How PETS can help you deliver.

Assistance animals have been helping people for a number of years but family pets in the office are a recent sight bringing a pleasant extra dimension to the workplace.

The appearance of PETS, cross-functional Product, Engineering and Test/QA Squads, is another relatively recent change. Found predominantly in smaller, more agile XTech companies, they provide a useful team structure to support the microservices-based architectures used to improve time-to-market, agility and efficiency.

I've worked with Squads to facilitate a move from monolithic weekly releases to multiple releases daily bringing double-digit numbers of rollouts per week as they were enabled to deliver independently and with significant levels of self-managed autonomy.

How PETS supported the value acceleration.

The PETS in place delivered different "x-as-a-service" value rails within the overall company value proposition. These rails included banking, payments, settlement, clearing, card issuance, customer setup and compliance amongst others.

The PETS team topology allowed the squads to rapidly come to a shared understanding of any change being proposed to their rail. Communication between squads was also easier when, for example, the cards issuance squad needed work done by the banking squad. This was because there was a consistency of approach across the squads, with each role bringing complementary but necessarily differing views of the proposed Outcome.

The Roles

The Product Role - Representing the Customer, the Product Owner brought the User Stories to the team. They outlined the fit of the intended Outcome in the wider context of the overall business, the product roadmap and customer feedback, garnered through Customer Experience meetings and ProductBoard feedback. All this was intended to find the best customer value to be added in the shortest time, keeping at least one eye on any regulatory or other business requirements to deliver against multi-dimensional demands.

The Engineer Roles - All the disciplines involved in the building and deployment of the application are represented here. This includes coders, DevOps pipeline builders, Cloud engineers and others. Their role is to bring the Product Owner's vision to life, translating that vision into an executable set of code entities that Customers can get their value from.

The Engineers also have to consider other aspects of the implementation. There are numbers of internal attributes of the software can have significant impact on the organisation. Code maintainability and adaptability, both of which can be broken down into quantitative measures, for example the Diagnosability being the ease with which a problem can be identified and its cause isolated.

The Tester/QA Roles - The Tester/QA members of the squad seek to look at the intended Outcome from an inquisitively "what if...?" point of view, as well as designing tests and checks to evidence that the Outcome has been delivered from a customer perspective.

Prior to development they will be trying to identify possible gaps or ambiguities in the user story. For example, they may try to identify personas which have not been considered and different, possibly missing, attributes of those which have. They probe the problem domain with a helpful yet critiquing eye so that issues can be resolved and prevented from becoming defects.

Then they have the task of preparing the automated checking scripts and data to highlight things inadvertently broken in later builds.

Pets can be a great asset to moral, team-building and staff cohesion. PETS can help too. Message me if you would like me to help bring PETS to your teams.