

Split Testing (A/B)

• Build a product based on an idea• Measure customers' reactions and behaviors against built

product• Learn whether to persevere or pivot the idea

Build-Measure-Learn

Examples on Split testing17

3%

Dustin found that “You should follow me on Twitter here” worked 173% better than his control text, “I’m on Twitter.”

100%

A surprising conclusion from two separate A/B tests: putting human photos on a website increases conversion rates by as much as double.

34% CareLogger

increased its conversion rate by 34% simply by changing the color of the sign-up button from green to red.

Decisions should be based on data – not opinions

Key learning

The company running most experiments against the lowest cost per experiment will win• DevOps is your best friend when it comes to

optimizing development speed• Lean Startup methods can help you build the

right things

Try – Fail - Succeed

Challenge Try these ideas!

“Failure is success in progress.”

-Albert Einstein