eMoney Advisor is a leader in the highly competitive market of online financial planning software. Like most successful companies, it strives to stay ahead of the competition, embrace change, and adopt new and proven methods of working. eMoney senior management enlisted the help of four Industrial Logic coaches to improve the frequency and quality of their software releases within the development organization, specifically their account aggregation vertical teams called Nexus.
An initial assessment and subsequent workshops helped the Industrial Logic coaches identify problems that were obstructing cycle times and releases. To address these issues, the coaches proposed the following:
Increase the quality and the stability of the software.
Instill better practices for continuous integration and delivery.
Make Test-Driven Development (TDD) a normal practice.
Create an environment where developers and testers program together.
Ensemble programming resulted in:
"With the help of our Industrial Logic coaches, we cut one of our key parsers from 8000 lines of code to just over 400, splitting much of the functionality into libraries that all of our parsers can use. The whole thing is surrounded by tests, it’s way easier to read and runs a lot faster."
"Prior to the changes introduced by Industrial Logic, 23 releases were completed annually. The process was very manual, requiring three full days of prep, along with support from the production operations. In that year, 2 of the 23 releases were rolled back and 1 required a hotfix. In the year after the IL training and coaching, we more than tripled the number of releases to 80 with only 2 rollbacks and one hotfix! Additionally, the team was able to automate the release process to the point where they no longer required support from the production operations team. Releases moved to twice weekly and now require only 1½ days of lead time."
With the help of our Industrial Logic coaches, we cut one of our key parsers from 8000 lines of code to just over 400, splitting much of the functionality into libraries that all of our parsers can use. The whole thing is surrounded by tests, it’s way easier to read, and runs a lot faster.
eMoney Manager
Our TDD practices are coming along nicely and maturing. Making sure we have the test coverage has really helped to produce code we are more sure of, with fewer issues. Since we incorporate testing into our workstreams, we also catch any bugs right after development is finished, thus fixing them very early on, and delivering much more stable feature work. The testing has also helped in that we are more confident our feature work has been fully vetted before we send it out into the wild -- as such, when bugs do arise, we also have the confidence that it might be something that changed since our finished work, which can also help track it down much faster. Overall, I am experiencing much added value to our team from following thesepractices and ideals.
Industrial Logic has transformed the way my team works. Their coaches brought a wealth of knowledge and expertise, which was shared freely with my team of young and inexperienced developers. They took the training to heart and ran with it, spreading the knowledge and principles to other team members. As a result, our code is faster, more robust, and best of all, easily maintainable.
Overall, this team now pumps out work faster than any team I’ve ever been on. This happened because good developers with good intentions received good training.
The practice most still in use is ensemble programming. Developers almost exclusively program in ensembles and code is seldom written as individuals.
Manager, eMoney Solutions
Another learning that really stuck with us is refactoring legacy code. Prior to the training we operated with surgical precision, only touching what was absolutely necessary to get a new feature working. Now we freely and safely refactor code to create just enough of a seam to add pinning tests. That’s allowed us to make vast improvements to our code base.
