Improving eBay's Development Velocity - Randy Shoup, Ebay | Craft Conference 2022

This talk was recorded at Craft Conference 2022. Randy Shoup from Ebay spoke about Devops, Lean and Engineering Leadership. This talk outlines eBay’s cross-organizational Velocity initiative to improve engineering productivity and drive better customer outcomes. While eBay's challenges ultimately span culture, organization, people, and technology, we focused our initial efforts on improving software delivery across the board, because eBay’s ability to deliver software rapidly, safely, and repeatably is a prerequisite for every other improvement. Our approach comes straight from the Lean and DevOps community, as expressed in Accelerate, Making Work Visible, Team of Teams, Project to Product, The DevOps Handbook, etc.

The teams we worked with in 2021 (representing ~10% of eBay's development efforts) have seen their productivity double: with the same size and composition, the teams now produce twice the features and bug fixes as before. Equally importantly, working collaboratively and breaking down silos have paid second-order cultural dividends across the company.

This talk will discuss

Breaking down silos between product engineering and infrastructure

Measuring software delivery performance through the Four Key Metrics from Accelerate

Continually reducing build time, startup time, PR validation time, and deployment time

Relentlessly focusing on removing individual teams' impediments to fast flow

Embedding experts directly in product teams and sharing learnings across the entire organization

We have a (very!) long way to go, and in 2022 we have scaled this initiative to 50% of eBay's development efforts. This session will provide actionable insights for other organizations going through similar journeys.

The event was organized by Crafthub.

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