ACME systems beyond Version 3.0

The ACME systems team's members have come through their challenges stronger and leaner but their story doesn't end there. As with any successful business, they don't rest on their laurels but decide to expand into new markets and opportunities—namely, to build and deliver mobile-optimized clients to work with and complement their core web-based propositions.

With all they have learned throughout their evolution, they know they have an optimal way of working to allow them to deliver quality products that customers want, when they want them, and they know how to deliver quickly, reliably, and incrementally. However, the complexities of delivering features to a hosted web-based platform are not the same as the complexities of delivering features to an end consumer's mobile device—they are comparable but not the same. For example, the process of delivering code to production servers many times per day is under the control of the ACME team, whereas they have little or no control over how their mobile clients are delivered to end customers, nor if and when the end customer will install the latest and greatest version from the various app stores onto which the mobile client is published. In addition to this, the production platform onto which the mobile client will be installed is pretty much an unknown in terms of spec, performance, and storage.

All is not lost, though—far from it. The members of the ACME systems team have learned a vast amount throughout their evolutionary journey, and decide to approach this new challenge as they had done previously. They know they can build, test, and deliver software with consistent quality. They know how to deliver change incrementally with little or no impact. They know how to support customers and monitor and react quickly to change. They know their culture is mature and that the wider organization can work as one to overcome shared challenges.

As the new venture progresses, they also discover another side-effect of their newly rekindled success: the amount of traffic and transactions start to grow very quickly. They therefore need to scale out their platform and they need to do it as soon as possible. Rather than rely on their own datacenters, they decide to move their entire platform to a globally-distributed cloud-based solution. This brings with it new challenges: the infrastructure is completely different, the provisioning tools are new, the tools used to build and deliver software are incompatible with the existing ACME tools. Again, the ACME systems team take this in stride and forge ahead with confidence using the highly collaborative ways of working, techniques, and approaches that are now part of their DNA.

Let's look at what this all means from a holistic point of view.