Evolving to awesome technology by focusing on value delivery

Releasing new product can be painful, risky, and time-consuming. At Hotels.com we evolved processes and technical practices to achieve rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new user functionality. Automation of build, deployment and testing processes, and improved collaboration between product management, developers, test engineers and tech operations enabled a world of “Product Mind-set”, where software can be released in hours, or even minutes. In this talk we’ll analyse the technology and process changes that enabled us to move from quarterly release schedules to application and service releases on demand. Delivering fast requires new methods and new tools, and we have to have the courage to leave old tools behind. We’ll consider how positive change is achieved by constantly re-balancing investment in technology, process and people who drive the change. And we’ll argue that increasing the pace of delivery is not enough. We’ll discuss how Hotels.com focuses on improving the pace of finding out which issues are worthless, to reduce the delivery of features that won’t add value to its customers.