DeveloperWeek Austin 2019

It’s critical that dev leaders continually inspire and better their teams for continued innovation and excellence. Mary Beth Westmoreland did exactly that when she helped lead process and cultural transformations that allowed for the evolution of Blackbaud’s technology strategy from a lagging, on-premises leader to an agile development model with solutions implemented on Blackbaud SKY®, the company's platform for social good cloud innovation, in just eighteen months.  

Mary Beth’s strategy was driven by the mantra “Be Brave.” She understood that bravery leads to innovation, innovation leads to company success, and company success leads to more company success.

Mary Beth will share the keys to managing dev teams to increased innovation and success, including:
-Creating a “safe” environment for productive disagreement
-Giving teams problems to solve, not solutions to implement
-Creating an environment of autonomy, mastery and purpose
-Celebrating failing fast
-Pivoting quickly

She’ll also share the lessons learned along the way, including:
-Ability for a team to release their bits at the end of a sprint is the #1 fundamental you must nail
-Modularity is your friend: Macro Services, Micro Services, Components/Containers
-Microservices are hard:
*You must invest a tremendous amount of energy into your
SDLS
*Unit testing w/ code coverage
*Automated testing
*Automated deployment
*Dependency management
-Non-Functional Requirements are hard: Find a friend doing it right and leverage their work