This is Drupal Sass, building software as a service on Drupal, Drupal North 2019. So, just to introduce myself, I'm an enterprise cloud architect. That is, I do Drupal, IGR, Sasspass, SAP, IAS consulting, all that kind of stuff. I won't explain what those are, because that'll take half an hour. Use Wikipedia, it's great. So, I've been on drupal.org for 13 years as Colin, CLA-N. I'm maintaining over 40 modules, not all of them actively, because I know that could be a question. I worked on the first release of buyandsell.gc.ca, which is the Government of Canada procurement portal. So a lot of your companies probably tried to... Oh, okay. Looks okay now. Thanks for that. Yeah, so that site, I don't know if you... Anyway, yeah, so I'm not sure why it's flickering, just trying to pretend it's not, I guess. So, on that site, it's a procurement portal for Government of Canada. So a lot of your companies probably tried to get government contracts through that. That was, I think, the first big Drupal implementation in the federal government, so I worked on that. I'm a Google Summer of Code mentor, have been for various data encryption projects in Drupal. So it's a bunch of client-side encryption and server-side encryption projects that I mentored students for. Just kind of need... I'm a core maintainer of the Agra hosting system, which you can't see right now, but the screen keeps flickering. If anybody knows any of the media people, feel free to grab them or ping them or something, because I don't know what's going on here. I believe everything's plugged in, so I'll just ignore that. All right, so I'm the founding partner of Consensus Enterprises, which is my new firm I have with some other folks. We do a bunch of different things, generically helping you do big things in the cloud. Davos processes, documentation, self-hosted multi-site solutions, audits, site audits, application lifecycle management, continuous integration and delivery, cloud infrastructure, architecture, and software-to-service engineering. That's pretty much what we do. Some ground rules for this talk, in and around me at any time. It's kind of an open source thing. Jump in, add your feedback, ask questions, all that kind of stuff. You can actually follow along on the website if you want. I'm assuming that site works. That's where this is. So I'm actually using, accessing that now. It's actually Hugo's, the static site generator we use for this. So it's up there. And so a lot of the slides, you're going to see some of these things I'm talking about. They're actually links. They're orange. For those of you that aren't colorblind, feel free to, if you want to go there, you can click on things if you want to go off and check out certain links that I'm talking about. Feel free to do that. I've got a Creative Commons license, so you can reuse some of this stuff if you want. All right. So how many of you are considering building a SaaS product? Anybody here? One, two, couple? Currently working on a SaaS product? So that's a good number. That's four, five. Great. And anybody already selling one? Does anyone have one in production? Not yet, because they already know what they're doing. They don't need to come here? Oh, you do not? Okay. Great. All right. Did anyone realize you're supposed to be somewhere else? You're in the wrong room? No. Okay, great. Excellent. Yeah, so anybody, are there any other interesting SaaS, like wire, please? Yeah. So, Drupal Distributions, there's regularly multiple websites from a single code base. Yep. And how we use it would be a good distribution, get a delta and buy a stock. Right. Kind of expanded business. Right.  Great. Perfect. Any other? Yeah, shoot. Okay. And we run a lot of websites. Staff time? Yeah. Okay. Great. So I'm just looking at angles that we could do that kind of internally. Yeah. Or maybe to other departments. Yeah, actually, we're doing some work for other departments, so let's talk after. You want to help? Sure. I can talk about what we're doing. Yeah. Great. Cool. So, excellent. Like the business aspects of a product, it's a bit different than a project. So normally with, you know, website project, but at work you get paid. You do another one when you get paid. If you're building a product, there's a lot, it takes a lot more time to build something like that with a subscription model. So it's different than development contracts, as you can imagine. You don't, you don't really get paid up front. Like you have to do a whole bunch of work before money can start coming in. There's a, you know, a lot of unpaid work to get your platform built. So you certainly need to have a plan for keeping the lights on, getting paid, that kind of thing. So what we're doing, like we've actually, we're actually, you know, working on some SaaS products as well as doing consulting. And we're trying to bootstrap it like fund it from our consulting work.  So these are just things, you know, you have to think about when you're, when you're working on the business aspect. Obviously you're not all here for that, but that's something to keep in mind for that use case, right? So like I said, lots of development. You may not get regular income for this type of thing. Yeah. So it's, you know, money should come in if, if you can sell it, right? I mean, that's what it's all about, right? So great. So let's talk a little bit about hosting.  So you can outsource your infrastructure. You don't have to worry about any of that. Simplify site maintenance. That's often done for you. I know some of them you need to click a button. You get the latest, you know, version of Drupal core. That's great. There's some cons though. So vendor lock in, like you're generally stuck with a particular vendor. It might not always be easy to export and import somewhere else, especially if you've written, you know, infrastructure as code, that kind of thing. That's not portable. You don't have control over hosting costs. So if you get locked in somewhere and their prices start skyrocketing, what do you do, right? So that doesn't even think about a data center location. So this is an issue in Canada because of privacy laws for Americans. It's not, I guess, too big of a deal. But here, so you don't have, I mean, yeah, you might not have control over data centers, right? So if you go with one of the Drupal hosting companies, usually you don't get to choose what country that's in, right? So I know with, in Canada, there are going to be times when you want to, your customer data needs to be not necessarily in Canada, but, you know, your users need to consent to whatever you do with that data. And that won't work in the States generally because other government can get access to any data at any time. And you don't even know that that's happening and users can't consent to it. And so you might want to think about, you know, having, where you want to put your data centers. So configuration as code. So this is using tools like, you know, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt, these kind of things where, you know, you use your code as infrastructure to spin up the ends, that kind of thing. If that's written for particular vendor, then, you know, you might get locked into that. Not great. So in a lot of these companies, they don't support multi-site. And that's actually very explicit with most of them. And I'm not sure why it is, but that's the way it is. And so like we started talking about it, you might want to run multi-site and have a whole bunch of sites using the same code base. A lot of the vendors don't support that, or at least the jubilose companies. So, and also cost is another thing to think about. So cost per site, a lot of these companies will charge you, say, 60 month per site. So if you've got 200 and the same code base, you're paying for 200 sites, where as opposed, you know, you would want it to scale the more sites you have, the cheaper it gets, but it doesn't work that way with these folks, unfortunately. So infrastructure. So there's proprietary infrastructure of the service.  These are things that are very popular now. But again, it's proprietary, it's not open source. So OpenStack is sort of the IIS implementation that won some other options were Ganity, which is a Google thing, and CloudStack. But OpenStack seems to have sort of taken over now, because I think RACS basically put a lot of effort into that. So yeah, no vendor lock-in, it's open source.  OpenStack is, that's a big one now, like I was saying. So there are a lot of different hosted companies running OpenStack.  There are companies that are running OpenStack and you just, like any other hosted company, you just pay them and it's running on OpenStack and you just do what you have to do, spin up the ads, that kind of thing. A lot of them, so I've worked with several OpenStack hosting companies and they often don't have data in and out charges. So like with AWS, I don't know how many of you know, but they'll often, you pay a lot of money getting your data, uploading your data, getting it out, that kind of thing and that can be very expensive. So with a bunch of these companies, the ones I've worked with at least, they only charge you for storage, which is great. So you can save a lot of money. Like if you, people uploading things, downloading things, that sort of thing. Your configuration as code, again, that would be, you know, like Ansible code, that kind of thing. So that, there's a standard API for OpenStack. So if you want to switch vendors, it doesn't matter. You can reuse that on any other OpenStack vendor. If they jack up the price, you move somewhere else. As opposed to say, you can't switch from AWS to Azure very easily if all your code is written for those APIs, so something to watch out for. Data centers in various countries. So there's actually, if you go to the OpenStack, I don't have the URL in front of me, but if you search for OpenStack Marketplace on the website, they actually, you can search by country by service for OpenStack providers. So now, different services, databases, service, VMs, whatever, that kind of thing. Yeah, data portability. So like I said, switching between vendors, your I infrastructure as code, sorry, I see. You can move that between vendors easily. You can also do the same with your data, not just your code. So you can export your VMs from some company and then import them into another company that's running OpenStack, which is great. More control over hosting costs, right? So again, you have various companies to choose from. But now, let's talk hosting system, right? The platform as a service, I guess. Do you need to write one from scratch? And you don't. So we've got some software that does that. There's something called AGR, which you may or may not have heard of. Has anyone heard of AGR and know about it? I see a lot of hands. You may or may not have heard of it. One, two, okay. So it was originally written to host and manage provisioned Drupal sites. So I think the 11th anniversary just went by, it's been around a long time. So it's open source. It's, yeah, like I said, 10 plus years, right? So it's got a web services API. So it can do a lot of things. Soon it'll be able to host anything. So AGR 3 is stable right now. So AGR 5, which is currently in development, which some of us are working on, that the idea there is to replace the provisioner. So historically it's been Drush, which works great for Drupal, but for everything else. So we're actually replacing Drush with Ansible. So it should be able to provision anything. So any kind of thing you want to host, you should be able to do with AGR 5, which is great. I don't want to talk too much about that, but that's where it's going, a bit to know. And all right. I did this already. Anybody using AGR? No, just me? I know you were. At various times. Cool. So that's the hosting system. So what that is, is that gives you sort of the back end hosting infrastructure, right? So you would sort of, you know, tell that, okay, I need a new site, it would spin one up. I want to take one down. I want to upgrade my sites. I want to run backups on a site. All that kind of stuff. So often you would want to integrate that with, say, e-commerce, you know, how do you get your clients to pay if that's a thing for you? You're recurring billing, right? You have subscriptions, how's that going to work? Right? So there's a module that I've been working on the last couple of years when I have time. It's called AGR site subscription. So that's a link. So it's a Drupal.org module. And so that adds e-commerce to the AGR ecosystem by associating hosted sites with customer subscriptions via recurring billing. It communicates with AGR API over web services. So let's say you had a Drupal 8 site.  Clients would, you know, customers would create an account there. They would pick the plan they wanted. They would, you know, enter the credit card number, all that stuff.  Or if they stopped paying, their credit card fails eventually, then you can just delete it. Or if you don't want to be that mean, you can keep it around and then, sorry? Suspended. Yeah, that's probably safer. Depends on your policy, right? Something to think about, definitely. So, yeah, I talked a little bit about this.  Send it to them if they finally do pay you. If not, don't, I guess. So, the way it works is sort of, it acts as a plug-in manager, right? So, it allows you to... Yeah, okay. So, it allows you to choose different subscription providers. So, the big one that it works with now, that was sort of the reference implementation that I got it working with was with Curly. I don't know who's heard of that or not, but it basically allows you to manage subscriptions online. So, whether you want to use PayPal or Stripe or anything like that to actually do the payment processing, Curly would sit between you and those to sort of handle the recurring billing, the dunning. Dunning is basically how to handle what happens when a customer's credit card fails, like do you send them emails, how many times do you try before giving up, that kind of thing, so that's a dunning process. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, so, Curly's done. So, that's great. Pretty much, there's a prototype up and running. I love more people to try and test it, that kind of stuff. Commerce recurrence framework. So, commerce is basically, for those that don't know, it's sort of the big commerce framework in Drupal. So, they've got a plug-in called the commerce recurrence framework, which tries to do a lot of that subscriptions management stuff within Drupal, so that you don't need a third-party service. So, using, say, Recurly, you need to pay your payment processor. They take a cut, like Stripe or PayPal. Then Recurly takes a cut plus a fee, right? And then you do everything else in Drupal. If you can do the subscription stuff in Drupal, Drupal handles the dunning, subscriptions, all that kind of stuff, then, you know, you can cut down one service provider, which is great. That's not done yet, so I'd like to work on that, but I need funding. So, I'm not working on that, but it'd be great to get that done at some point. And there are many other options in terms of these providers, and, you know, we'd love to add support for that, eventually. Some things to think about. And so, this applies more generally, you know, outside of the business use case. It can be applicable for government is, you know, how do you want to handle installation profiles, which in Drupal is sort of the, you know, different, you know, preconfigured versions of Drupal. So, you can have, or, yeah, distributions, installation profiles, and kind of use those interchangeably. So, you can, you know, you can have sort of base, a base configuration that can apply across all your platforms, which is eager speak for a Drupal code base. So, you're going to have a standard code base. You can have different ones for different use cases. Now, within each one, or within multiple, there's the features module in Drupal, which lets you basically package configuration and reuse that in different places. So, you could have, say, instead of having, say, multiple installation profiles or distributions, you could have one with, like, a common kernel, and then use the features module to turn on different features within different use cases using the same installation profile. So, these are some things to think about. Resource quotas.  So, resource quotas is a thing to worry about. I do have a module called, say, Quota Enforcer, which, right now, what that does is it's a framework to add different quotas to different things, but right now, it cuts off your... You can't add more users if you're at your limit. So, it's a user quota and it's a storage quota. So, you can set whatever you want that to be, and your clients, when they're using their sites, they won't be able to pass that. If they try to add new content, they'll get a nice error message saying, you're out of disk space, basically, contact your admin, get a bigger plan, that kind of thing. Admin access.  With SaaS, it works a little bit differently.  Hosting companies say, if I've got a SaaS product, I'm selling it to you, I would be, you know, user one, the super user on the site, so I could do admin things, turn modules on, turn them off. But the site owner, which isn't a great term, but it kind of works, would be your customer that's subscribing to the site because you're providing it to her, right? So, you'd want that person not to have full access to the site, but some access.  You don't want your customers to go and turn on modules and turn them off, say, turn off your quota and force a module, and then they can do whatever they want, right? So, yeah, user one versus owner role. Yeah, user one can do everything in Drupal, so you would probably want your customers to be user two, and then they can delegate down from there, create their own users. Permission subset will take, you know, the big permissions page in Drupal and shrink that to whatever you want, and you can give that to your customers, and then they can delegate a subset of permissions, which I think is a much safer way to do it. So, the story with that is, it's there for Drupal 7, but there's no Drupal 8 part yet, so that's another thing that would need to get down for this type of thing. All right, customer service. So, you know, you obviously need to interact with your clients in some fashion outside of providing them with the service. So, you know, you want a public-facing issue tracker. GitLab has something called Service Desk. You know, everyone knows GitLab for like GitHub for hosting code. They have a Service Desk feature where it lets you turn, like, emails into tickets or issues. That's one option. There are various tools to do that. I won't go into that too much, because, you know, I'm just trying to touch on these issues. Things to think about, right? Yeah, if you're already using GitLab, this might not be a bad option. Most people are. So, I don't know if this is a bit of an aside, but when it was announced that Microsoft bought GitHub, GitLab.com actually went down because everyone was trying to move their stuff over. That's kind of a funny story. So, GitLab actually has more features than GitHub right now, so it's getting more popular. It's open source, you can run it yourself, or at least the community edition. So, that's why it's fairly popular. Is anyone else have thought about this today? What are some good things to do for customer service? Any thought about it yet, or not really? RT. RT? Yeah. Okay, so that's like a big, like that's a bit around a long time, a standard tool, right? It is open source. It's open source, email, ticket tracking. Open source, email, ticket tracking. Okay. So, just email. Right. It's something. Great. Okay, so RT is another option. Good to know. I think that's probably good. I have heard of that one. I forgot to mention it. So, that's sort of the, you know, a little bit of summary of all these things to think about when dealing with these kinds of issues in the Drupal ecosystem. So, yeah, I mean, I'd love to keep talking about this. We still have some time. So, yeah, any feedback, some questions, thoughts, comments, you know, let's talk about it, yeah. Can you clarify the kind of the goals of open stack versus state year? What part deploys its restructure as an open stack? Yeah, so that's a good question. So, what I should have had was an architecture, like technical architecture diagram. Maybe I'll do that next time.  So, that's the infrastructure. That would be, you know, in the same class as, you know, it's open stack or AWS or Azure, digital ocean, any of these services, right. That's all infrastructure, whether it's virtual or not, right. And of course, you can just run it on hardware and not have the virtual aspect. So, then I guess the platform, so that kind of said at the bottom layer, right. Your infrastructure, then your sort of platform layer would be basically eager, right. Because that is not infrastructure, but it's not the actual application that the users are running into. But it's a platform that provides the software that it hosts the software, the service that you care about or that your clients care about. That would be installed on a server like Web Open. Right. So, you would say go and take eager and install that on a VM or digital ocean or, you know, AWS or whatever, right. So, that's your platform.  You know, pseudo app to install eager three, for example. But, you know, it depends on the setup you have. That would just give you the default installation. So, you have a platform, you know, would be eager. And then that would host the sites that the clients interact with. So, that's the software. Can eager deploy sites on other virtual machines or deploy a container that's stable or something like that. Yeah.  I think there's eager cloud. So, what they do, they can actually spin up VMs and other. What we're actually looking at with eager five, which isn't out yet, is that'll happen much more natively, right.  So, that'll be much easier to spin up the next one. So, now we've got some modules that kind of do it, but it's not really core. So, yeah, but it can do that. Typically, the way you do eager now in eager three is you would create a server however you would normally do it manually or, you know, you'd go in digital ocean, click on all one, two VMs, one's a database. Then what you do is you tell eager where your servers are. That's how it works now. So, you would say, okay, I want to, you know, click on servers, add server. Okay, you know, here's the domain name, here's the SSHT, that kind of stuff, right. So, then once eager knows about it, it can provision sites onto, it can provision a platform onto that server and it'll provision sites onto that platform. And by platform, in this context, I mean like a Drupal code base. So, that's the term that you're using. So, it's basically a Drupal code base without the sites directory. So, that's an eager platform. So, when you install sites onto an eager platform, it's just creating a site directory and sticking it in the platform or in the code base, right. So, that's, yeah, does that answer your question? Yeah, yeah. Can I have a follow-up question? That's a big question as well. Like, in dependencies for Drupal, like PHP and... Yeah. So, like, if you just run, if you just run like sudo apt install eager three, it'll pull in PHP and by default, Apache and MySQL. But, you know, you can run MariaDB or you can run Nginx. I like Nginx. So, you can know Apache to default. Yeah. Can I talk a bit? I'm Dan. I'm also with consensus. I work with Colin and the other guys. Nice to see you. Hi. I'm new to this community. Hi, Dan. Can I also mention, do you want to mention where we're going with the eager policy or can I discuss this? Yeah, please. Do you want to come up? I don't know if they can hear you for the mic, but... Sure. So... Yeah. So, where are we going? Just to follow up on the answer to the question. Nice to see everybody. So, what we're working on is kind of the next step with this. So, remember, a really key thing to understand for those of you who don't know what eager is exactly without having an architecture diagram here is that it's just a Drupal application itself. It just happens to be one that knows how to manipulate other Drupal applications. So, what's nice about that is you get that sort of warm, comfy, I know, how to use this thing feeling if you're a Drupal person. Especially if you're familiar with Drush right now because that's kind of the basis for eager three. However, in the move towards eager five, what we're doing is we're swapping out all the Drush stuff with Ansible. And the nice thing about that is that Ansible is much more platform and technology agnostic in all directions. And also, it is so extensible given that it's Ansible. And so what we're working on right now is a generic way to have an Ansible role that's going to be what's called an eager policy that basically just says this sort of comes back to your question I think that for this particular install of eager we're going to be using NGINX versus Apache, right? So anything that's not the standard eager base config that comes out of what you would get today from the Den package, let's say, anything that you would want to be different, you'll be able to package that as an eager, as an Ansible role of your own. And then you just use it, you just have it as a dependency within the whatever role you're using to install eager itself from Ansible. I want these modules, these eager modules enabled. Maybe you want the remote site import stuff allows you to move sites or to copy sites, deploy sites from one eager installation to another one. So that's useful for things like migrating code from let's say dev to QA to production, right? So there's all these different modules within eager that can do that stuff whereas in production you might want a very stripped down closed down version of eager running that doesn't expose a lot of stuff or you may or just has a lower resource footprint so for efficiency so for a lot of that kind of configurability will be available within this kind of this Ansible role. Yeah. Like roles in Ansible define variables so one can be Web server and the default might be Apache but you can change it and say oh no, I want it. So it'll be it'll be a lot more customizable and it'll also allow you so we're working on ways to support newer versions of so we already support DA today within eager and we're going to be adding support for other stuff as well so I hope that answers Yeah. That's exciting. Yeah. I think I can't remember if the Azure policy role is not on our public facing the lab repo yet. Yeah. I'll get it. Yeah. Just to add to that like Ansible for those that don't know it's a command line tool so you can tell you know on the command line you can type you know I want to provision you know these VMs at this you know hosting company what so when it gives you just to back up way back eager is basically a web front end for DevOps so if you're using eager you don't have to do any command line DevOps anymore like you you know in the old days you'd have to do you know drush SQL sync you know you dump your database in production update your dev and staging eager you don't have to do that anymore that's gone because you just point click from the web front end so it's basically two components there's a front end Drupal site a bunch of custom drush commands which are your back end provisioning system there's also a queue so you do something the front end it adds it adds a task to the queue and then that gets provisioned by drush right so in the future that'll be Ansible which means it can only do Drupal-y things it can do anything Ansible can provision whatever you want the Django site you could have a Jumla you could have something else it doesn't matter so this is really going to be breaking open into a much more you could get eager to provision yeah does it mean that you could be overall pipeline with the the next thing yeah I mean so you wouldn't the eager itself isn't going to provide that you would have whatever Travis or CircleCI but eager I mean from day one it had hooks into the API hooks just as Drupal always had so at any point like before eager provisions a site there's a hook I think a hook pre-provision site and you know you implement that custom module and you could say oh before install a site go and do this other thing and you could say after a site is installed I want to do something so there hooks throughout the system in eager that was the old eager and the new one obviously we're going to do the same thing because people want to be able to do whatever they want with the system so you know you can definitely hook in your whole CI testing suite whatever you want and you can say on provisioning like pre-site provisioning or post-site provisioning you can say okay run all these tests if any of them fail and roll back so eager three now when you try to upgrade a site and it fails it just rolls back to where it was before you don't lose anything so that's a really cool feature that yeah that's on the same servers you might not want to run tests on the server where you have your production site right yeah so you do this on staging environment for example I mean that's another talk but for depth staging probably in eager you'd have three eager instances where you're staging or you're prod eager and you know you do that kind of stuff on staging I guess right and then you know to when you move sites around there's a remote import module and you can just move sites between eager environments like one eager can pull insights from another one and that's how you handle the whole you know deployment depth staging prod and you know about each other yeah they all yeah exactly so the way yeah and that's done in a really secure way uses SSH keys so there's no funny business with web services it's just SSH keys so SSH keys yeah you set that up in the back end and then the front end to make them talk to each other the main the main the main goal with eager is to make stuff make the easy stuff easy when you want it to be easy and straightforward but to also allow you to get as far into the weeds of customization and extension as you want again so we're trying to yeah like the slogan was an easy path and then but it's also it's highly extensible the slogan for eager was always tools not policy so here's a bunch of stuff instead of having to write a bunch of scripts to you know do your dev ops we provide you know that's provided but it doesn't set policy for you whatever you decide what your policy is then you configure eager to do that right and so we're going to do that in eager five right so are there any other yeah sorry that was a bit of a turn into an eager time which is not what we meant to do but yeah there's we'll come back to you here you can do talking about the eager five you've got the 10th time so real soon now yeah I mean like with most open source yeah I was just about to say so with normal open source project it's whenever it's ready now whatever it's ready is determined by several factors including funding right so if we have you know clients or partners of folks that want to do that and they provide funding for us not funding but they provide code like you know you can either provide code or funding or whatever then it'll move along faster right the more help we have or testing exactly so you know funding code testing documentation that's a big thing right so we're we're very poor documentation so if folks are interested in helping with that in various ways it'll it'll get done faster right but eager three is stable now and actually because we're tricking eager to thinking it's Drupal and it's not and that's why it works it was written a long time absolutely so so that's typically like for our clients they're like where we're hosting eager for them or are helping them manage their own eager where we set up we installed it typically we'd have one platform called you know say Drupal 7 you know at a time stamp right and so all the Drupal 7 sites will be there hosted on that say for example you know they're using different modules but they don't have to be turned on for every site it sounds like we need an eager talk where we actually run through what it can do for people it seems like this sorry but yeah it's check it out I mean we're not it's not a product of ours it's just an open we happen to have a couple of core maintainers in our team there are other core maintainers in other parts of the Drupal community we're very happy to have more folks because the more folks that are contributing to it the better it's going to get and a broader set of needs it'll be able to tackle that yeah whatever you're for whatever you're for that's a good question so that's the same kind of question as what happens to PHP 5 no PHP 6 sorry yeah it's kind of a long story but it's kind of like someone started on that and kind of went in a different direction and some other folks wanted to go in and that's sort of I guess the short answer is that's not a bad solution temporarily it's changing a few things but we thought well let's rewrite well because the problem with AGR it's got code still from PHP 4 when it was I think like way back right so this is early days of Drupal so what was like doing symphony stuff right which is great Drupal 8 doing that but the front end is still just Drupal 7 right so well let's sort of Drupal 8 we've got new APIs we can do web services REST more natively all this kind of stuff a long-term yeah so it's kind of like there's AGR 4 but it's basically one person working on it right so it's getting slate kind of starting over and yeah so yeah I mean yeah so to go back to the SAS architecture sure so we talked about Soviet infrastructure we've been hosted and everything but we haven't touched development and source control and so it's one thing to have one site with let's say one repository but do you have a different approach to something more more large yeah I mean the way these kind of things scale is if you have one code base and everybody's using it right so the magic to make that work is Drupal multisite like the fact that Drupal Core supports multisite that's what makes this possible because if you have 200 customers that are running on you know shared code base and you know AGR lets you upgrade all of them at once like you if they're all multisite didn't exist you manually have to upgrade each now there's only one gear refill you're updating and 200 customers get all the benefits right yeah but I mean if you have let's say custom AGR modules and you have some custom code for your infrastructure yeah would you separate all of this or just throw it all in one big repository it depends on what you're aiming to do you have to think about how you want to use it in the future you probably have a private repo with AGR customizations for your AGR installation or for your staff absolutely and the fact that you were noticing that pattern of doing it that way over and over again was what led us to build this idea of an AGR policy that's going to be something that any that and we're going to release it generically and then folks can customize that locally as much as they want to but that would then become something that you can use to install AGR policies depending on so for example if you have five different clients and they actually have different needs in terms of a lot of stuff we were talking about before you can customize it with the use of a different policy for each client like for example by default AGR takes over your web server configuration so by default it doesn't let you upload users upload files more than two megabytes so usually the first thing I do on most AGR projects is okay I have a custom AGR module and I change that to like five or ten whatever the client needs so that's a small example but like I said you can write modules to change any part of the config or whatever it's doing it's a framework just like Drupal's a framework so this is a SaaS framework so same idea yeah so I was thinking because some of those configuration are kind of really intimately related to your SaaS your application right and that's why you have custom private modules yeah just like for Drupal sites usually you're going to have a custom module where it's got it's own theme so same with the platform level I'm noticing that it's new so we may want to continue this conversation over lunch for anyone interested do we have until is it 12 or 12 oh yeah I guess it's over time yeah okay thanks everyone yeah


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So this is kind of an experiment, so this involves me. I'm going to start by asking a few questions and posing some hypothesis to see where it goes. And I'd like to thank everyone for being on this panel. I'm trying to be a kind of a representative of this person and experience. And I'm going to start with some introductions. Let's go down to the floor. Brian here is a young hero. My dear thing is that it feels like you're missing God. I'm doing it at the festival, especially in Joy. But I'll believe you each a minute to kind of introduce yourself. So anything you want to say about yourself, tell us around here. Hi. Perfect, classic, Brian here. And then we've got Jonathan House. He's a technology director at analysis. And he's been going to the Adam Grandtale for a sense of the day at the time of the week. And I'll just take a quick look at him and introduce myself. Perfect. And I'd like to know all about him, right? All right, I'll try to do better job with this one. That's how you want to play. So Kristen's also a regular at the Adam Grandtale. He has a background in development and testing. He's also done some training at the Agile Coaching. You want to say anything about yourself? No. And then we have Israel God. He's had a law that I love reading now. He's kind of been sworn by my aide and executive leadership. Israel God is an agile executor. I'll let him say hi. Hi. And then we have Zahra Marston. She's currently the chair of the Agile Alliance. She's focusing on helping people with the human psychosocial development. I'll let her say hi.  That's what I was wanting to say. Yeah. And then we have Lee Cruz. She's also a regular at the Adam Grandtale. She's an Agile Coaching program manager. She was at Dance N.D. and she was part of the transformation there. And she's currently working at Water Roller helping them become more agile. Say hi. Hi. And then Mike Moore. He's got years of experience as a developer. He's sort of an instigator. He's had podcasts. He's organized a Mountainous Movie conference. He's always finding cheery. And he's a new manager trying to lead a team towards Agile at most times. All right, perfect. So we can have him mix up executives, developers, testers, car owners, consultants, various roles and perspectives. So also in the spirit of Agile, and especially this conference, I don't want to exclude people from the conversation. That's why the mics are on there. So there's plenty of people that serve with a lot of experience, a lot of perspective. So feel free to jump in either through Twitter or through the mics and inject your comments and questions. And we'll just kind of make this really organic. And the set. So everyone kind of has a good capability. If you saw a little bit of this in both of the talks you've seen so far. And this is one of my personal feelings is that when you have these breakdowns in communication between the different personas, the word that Sue kept using is an incredible amount of churn. And that weighs a lot of time and energy that you need. But can't be said basically making software. We're trying to make work in software. That's kind of our balance system. So in the worst cases, the executives seem disintermove. The developers seem arrogant and dismissive. The product owners inappropriately demand specific implementations on one feature. And they wish you watched it on the next. And of course, no matter what, everything is always QA spot. So on one hand, you've got individuals in your actions that are processing tools. In reality, we sometimes use processing tools as a shield. Tools don't have egos, and processors don't disagree with us. So we kind of stop talking to each other. So the first question for the discussion is, do you agree with this premise? Not necessarily in your organization, might you? But in general, in the hypothetical sense, have you experienced this sort of breakdown in communication between the different levels and personas? And anyone who wants to answer that question, do you have it? Or is this part? And part of the issue is in the framing of the question. Absolutely. Personas are very useful for us in creating these cases and thinking about customers who might buy our stockwares. But when we start thinking of each other as personas, we're falling into the trap of stereotype. And the biggest indicator of whether or not I trust you is whether I know you as an individual. People don't necessarily trust groups that they don't feel they're a part of. And so as long as we have this idea of, and the title of the panel captures it, as long as we have this title of where us and everybody else is them, we've automatically begun the trip down the road to no trust. I would suggest that journey cooperation has perhaps a deeper meaning than the usual in your life. When I journey cooperation, I do not necessarily sign up for life as a person in the next stoppiece, or in the next department, and so on and so forth. However, my signature of the employment contract, in many ways, is commitment to trust because their interests are mutual. So to me, the two are very, very distinct. There is one thing where I like certain persons or not, and I have a degree of freedom to associate with me more than the other. There is quite a difference in the use of being in the same corporation. The fundamental assumption is to actually trust each other because we are all working towards the same end of time. So trust can, of course, at the same time, the act of joining the corporation will be the neck of trust in one another. So I have a question in relation to that. How many of you out here, just a quick show of hands, actually trust the people you're working with, not in your immediate team, but across the organization as a larger whole? Oh, come on now. Really trust? How many of us compensate by the work that we do for other groups and other teams in some of our environment that we don't quite entirely trust? So trust is obviously important. It's listed in every time that you hear people talking about agile, you hear about trust, personal safety, things like that, it's an important part of the environment. But the truth of the matter is that most software development environments out there really don't have the sense of trust. They don't have the sense of self-actualization. They're not striving necessarily to be the best that they can possibly be. So yes, trust is important, you have to build it. But you also have to compensate for situations where the trust doesn't exist until sometimes you can build it or just deal with the fact that it's not going to be there. So I have a problem, which is that I don't want to give away anything from my keynote. Nevertheless, I want to be disagreeable in some way. So let me tell you a story. I was once talking to the CEO of a smallish software company, like 100 programmers or something. And this was in the 90s when I was a testing consultant. And he said to me, regarding testing, that testing is like taxes. He viewed the testing budget as like income taxes, in the sense that he didn't really know what the money was going for. He suspected that if he did know what the money was going for, he would be unhappy. But he had so much else on his plate that he simply paid his testing tax and let it go. And I realize that back in the days when I had a real job and I was a tester, I actually benefited from that situation in that testing was sufficiently a low status job that none of the executives cared enough about what I was doing to interfere. And as a result, I was able to do a lot of very interesting testing work simply because not because they trusted me so much, but because they didn't care. So what I'd like to propose is that some of the problems we have is that so many people are working so close to the edge that everybody is sticking their nose into other people's business, making sure that every dime is being spent well and that five levels of management have to sign off on a travel request, that if we simply would just leave people alone, we wouldn't have so much of this problem if it is indeed a problem that we're talking about. That's the question. We think it's a problem. Does anyone think it's a problem? Raise your hand if you think it's a problem. You guys all trust each other, right? Come on. By the way, you're being filmed. And this may come back to invite you later or view time. All right, keep your hands down. With facial recognition. I'll say that the key for me, in my career so far, to building trust is to actually produce and to have a track record of success. And so I think whenever I happen in a low trust situation, just keep your head down and try to actually deliver something. I think maybe you're wondering just a little bit about clean story. I think it's also, I don't know that we've had trust issues. I think respect. We trust each other, but we may not have as much respect for someone's work or opinion or influence as we have to compensate for that and work around that. So there is a question. How's the rest of the question? I was listening. Is the mic on? It's not turning on. You should go. It's not connecting to anything. It's not connecting to anything. OK. We'll see you after we're done. OK. So what I want to know is if any of you, and I know it's a loaded question because I know the answer's yes, by the way. Yes. If any of you have been in a situation where there's I'll let you trust. Everybody's really nice to each other. I trust you. And therefore, there's no criticism. And the part of trust is also being able to criticize or raise problems. What about the flip side of what you've been talking about? There's too much of a legend trust. And as a result, people don't criticize each other. Yeah, I've worked in large enterprises. Yeah. The be nice culture kind of comes along anytime you start growing into a bureaucracy. You get that kind of be nice part of the culture. And what happens is that everything is harmonious on the surface, and there's no trust underneath. Because since a friend of mine says, if you can never say no, your yes doesn't mean much. So if I'm always saying yes, yes, and keeping things harmonious, that means I'm not able to say no. I'm not able to say I don't agree. It's a mega form of group think. And it leads us down all kinds of paths we don't want to travel. This deli awaits whether for internal reason or external reason. So that's the lead. The mic's broken. We can't hear him at all. I can't hear you. No. No. Thank you. Allow me to start again due to the fact that our device didn't work for me.  They are different from one to another. But the situation that I described certainly happens. And it usually happens at a time that a culture, like the collaboration culture, it deliways. So the thing, the business of the class and the business of art. You know, artificial trust of the surface, no real trust underneath can indeed happen. However, a whole bunch of other pathologies happen as a function of other cultures. For example, in a very spontaneous world culture, people oftentimes are afraid to come with bad news because the reaction is so furious. So you need to look at the situation when you have what you consider to be trust on the surface, no real trust underneath, in terms of how it falls in the context of the culture that the cooperation has. So this book is written by a certain entrepreneur soliciting this Patrick Lencioni. He filled this model of the five dysfunctional team. It starts at the bottom. And this is sort of resonating when you're talking about an emptiness in the second level. So the bottom layer is this absence of trust. The second dysfunction is a fear of conflict. The third dysfunction, because there's no conflict, there's no real resolution like this, there's a lack of commitment. People won't commit unless they've actually developed a good end goal. Then the fourth layer is there's no accountability. And his argument is that psychologically, you feel that people haven't committed and you won't hold them accountable. And then the final dysfunction, in my mind, to the first of this, not focusing on results. And I feel like focusing on results and actually delivering is about a constant change in that. I think that's kind of a nice framework. And I just wanted to kind of throw it out there and you guys can comment on that. It seems like the direction you're going to go. Well, I'm not actually going in that direction. That's because you're Brian Merrick. Either way, everyone's swimming and you're going down. Yeah, so to say something against trust for a moment, many years ago, a whole ton of people went into Tiananmen Square to protest for democracy. They are going to resell rights to China, by the way. And right now, there are conflicting accounts of lots of people going into the streets of Tehran to do the same thing. The Iranian resale rights. I don't think it's right to characterize what they're doing. And remember that people right this instant are getting beaten up pretty severely in Tehran. And a lot of people died in Tiananmen Square. And I don't believe that they were out there together because they trusted each other so much as that they believed in something that really mattered. So they were willing to go out there without trust. So it's foolish to say, you shouldn't have trusted teams, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I wonder to what extent we are using trust to substitute for the fact that our work doesn't matter to us. The thing we're producing doesn't matter to us. It doesn't seem real. It doesn't seem valid. It doesn't seem important. So we're sublimating our desire to telegraph the message, our citizenship, by retreating to interpersonal communications, interpersonal reactions that are supposed to substitute for the fact that we don't feel a sense of accomplishment. I would agree with that. I think that if you're using trust to isolate yourself from change, and that's probably a bad thing, like you said, you need to stand on some principles. So I feel weird being here because I don't really come from an agile background, and I haven't really had any success in agile for a long time. I've been the guy at the very bottom. That's why you're here. Kind of yelling up and saying, let's do this, let's try this, let's pair. Let's get a CI server. Let's start testing all these other things, and I've had zero success in my career. And then I got a manager like two months ago, and it's been so easy to continue this integration server and to implement pairing and to start testing more. You got smarter. Yeah, I suddenly just got smarter with the title. And so I think to your point, though, I said, well, the entire team and really company works this way, and I'm going to trust that they know what they're doing.  So yeah, to the extent that it allows me to do that, I would agree with you. Jim Heist made a beautiful slide that I would like to do justice to even verbally. It shows a caveman with a spare bagel or both sitting in front of a PC and joyfully putting it through. And the quips that go with it, and Jim literally asks it in various occasions to the audience, how many of you come on Monday morning to the office desiring to do poor quality work? The fact of the matter, I have never, in any of the times that I have seen this question asked, I have never seen a person raise his or her hand and say, hey, I do. So the issue to me is about the way or, and I would say, executives like myself and others, set the system.  If, on the other side, the person in charge has the humility, the strength and the introspection to say, I set up things in some false manner, I made this error, I made that error. Those people who come on Monday morning to do high quality work are not getting there because of something that I heard in setting, then you can start knocking one thing after another and improving. But in terms of the base materiality, please, that we all work with, I am very, very heart-pressed to think about any person that I had known during my career who did not come with best intentions about quality or whatever he or she would do. Which reminds me, Alistair referred this morning to some of the lean principles and how that's becoming part of agile. And when I think of lean, I think of sort of my favorite part of lean, which other than the definition of perfection, is the good fortune I had to take some trainings from Edward Stemming. And his assertion always was that it's not about the individuals, it's about how the system is created and that there is enough... I won't go so far as to say drive, but I will say influence, that systems influence behavior to such an extent that if there is something going wrong, look to the system, not to the people. What is it in the system that is causing that, inducing that behavior? And in his 14 points, he also talks about driving fear out of the workplace and a bunch of other really good advice. So if you haven't read Deming's 14 Points for Managers, do that and take them to heart because that in itself is setting up the conditions for success. And I think there's a lot of tension right now, frankly, in agile between those who would like to see it stay really focused on the people who are getting the software out the door, which is the development team. And rightly so, that needs a focus because without putting the software out the door, none of us have work. And those who are saying, but wait a minute, we have to create the conditions for success. And that's the job of other people in the organization than just the dev team. And so we are dealing with a paradox where we can't focus one place or the other. We have to focus on both simultaneously and that takes us to the system. So getting better at thinking in terms of our systems and in what our systems are doing also has an influence on some of these other things that we're talking about here. That would suggest that we should draw individuals from individuals and interactions over processes and tools. It should just be interactions over processes and tools. I suggest that a couple years ago. You know, I think this is pointing to one of the fundamental issues that doesn't get addressed often about Agile. That is that it's kind of self-selecting. If you're doing Agile right, you have certain qualities and personality and certain aspects of the culture that you've accepted. One of the things that you just mentioned is the fact that you are willing to drive fear out of your workplace. How many of you that work for a large corporation are willing to tilt against that big of a windmill in your workplace? The fear of going to your boss reporting to them that you're going to be late or something along those lines. I would propose that we're a self-selecting community. The people that are capable of doing this, the people that care about software beyond the point where they're collecting their paycheck, we're the ones that are going to do these things. We're willing to walk in, we're willing to tilt to the windmills, we're willing to fight these battles, even though we know that it's going to be hard at the best of times. It's going to be impossible at the worst of times. But what happens to us? In a large organization, in your groups, how many people really care about software? They care about it beyond when they're at their desk 8 to 5. They care about it beyond the time that they're at their desk 8 to 5. They care about it beyond the fact that it gets out of their department. How many of you really see that in the larger software development community? Or do you see it in this room in a smaller community of people that care? That's the fundamental assumption I think is missing. People say, oh, we're going to do Agile, but what they don't understand is that there's a cultural adoption that sits underneath this that requires certain things, that you have to care, you have to have courage, you have to be willing to make mistakes, you have to be willing to change. And I would say that the larger community, a lot of these skills are not present, and they're going to be awfully hard to teach. So are you suggesting that Agile hasn't crossed the chasm? I am suggesting that Agile will never cross the chasm. So I'm going to go back and ask a question. In the experiences you've had at whatever level, you've experienced the kind of lane game hot potato, and at that point your teams are going to stop focusing on what I call kicking donkey, and they instead focus on covering donkey. And once that cycle starts, have you ever seen anyone get out of it? I'll leave it to your imagination, Brian. I don't understand what kicking donkey would mean. What's another word for donkey? Oh, I get it. Not from the Midwest, we're slow. Let me pick on Mickey. Have that experience. I think we were successful, and it just built trust. We started slow and gained ground, but I don't think we ever pointed fingers at anyone. I think that the more successful we got, the more buying we got, the more trust we got, and it just kind of grew throughout. So I was at an organization a while ago, and at the time I would classify it as very little responsibility on the dev side. There was one tester in the org, and probably 50 or 60 developers. And what would happen is, and this wasn't an agile, so one of the things that happened was management shows to go down the witch hunt road to try to get that responsibility. And there was a time when I would actually say that I felt like the developers felt more responsibility, but then there was a time where that crossed the line and nobody was productive anymore because they were too worried about getting fired. And that's the environment that it was, by the way. It was very much a, if you, we will let somebody go every so many months. And, you know, everyone on it, one person from every team, depending on how big the team is, certain percentage will be let go. And what started, what happened is people stopped helping each other. It did turn into a spiral, and I ended up leaving, and went on the greener pastures. But I will say that I felt that at the time there was actually a point where I think that they might have been able to turn it around, where doing such a thing, contrary to what I would like to believe, doing such a thing did make a difference, but they kept doing it, they surpassed that line. So just to reiterate a point, the dynamite, do you feel like that is kind of reinforcing this idea of the system? Yeah, possibly. I have the fortune that my 15-year-old son is for one year in Japan as an exchange student this year. So I am learning and experiencing Japan through his fresh eyes. And problems, of course, come up in school or in some of the clubs that he goes to or with the host family. It does not make things that are not different than in the Midwest or on the east coast or the west coast here. What I am immensely impressed time and time again is the ability to fix the things without putting a blame on a certain person. There is a business of resolving a situation without making an individual, a teacher, a counselor, a host mom or the like, feeling completely guilty and helpless in terms of everyone turning on help is most impressive. He takes a lot of time and sometimes my wife or myself lose a little bit of patience until something gets resolved. So I have seen time and time again things get resolved without placing a blame and this makes a tremendous difference in the way things move forward there. I still want to get somebody here mad at me. So let me continue to attack trust in some sense. My wife, the veterinarian, has access to what they call euthanasia fluid. However, I have never before this moment said that I trust her not to use it on me. There is another thing that I have never told 200 some odd people before. One time I came back from a trip and we were unpacking my suitcase and we discovered a pair of women's black underwear in my suitcase and this did not lead to a conversation.  I have no idea to this day how it arrived in my suitcase. It turned immediately into a joke. So I want to posit that the more we talk about trust the more it's a sign that we don't actually have any of it. It was the follow-up part. Brian, as you were talking that's what I was going to say. It's funny how we have to say I trust you but . . . and I agree that it seems like we are using trust to go back to your previous thing possibly as an excuse but I think it's also something that's very important to build. I don't know that you . . . to a certain point if you have a team of people that say it's a self-organizing team and everybody has different opinions and everybody goes off and does their own thing to the same exact work at what point do you have to get together and say, hey guys, let's build this concept of a team and I am able to handle this component and you're able to handle that component and H-U-A, you know, you are hired because of this. You can test this. I'm with Mike to . . . I think Mike said that trust is essentially delivery on your commitments. I'd like to make one small addition to that which is trust or whatever thing it is that we're trying to talk about under the rubric of trust is evidenced by someone on your team or someone on . . . someone whose work affects you doing something for you that inconveniences them. So Lisa Crispin, co-author of the book Agile Testing, which is a really good book, talks often about the way that the people on her team will do jobs that aren't really their job just because other people in the team need help and I think these activities, these visible activities are the most important thing and the words behind them are not. The one thing we have to keep in mind is that the word trust is a very loaded concept and trust itself isn't that interesting. It is what you trust. I can trust a co-worker to do his job. I can trust a co-worker to go beyond the call of duty and do everything that is necessary to deliver. I can trust another co-worker to lie to me every time I tell him or every time he tells me when something's supposed to be delivered. It's what we trust in each other that's important to the team, not the fact that we just trust each other in general. Let's hear from Jeff real quick. I'm Matty, Brian, just for throwing that out there. As a long term match, Lisa, I found a self-proclaimed wedway. I found the last few discussions somewhat disturbing because I'm thinking like we're going kind of on an orthogonal path to what I see as the strength of agile. I see the strength of agile being the engagement that happens between the members of the team and the people outside the team between the customer. And the trust, it either is going to be there, it's going to grow, it's going to decline. I don't really care. But if we're engaged, we're going to find out and we're going to work with that. So I think this should be a discussion more about engagement than about trust. What do you mean by engagement? Engagement means, well I think, okay so for example management I believe is very good at engaging with their employees because that's their job, right? However, I think those developers and especially perhaps because of their personality traits have a hard time engaging with those outside they become very insular and have a hard time engaging with those outside the team, outside the company at conferences like this. That kind of engagement is what I'm talking about. It's that interpersonal engagement that either leads to trust or leads to distrust. And frankly distrust can be just as useful as trust.  Is it fair to say that Jeff, is it fair to say that engagement shows trust? I think it makes it, it brings it to light whether you trust or not if you engage, if you disengage your only options are to not to trust until you know more information. Because I don't know maybe this is extreme but I don't know if I engage with somebody I don't trust. So the act of engagement is showing trust. Someone has to take the first step. I just want to interject one thing because I think that you guys might be arguing with semantics a little bit. This is obviously taken on a life of its own but kind of my original concept is the fidelity of the bandwidth or the communication between those roles is what determines a high functioning agility from a dysfunctional agility. That's sort of my starting premise and we kind of got onto trust but I think on some level with Jeff it's all about what he's calling engagement I think of this kind of high bandwidth communication between the different roles. Let me recount an episode from a company which definitely at the time was not agile because this is Microsoft. I was working for them at the time that the antitrust was going on and the ruling was to break the company. And productivity across the corporation went down the drain for the simple reason that everyone in his grandmother were spending all the time speculating about will the lawyers manage to turn things around or will they not manage to turn things around. Bill Gates, who always was extremely involved got together a bunch of us and basically tell us guys you have got to trust the lawyers to turn the jurisdiction around just they need to trust you to produce the code. And in one short meeting with this motif he really changed things around a big time. What would have happened if the decision was not turned around? I don't know. But in terms of the productivity across the corporation in 30 minutes possibly even lessens the change drastically by pointing out what trust really means in the context of the corporation. One of the things that we kind of do kind of skirt around is the human element of producing software. That's one of the things that I really liked about agile when I was first learning about it was it seemed like it focused on the individuals over the process it focused on more than just writing the code on the process of writing code and how you deal with other people to get to the end goal. I do think that agile is definitely missing that. I have ran a couple of podcasts and one of the things I like to talk about was talk about agile was talk about the practices how you adopted everything else and I got lots of email and communication coming back from that saying that people were just really sick and tired and these are really your target audience these are the developers who are going to be the ones who write the code and they're sick to death of hearing about agile. So I think to take on Brian's thing to get you guys mad I kind of think agile is broken so let's throw it out there I think that agile is not what it was intended to be and that's one of the reasons I was so excited for the agile route so let's go back to where it started and so I'll throw that out there is agile broken? I was in a conversation with some people in Portland about a year ago and I asked that question and I said I've been hearing a lot that agile is across the chasm and I don't know what I'd look forward to know that and what do you all think has agile crossed the chasm and a very wise person in the group looked at me and said well the word has crossed the chasm the actual doing of it is still somewhere on the other side and so I think that it has become a buzzword and people react to buzzwords and there was a time when empowerment was the big bad buzzword and these things run in cycles so what I'd like to do is go to an example of what you said was the title of this talk there's only us so an example of a time when there was only us is this a wonderful story that I heard recently about an organization that was embarking on quite a large project and they had a lot of sub parts and they knew they were going to have to to field about probably six or seven teams they weren't exactly sure so they got everybody in the room the whole development organization all the managers everybody in the room and they described the nature of the project and what they were trying to produce and they asked the people in the room how do you think we should organize this what's the best way how should we put the teams together and stuff they had some conversation they figured out what teams they were going to need in order to roll up into this larger project and then the manager said okay we're leaving the room now and when we come back we expect that all of you will have organized yourselves into the teams you want to work on and that you're best suited for and they left and they came back 20 minutes later or half an hour later and they had their teams and everybody started work now that to me that's the example of engagement, trust, no fear I mean all these things we've been talking about that's that's how that works is when you can see that kind of thing in action in an organization we can take another minute or two before lunch if you guys have anything to say I know you came up so let's hear from the audience but if you have a last word or something you want to get in so my question is hold on a second so Paris Hilton wants her under so my question is and maybe this flies in the face of there's only us it seems that over the course of perhaps the past decade a lot of development teams and a lot of development organizations have undergone a lot of improvement organizations and the large organizations that we live in were built around the assumption that the development group is in fact the bottleneck constraint I'd like to ask the panel are you seeing situations where that was the case the development group was the bottleneck constraint it no longer is the case and how is the organization that was structured around that basic assumption because now something else must be the bottleneck constraint alright my work here is done normal to sentence to give us a better understanding of the question yeah so in an organization whose main business is producing software for example there are all these other activities that go around the guys who are coding right there are people figuring out well what's the market there are people going out and finding customers there are people shepherding the production of the software into the environment and the customers all of these other things that happen that are not the guys with the fingers on the keyboards and the product owner working with them and all that sort of thing and it used to be the case I think in a lot of situations that all of those other functions could operate under the assumption that what is going to take the most time what is going to restrict our ability to bring product to market to bring value to market the speed at which the development group can actually build the thing and I think in some cases in many cases where you have teams that are delivering releaseable software every week or two weeks it's a very different situation than when well our next release is 24 months from now what sort of pain points have you been finding outside of the development trying to adjust to the fact that wait we've got another release it's only been two weeks since the last one or for instance we don't have time to do proper market research are you seeing things like this and how are successful groups adapting I think that the presupposition of that statement is that there are successful groups that are adapting and that implies what Alistair mentioned in his keynote the fact that you are looking for the bottlenecks and you're solving them you're moving the bottlenecks around the company ideally trying to get rid of them but how often does that actually happen but there's the other side of it too and this is the unsuccessful companies and I think that rather than a removal of bottlenecks it's just simply an acceptance of the fact that the bottleneck is always there and it will never go away and that's the other side of the coin so in a successful company yes but how many companies are really successful in delivering software on a frequent basis I certainly see such instances and my sense is that the most painful point is around a contract a contract to produce software the terms and the progression of the law simply is used behind these of the agile methodology or other methodologies I will give you an example from a recent bid that I was involved in I got the LFB and while reading it there were two clauses there that really struck me now and one was that they expect the vendor to be a child if the vendor is not a child he or she can provide an explanation how they would do about it but basically the clause is clear if you are not doing a child don't bother there was another clause there that said working software it dropped every week into the data center so I was impressed and came to the meeting for the organizations that issued the bid with extremely high expectations only to find out that there was a total disconnect between the state of their state of mind at least of their attorneys and the state of mind of the people who were running IT for them so we run into those things within the corporation and no doubt about it I was in a situation where I was told by marketing Israel you guys are shipping software faster than we can market it so the level is relatively easy to deal with the painful one is when it comes to two legal entities who needs to agree on what needs to be done so an agile contract and actually in this very city a lot of work has been done by Alistair and some of his colleagues about the various ways in which you structure agile contracts so if there is one endpoint which I would say can make a decisive difference in agile crossing the cousin is contract law catching up with agile concepts here's what I propose I have a lot of threads rolling around in my head and I want this guy that's got up in the middle to ask his question but there's only us and I think we're getting hungry so what I want to do is have him introduce kind of a new thread and then we'll take this discussion hopefully from here to lunch and everyone can talk about it with everyone on the panel and also there's a social tonight that everyone can talk about it even more so I've had the pleasure before we're another and sometimes we do it well often times we don't do it well for one reason or another and when we're not doing it well sometimes you might even accuse us of cargo culting where we're kind of going through the motions we're putting on the earphones waiting for the plane to land and nothing's happening I have conflicting feelings about that and I was curious about yours and that we introduce agile to these organizations there's nothing to happen and sometimes I think yeah, that's the right start at least they're waiting at least we've given them the tools but other times I'm thinking this isn't ever going to go anywhere so you're trying to say agile isn't having stand-ups and stop running documentation that you've done and tomorrow preview the laptop and have it set up to code and test enjoy your lunch


Εγώ, μητέρα πέρα, γήω από το βόγκο από το καφίδιο, θα προσταθούω να μαναγώ στο μέρος. Λuering for the CIPOL and I'm going to present today our big project on moodle workplace that's called LEED. Before I start, I would have to say some few words for the CIPOL, what it is because this actually has created all the requirements concerning how the LEED is working. Συπολ είναι η ΕΕΕ τρανική αγνήση για ασφαλή εμφασία. Προσπαθούμε από το 2000 στο Ευρωπαϊκό Υναιο. Προσπαθούμε στο 2001 ως ένα κόντρο της δευτερικής κοινότητας. Είχα να έρθει εδώ. Είχα να έρθει στην κοινότητα της Πολιστικής Ακάδεμις και της Ευρωπαϊκής. Τώρα εξαιτήσαμε, εξαιτήσαμε με τα ευρωπαϊκά εμφασίες. Τι είναι η διεθνή μας, η διεθνή μας έχει να κάνει με αγγή με δικαίωσης, εξαιτές από Ευρώπη, και έχει να κάνει μεταξύ τους σκέψεις, για να βρει τα κράμματα και να προσπαθεί τα κράμματα σήμερα και εμφασίες. Αυτό μας σχέδιο, που είναι λογικό, είναι για να έχουμε σημαντική και οργανωμένη κράμματα, κραμματική, τερρορυσμ και εμφασίες δικαίες. Αυτό σημαντικόμαστε ότι η κοντά που έχουμε inside the platform έχει να κάνει σημαντικά με αυτήν την αγγή της εμφασίες. Αυτή είναι η διεθνή που έχουμε, ένα σημαντικό παράδειγμα. Και δεν μπορεί να υπάρξει κατασκευή και κάθε μέρα από τα σημαντικά εμφασίες. Σε 2023 έχουμε ένα νέο στράτημα, και έχουμε 4 εμφασίες σκέψεις. Έχουμε να γίνουμε η Ευρώπη για διεθνή εμφασίες. Είμαστε λιντήρες για η κομματική κατασκευή εμφασίες εκκρότημα που είναι πάρυ σημαντικά για εμφασίες δικαίες και εκκρατήσιες σε χώρε. Αυτό είναι το Σεύθροφόρος μας. Δεν είναι τελειά, as usual έχουμε εμφασίες και εμφασίες που αντιμετωπίζουν τη περισσότερη εμφασία. Εν κλείδινα που είναι χρή What is required, Από την ΕΛΕ, πρέπει να ακολουθήσουμε τα στιγμή υποστασίας για τα οποία we are certified as an EU agency. Τώρα θα ξεκινήσω να μιλήσω για το πλατφό μας. Το πλατφό μας είναι called LEED και είναι ο ακρονομιμπας της στιγμής υποστασίας. Όπως καταλαβαίνετε, όλα είναι στιγμή υποστασίας. Υπάρχει ό,τι ξεκινήσει. Είναι ένα πλατφό very customised, ξεκινώντας από τα στιγμή, που έχει θεματικές εργασίες και εργασίες εργασίες για να εργασίσει για τα στιγμή υποστασίας εργασίες. Έχουμε ένα στιγμή υποστασίας mobile, δημιουργημένη στο SHIPOL. Και εργασίεσαμε μέχρι την COVID-19. Το πλατφό μας ήταν το 31η του Απ. 2020 και εργασίεσαμε μέχρι την COVID-19 με μια πολύ δύσκολη εργασία να εργασίεσουμε και να εργασίεσουμε μία εργασίες να εργασίεσουμε. Είμαστε πάντα τα στιγμή υποστασίας εργασίες και αυτό είναι γιατί έχουμε ένα πολύ σημαντικό σχέδιο για το τι κάνουμε οι εργασίες. Και αυτό είναι γιατί εργασίεσουμε, για την εργασία. Και όπως βλέπουμε, έχουμε δύο εργασίες εδώ. One, the minor, it's running universally in January because we don't have enough time for testing for anything that we have. In July we have usually the major upgrades, so we do have one month, August, that is usually for a vacation, but we have the testing, in order to be able to support the next academic year starting from January. In the meantime, we always have every two months at least a security update because we always have to have standards concerning the security and always work in the most updated information of this. I have some information concerning the security, I will not be on details because I'm not security oriented, but I have to say about the WAF, the web application firewall, that is a very important asset we have under the platform in order to help us in any attacks on the internet. As you understand, the EU agency plus the TECIPOL is near Ukraine that we have the world. It's a very interesting place for attacks and it's a very vulnerable environment, so we have increased the security during the time. You see, we have also applied the MFA authentication, multi-factor authentication in order to get in the platform, so we have two steps inside in order to log in. You will see later, I have some print screens concerning this. We do always have a disaster recovery plan and we execute for every its upgrade. We have a certificate, the company that is from the European Union, checking on us if there is any vulnerability before or after applying something and opening it to everybody. Now, what we have in LID? Now we have more than 50,000 active accounts. We have a lot of trainings coming inside the platform that are actually closed for our restricted law enforcement environment and in order to get in some of them, you should be nominated from specific managers of its country. This is the sort of information and content we have inside. As you see, we have even the on-site courses, we do have a specific course page inside our platform, but it starts and ends inside the platform, but the main course phase-to-phase training it runs during the live environment. This is the main areas that we actually have the most participants. As you see, it's law enforcement again. Serious and organized crime, cyber-related crime, fundamental rights, EuroPoll, this is all synthetic drugs has to do with law enforcement, so it's very dedicated to our environment. The reason that we selected firstly Moodle and then Moodle Workplace because it's an advanced version, but we wanted to make it even more professional for us, according to the regulations, we work officially with open source platforms. So we started with the Moodle, this was the older version that we have, and then when we wanted something more professional, we went to Moodle Workplace that we actually could divide our users inside the platforms. So it was very important to go to a more advanced solution with more advanced reporting and a more structured organization inside. The platform, as I said, is very customized. These are the main, as we can say, customization we have, starting from the registration process that is actually connected with the organizational structure. Inside the platform, all the actions are connected with the way that the organizational structure is arranged, I found it. So what we have is around UBROP, we have a lot of lead managers working in EU member states and also organizations that work with us. So they are responsible for approving and allowing the users inside or rejecting and depending the reason. So I will start by showing how it is the registration process. They have to fill in a form with specific fields and explaining the reason in order to register. And this email is sent fast information firstly to the user and then the responsible lead manager has to approve the process in order to allow access. Depending from which is the European Counter-Organization, it might have restricted role inside the platform, meaning that although it can get in the platform, we will not be able to see what we have inside or search for the content. But specifically courses that are a role too. This is, I know it's very small, but this is how it shows the registration. As you see, the main field is the counter-organizations, the third field. This is the first field that actually connects everything inside our platform with the organizational structure. And this actually leads to the user to be approved or rejected from a specific lead manager. Right now we have 154 lead managers across Europe. This is, as you see, the page that we actually applied now the multi-factor authentication. So when you try to add your credentials, you get an email with a code and then you have to add it in order to be able to verify it in getting the platform. We don't have it for all our users, but only for our high-level users that have more capabilities inside the platform. This is our mobile app. As I said, it's a branded app. So it is actually having to do with all the upgrades of the platform. It goes also to the mobile, as you see. But it works mainly for our users. It doesn't have the upgraded capabilities that we would like to have for managers. These are some of the integrations we have inside. For example, we have an integrated video repository where we save all the webinars that we have in the recorded webinars. And this can be connected with the courses inside using the material. The users also can also search in this one, from the dashboard, to find with specific words the webinars that they would like to find. Another regression we have is with EPSCO, that is for each journal and the books. Again, we have a specific contract with titles that you have to do with low enforcement. So we don't allow the users to see everything, but they can actually get inside with specific, again, words to specific titles connected to our environment. Why am... Sorry, I went back. And what we have new also is we have a global search that is actually replaced the main mood search button. And this global search, instead of searching only in the main titles, it search inside the content also. So the users can find all the information, not only from the title that was before, but even in forums, in assignments, everything that they have access to. So everything is connected with the restrictions you have. So if someone has full access in lead, they can find everything. If they don't have full access, they have to be restricted. And if in cases we have nominations, this means that the content is very, very strict to specific people inside the platform. Again, I did something wrong. And one thing that we actually added now is we start digitalizing our official processes. This is a very big job for us, because we try to replace the documents and the email sending with something happening everything inside the platform. We worked for these specific exchange for at least three years, and we still do a lot of enhancements on these. We're not there yet, although it launched this year and we're very happy. We managed to have a flow that is stable and the whole process run inside the platform, the documents, the nominations, the final steps were inside. Now we're trying to go to the second step of enhancing and put more capabilities in the same flow. And this is the second one that is prepared for us. We actually created the specifications working with our internal stakeholders, the business teams that are interested, specifically for these onsite activities. We created mock-ups, we worked a lot on this to find the fine tuning, and we expect the development phase to start in the next year 2024. And as you heard before, the tenancies is in the model workplace. This is an important aspect also for us. We have already two in launch officially. This is the International Cooperation Projects that is a partner company of SIPOL working with us and has specific topics that are actually allowed to see. The users are only there, they are not allowed to see the lead. It's specifically autonomous tenancies working in the same server. And we also have Slovakia that everything is translated in Slovakian languages. What we have added and what we promote to our partners is that not only they have the tenancy, but they can actually translate it to the EU languages that is allowed to have inside. So we already have in place three running in the testing environment in Portugal and in other countries and organizations in order to promote it. And finishing the whole customization, it is important to say why and how we support all these things. As I said before, the acronyms and LM mean National Lead Managers. It's from more organizations and countries across Europe. And we have working arrangements. So we do run regular training. We do have monthly online meetings with all of them. We work very closely with them. We ask them their feedback and we try to change whatever it does and run for them. They are the basic stakeholders for us. We do onboarding. We have face-to-face meetings, individual meetings. We start micro-learning sessions and we have a lot of short guides in order to lead them inside the whole phase. Okay. And another thing that we do and it's important for us, it's a training that has to do not only anymore for the internal but outside of us, facilitating and working with our low-enforcement activity managers. What it means, we actually run the trainers and experts run from the sIPOL. It's specifically official, connected in different ways from the institutes around the Europe. They have to have a specific background but doesn't mean that they have the knowledge to work with the online part. So we do run every year, at least one of the model workshops. And what we try to succeed with this is to create quality courses based on a template that we have already created for them. So even if they're not very well in the IT skills, they can actually run by changing the XXX places we have them to change inside.  Of course, some of them are very good on the IT part and they know more, so they can actually have more access. But still, we try to have a specific template inside the courses. So we know that, for example, when it's online course, it has to have a specific way of appearing and templates and then the same for on-site courses and different other products we have. The new thing that comes for us and it's important that it has to do with actually the new strategy of the 2023 that we have is that we are going to certify any more our participants, our facilitators, lower enforcement facilitators. For this reason, we cooperated with the Moodle HQ and the Moodle Academy. We approached them and we requested to buy the material concerning the training in order to reach the MEC. And the reason for this is we got the training, we added as programs inside the platforms, we worked with a specific team of lower enforcement officials, the trainer experts, and we made the material to be connected with what we want as facilitators, the lower enforcement, with specific studies, with specific material, with specific even activities that might be more close to what we want to succeed. Of course, you know that the MEC is connected with the digital... DG... I would say DG.com. And the actual targets are there, we have the levels and we have created the project that runs in three phases. We already actually closed the first phase, acquainted and transferred the material and what we wanted as lower enforcement. Now we are training the first six facilitators, lower enforcement facilitators for us, and we expect for the next phase in 2024 to be able to run it in all lower enforcement environment, universities and organizations we cooperate. This is our official program. So we have the beginners level, the Moodle workshop course, as you see before, that is the basic one. Then we work with the digital teaching-based program that is five courses that are connected, of course, with the Moodle Academy courses. Then we have the intermediate level. We have instructional design course that we have created internally for basic other learning. So we actually give them information of what we want them to succeed. And then we work with the digital teaching-skillers program again based on the Moodle Academy. The aim is not only to understand what Moodle can do. We want them all to be trained enough so they understand, in a platform, the good way of thinking how to actually have a digital competence portfolio correctly qualified. Of course, when they succeed on this, they go to Moodle Academy and they have to pass the MEC certificate. This is very important for us because we wanted, as I said, the target accreditation for our facilitators and this is something that is the first one that we open in this level. And this is my final slide. And we are first to implement a Moodle workplace. Actually, we started for the Moodle workplace before launching because we were very happy very much from the presentation and we wanted to have it. So we actually started in 2019 when it just launched to use it and try to make it to become ours. We used a lot of multi-tenancies and we have integrations, a lot inside. We have the Broadlet Mobile from 2019 and we are very happy that we work with Moodle HQ considering the digital competence and we hope we are going to finish also the Mobile, the Broadlet Mobile in a more structural way for our managers. And thank you very much. Do we have any questions for Asteria? So I assume that through changing regulations and laws, it's especially important that the documents that you have online are always up to date. So how do you take care of not posting outdated information to the officers? That's to understand. What do you mean, outdated information about the officers? You mean about the content we use inside? Yeah, right, like laws that might change or jurisdiction. We have courses, we have a training program that we work around the year. Actually, we gather all the information what we need to share for the next year. The courses are not always open. Okay, we have nominations. So for example, we might work for an impact like serious crimes this year that we have to be very focused. These clothes, they are not available for the users. So every year we update the material. So we have activity managers internally that work with expert and updated material. Also, we have some self-paced courses that are available for everybody in the regular role. And for this reason, we have every year updates concerning the law. Since we are EU, we have to take very good care of what we share the information and also our law legal team is also working with us whatever it has to do with the privacy, the terms and conditions and whatever it has in the platform.