Chapter 2. Observing a live project
This chapter covers
- Tracking progress of multiple development efforts
- Using Elasticsearch (EC) and Kibana to track and visualize metrics over time
- Communicating progress back to leadership
- Using data to improve day-to-day operations
In chapter 1 we walked through some of the concepts around agile development and saw how a team is typically measured, looked at problems that crop up, and got an overview of how to solve those problems. Now let’s look at a team that put these concepts into action, how they did it, and how it all turned out—all through a case study.
Software development is flexible and can move very quickly. Every project is different, so any one project isn’t going to encapsulate all of the characteristics of every project.
Let’s take a look at Blastamo Music, LLC, a company that makes guitar pedals and uses an e-commerce site written by their development team. As the company grew, it built better products by replacing the electronics in the pedals with software and acquired several smaller companies that had the technology and resources needed to grow even faster. Among these technologies was an e-commerce system that had several features the leadership team wanted for their site.