We would like to share our experience and journey on how we brought down our Jenkins build pipeline time down from over 90 minutes to under 12 minutes. In the process, we would share specific techniques which helped and also some, which logically made sense, but actually did not help. If your team is trying to optimize their build times, then this session might give you some ideas on how to approach the problem.

Development Impact - For one of our build job, below graph shows how the number of builds in a day have increased over a period of time as the build time has reduced. Frequency of code check-in has increased; Wait time has reduced; failed test case faster to isolate and fix.

Business Impact - More builds leading to quicker feedback and faster story acceptance and less story spill over.

While having a chat with Naresh Jain, he suggested me to go through the Ted Talk – “Gaming can make a better world” by Jane McGonigal. I found the title very weird and was wondering how is that possible? After going through the talk though, I was amazed. I started wondering if I can use the gamification technique in Agile Adoption, in our Products, in Performance Management Systems, in Employee Engagement Programs?

Dhaval Dalal introduced me to Prof. Kevin Werbach’s definition of Gamification – “The use of game elements and game design techniques in non-game contexts.”

For our 4th ShipIt Day, organized on 25th/26th Sept 2014 at IDeaS, I decided to explore the idea of using game elements and game design techniques in the context of Agile Adoption. The idea was to create a gaming system which will automatically collect data, i.e. without explicit user intervention, from multiple sources like Jenkins, Rally and manually from individuals and offer Star’s for positive behavior and deduct Star’s otherwise.

The aim was to help the team get continuous visual feedback on how they are doing, adopt agile practices, visualize sense of accountability, visualize sense of achievement, drive positive behavior, create healthy competition, create a culture of appreciation, help performance tracking and create transparency.

Update -

1. Deducting points seems to be bothering the individuals. Now we are experimenting with getting rid of negative points and introducing short lived badeges instead e.g. "Build Breaker".
2. We have now added more badges to recognize individual efforts in various categories.
3. Working on open sourcing the core app at https://github.com/IDeaSCo/rockstar

I would like to share my experience and journey on how we brought down our Jenkins build pipeline time down from over 90 minutes to under 12 minutes. In the process, I would share specific techniques which helped and also some, which logically made sense, but actually did not help. If your team is trying to optimize their build times, then this session might give you some ideas on how to approach the problem.

Development Impact - For one of our build job, below graph shows how the number of builds in a day have increased over a period of time as the build time has reduced. Frequency of code check-in has increased; Wait time has reduced; failed test case faster to isolate and fix.

Business Impact - More builds leading to quicker feedback and faster story acceptance and less story spill over.