In 2005, Microsoft’s DevDiv (with 2000 participants and 40 million lines of code) overhauled its engineering practices to improve agility, quality, and customer satisfaction. Four years into the journey, customer satisfaction has increased dramatically. Product quality improved 10x. Velocity improved 2x, with schedule time for major releases was cut by eighteen months and quarterly releases of “power tools” allowed incremental delivery to external customers. Practices that change include planning, org, quality gates, branching, testing, tooling, reporting, backlogs, transparency.

We struggled with long-running, complex builds and difficulty in sharing code across multiple projects. We started using Maven to simplify our builds. This lead to many more benefits that we didn’t expect. It also minimized the overhead costs of extracting, introducing and maintaining new modules. This provided a path for us to move away from a few monolithic slow builds to many small, lightweight fast builds. Using conventions improved cross-team communication. Managing dependencies, versions and performing releases have all become trivial. Maven is a wonderful tool for enhancing agility.