Improving Lean, Service-Oriented Software Development at Codeweavers Ltd

Following a successful adoption of lean and agile practices, the development team at Codeweavers Ltd has furthered its approach to service-oriented software development for the motor finance and insurance industry. Through iteratively inspecting and adapting their processes over the last twelve months, the team members have seen a change from their Kanban-style single piece flow to multiple work cells developing with separate swim lanes on a work in progress board and within fixed length iterations. The arrival of strong competition to their market led to a positive shift towards customer service and interaction with increased attention on lean planning and agility. This chapter reports on improvement in software craftsmanship with a focus on quality, largely achieved by the use of service-oriented architecture, combined with increased use of mocking for unit-testing. The perspective taken is from software team members, and in the chapter, the developers chart their own observations, improvements, and failures over the course of a year. INTRODUCTION TO CODEWEAVERS AND THEIR AGILE ADOPTION PROCESS Codeweavers Ltd is a software solutions provider based in Staffordshire, UK. The company has around twenty-five employees, including a development team of around twelve developers. Smaller teams of two or three are responsible for infrastructure, design, sales and client support. Since 2001 the company has delivered applications and web services for the automotive financial and insurance industries, and in that time has grown to become the market leader in its specialised field. Its client-base includes leading car manufacturers and dealer groups. In late 2007 the company began a gradual journey of agile process adoption, in response Paul Shannon 7digital Ltd, UK Neil Kidd Codeweavers Ltd, UK Paul Barrett Codeweavers Ltd, UK Chris Knight Codeweavers Ltd, UK Sam Wessel Esendex Ltd, UK