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Over the years, we’ve taken pride in making our tools, product and development process, as open and transparent as possible. Our tools (Bugzilla, Litmus, Wiki) are publicly accessible, our source code open (svn) and we’ve blogged on many occasions about our Agile practices.

Today we’re taking a step further by publishing our Development Survival Guide. This presentation is an internal step-by-step guide that we take new engineers thru during their orientation. It’s a good summary of what to expect on a day-to-day basis as an engineer working at Songbird (other than daily Fussball tournament and unfettered access to the beer stocked mini-fridge). It’s your opportunity to take a peek from within.

Want get even closer? Apply for one of our openings.

Download Songbird Development Survival Guide 1.2 in pdf.

Agile development methods are well suited to plan and execute near term release cycle. For instance, the tools we developed and processes we’ve adopted help us plan and steer a release to completion with a good level of accuracy and repeatability. However, there are instances when the time horizon needs to be further out than the current cycle. The need to create a budget, synchronize a roadmap with a partner or determine future hiring needs, make it necessary to have an effective mechanism for long term planning.

Fortunately, the metrics gathered during each Agile release cycle can be very helpful for that purpose. Once we gain a good understanding on what is being worked on, for how long and by how many people, we should be able to extrapolate this to forecast future releases.

Let’s take a look at what activities take place during a typical release cycle:

1) Plan release
2) Write code
3) Test
4) Fix bugs

Then repeat ad nauseam.

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This is a following post to the series on Agile development at Songbird. As covered previously, we’ve created in-house tools to help with the planning and tracking of our release trains. The tool works off of Bugzilla and extracts meaningful information for project tracking. As it was originally meant to periodically generate an email status, it became apparent that it was too static for daily project tracking needs.

Songbird Release Trains

We concluded that a dashboard that was more dynamic and worked in real time with Bugzilla would provide a more accurate picture of development progress. This is an overview of the couple of extensions we added to the tool.

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