Alef Education is a fast growing start-up established only in 2017? and we are now delivering our blended learning platform to over 55K students in over 150 schools in the UAE and a few in the USA. Starting small, with a handful of developers, working Agile was easy peasy. Nowadays, with over 70 developers in 13 teams things got a lot more complex and retaining agility a constant challenge. In this presentation, we will cover a few of the issues that we faced and how we dealt with it. We will cover the introduction of DevOps, applying scaling techniques, dynamic re-teaming, organize around microservices and the introduction of CoP's. Don't expect a huge success story, however... we are still learning and experimenting and we certainly don't have all the answers yet (or ever will). But we know that what we have experienced is of value for many companies and we are not afraid to share our mistakes as well for the sake of learning.

1. March 11, 2020 - Dubai, UAE
Remaining Agile in a
fast growing start-up
Muhammed Noor ul haq & Alexander Bosma

2. SUPPORTERS
MEDIA PARTNER
PLATINUM
PARTNERS
GOLD PARTNER BRONZE PARTNERS

3. 3
Introduction
Muhammad Noor ul haq
Head of Engineering
@ Alef Education
/noorulhaq
Alexander Bosma
Scrum Master/Agile Coach
-Self employed-
/bosmasan

4. 4
Agenda
What problem Alef is
trying to solve? Alef Growth Story
Challenges Lessons Learned

5. What problem Alef is trying to solve?

6. 6
The Traditional Classroom

7. 7
How Alef is Solving Issues in Education?
Detect
Knowledge Gaps
Provide Adaptive
Content
Continuous
Assessment
Identify Struggling
Students
Improve Quality of
Content and Questions
Gain Complex
Insights
Consistent
Feedback

8. 8
❏ 1 feature team
❏ Monolith Architecture
❏ 1 Pilot School
Jan2017
Mid
2018
2018
End
2019 2020
❏ 3 teams
❏ Monolith to Microservice
❏ 11 Schools
Alef Education Growth Story
❏ 4 teams
❏ 15 Microservices (+) Monolith
❏ Bigdata Team
❏ 31 Schools
❏ 9 teams
❏ 30+ Microservices (-) Monolith
❏ Data Science Team
❏ Business Intelligence Team
❏ 150+ Schools
❏ 350+ Schools

9. 9
150+
Schools in UAE & US
4,000+
Teachers
50,000+
Students
1,000,000
Questions Answered a day
50,000,000+
Data Points are collected every day
Alef Education Facts

10. Challenges

11. Engineers as Scrum Masters
What happened?
Due to company growth
the role of Scrum Master
got more complicated and
requires new skill sets.
Solution:
Hire a bunch of
experienced Scrum
Masters for the teams
Starting point:
Ambitious team members,
experienced with scrum,
wanting to learn and take
responsibility, taking turns
in scrum master role.
Implemented solution: Scrum Master Community of Practise (CoP)
● All SM’s get together regularly to discuss subjects like estimating, retrospectives and
experiments
● Benefits are improved skills, cross-team bonding and knowledge sharing
● Follow-up: More CoP’s for PM, TA’s and test-automation

12. Team Silos and Stagnation
What happened?
Productivity and learning
stagnated and teams were
becoming more self-oriented. The
status quo was not motivating to
try new things.
Starting point:
Fixed teams with
ambitious members, top
of class, want to be
challenged.
Implemented solution: Dynamic re-teaming
● Individual attention from leadership and coaches will signal wishes from team members
● Make a switch when an opportunity pops up. Accept lower productivity at first
● Benefits: People (and knowledge) stay in the company, team members know more about the
whole system and manage dependencies better, inter-team communication and less effort/costs
for hiring new team members

13. Lack of Communication
What happened?
It’s hard to keep up with
what other teams and
departments are doing and
inform them about what
you are doing.
Solution:
Scale down.
Starting point:
Due to growth teams focus
on their own operational
excellence but missing the
overall vision and goals.
Implemented solution: Radical Transparency
CoP’s to share knowledge and experiences Invite business people to sprint demo’s
Demo day every month School visits by tech teams
Weekly Scrum of Scrums Sharing failures (Postmortem)
Company wide retro after start of school year Team pages on Confluence

14. Continuous Delivery
What happened?
The number of teams kept
on growing, integration
and releasing taking more
time, piling up code.
Solution:
Extend the DoD for all
teams to include
everything including
releasing.
Starting point:
Done is not DONE, teams
deliver their stuff to a
system team who do
integration, testing and
releasing.
Implemented solutions:
● Automate integration tests
● Invest heavily in building CI/CD pipeline, automate everything
● Focus on test automation in all teams
● Push back activities from System team to development teams (shift left)
Develop Integrate Deliver

15. Long Term Planning
What happened?
Expectations from the
business are not met and
priorities changed faster
than the long term plan.
Solution:
Be more precise and invest
more time in planning to
ensure things don’t change
quite often.
Starting point:
Plans are made for a
complete (school) year and
need adjusting after every
release.
Implemented solution: Short Term Roadmap Planning
● Use 3-4 months planning horizons. Current increment has fixed scope, next increments are
described in high level objectives.
● Measure the impact of features to base next steps upon (feedback on your hypothesis)
● Visualize the roadmap on a central wall for everybody to have complete visibility
● Communicate during town-hall meetings, not just the plans but also the outcomes

16. “You build it, you run it.”
—Werner Voegls, Amazon CTO (2006)

17. Team Topology - Multiple Teams with Microservice

18. Inverse Conway Maneuver
"Conway's Law asserts that organizations are constrained to produce application
designs which are copies of their communication structures. This often leads to
unintended friction points.
The 'Inverse Conway Maneuver' recommends evolving your team and organizational
structure to promote your desired architecture. Ideally your technology architecture will
display isomorphism with your business architecture."

19. Aligning Team Boundaries Maximizes Continuous Delivery

20. ● A ‘team-first’ approach to
software boundaries.
● Limit the size of software
services/products to the cognitive
load that the team can handle.

21. Alef Teams Topology
Maximize team autonomy and
optimize flow of change

22. Dependencies are Inevitable
Team collaboration is important to
deliver rich user experiences using the
cohesive capabilities delivered by
multiples teams.
The challenge is to strike the right
balance. Ideally, 80% of the work should
be within a team boundary.

23. Align business, teams, and software architecture
for fast flow

24. Observe
before you
act
Do less,
more often
Stimulate
Learning
Communicate
early and often
Principles
over
Processes
Focus on
Team
Topology
Give it
Time
Break
the Silos

25. “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase
perfection we can catch excellence”
—Vince Lombardi

26. Thank You