In Tencent, how many technical leaders are writing code?
On March 9, 2020, Tencent officially released the Tencent R&D Big Data Report. In this report, Tencent disclosed the important data of its product and technology R&D in 2019, which was the first time for Tencent to actively disclose the big data related to R&D since the establishment of the technical Committee. It was a periodic summary of Tencent’s own technology R&D.
The report is jointly produced by Tencent’s Agile R&D collaboration platform TAPD, Tencent’s code hosting platform Worker Bee and Tencent’S integrated delivery system Tencent CI, which support the entire R&D process of nearly all of Tencent’s businesses.
Research and development accounted for 66 percent, with 1.29 billion lines of code added
The report shows that Tencent continues to increase investment in research and development.
In 2019, Tencent accounted for 66% of its RESEARCH and development staff, making it one of the highest among Chinese tech companies. At the same time, Tencent added more than 3,500 new R&D projects in 2019 — the number of To B projects in 2019 increased by 77% compared To 2018 as Tencent fully embraced the industrial Internet strategy.
In terms of code volume, Tencent added 1.29 billion lines of code in 2019, up 30% from 2018.
In terms of research and development effectiveness, Tencent also performs well.
Since 2006, Tencent has started to promote the agile evolution of r&d mode. In the long-term practice of agile R&D, Tencent developers have built two tools, Tencent Agile collaboration platform TAPD and Tencent Worker Bee, which can realize rapid response to user needs.
TAPD provides product development lifecycle solutions that support agile requirements planning, iterative plan tracking, testing and quality assurance, continuous construction and delivery, r&d performance measurement and r&d knowledge accumulation, helping r&d teams collaborate quickly, efficiently and deliver high-quality products. In 2017, TAPD was opened to the outside world. Tencent exported its valuable RESEARCH and development mode, practice and tools to help enterprises improve their research and development efficiency. Currently, TAPD has served more than 100,000 enterprises.
Tencent Worker Bee is a distributed enterprise code management collaboration solution created by Tencent after 4 years. With code review, branch management, conversational development, integrated customization, review and monitoring and other enterprise-class R & D management system features, help enterprises throughout the R & D process, so that development and R & D management more agile and efficient — it is worth mentioning that, like Tencent TAPD, Tencent Worker bee has been opened to the outside world.
Data show that 60% of Tencent’s project teams have less than 20 people, 47.8% of the project iterations are within one week, and an average of 3,802 user demands are completed every day, while 28% of the demands can be responded to within one day. In terms of Bug handling, 46% of bugs were resolved within 1 day and 82% were resolved within 1 week.
Open cooperation, Tecent technology changes greatly
For Tencent, the above achievements cannot be achieved without Tencent’s emphasis on optimizing the technology research and development environment and improving the research and development efficiency in 2019.
On January 4, 2019, Tencent Technology Committee was formally established, led by Lu Shan, Senior Executive vice president of Tencent and President of Technology Engineering Business Group, and Tang Daosheng, senior Executive vice president of Tencent and President of Cloud and Smart Industry Business Group, two members of Tencent General Office. Under the two project teams of “Open source Collaboration” and “Self-research on cloud” and external open source management office, to promote the open sharing and collaborative construction of internal code, on the basis of internal open source code and external open source, and promote the comprehensive integration of business on the cloud.
After the concept of open source collaboration was put forward, Tencent sorted out some relatively basic technical sections from various business groups to take the lead in the practice of open source collaboration, among which Tencent CI is a typical example. Tencent CI Oteam is a cross-team virtual organization within Tencent. Led by blue Whale team of IEG (Interactive Entertainment business Group), Tencent CI Oteam organizes relevant teams and individuals to jointly develop, construct and operate Tencent CI, a unified continuous integration delivery system of Tencent, aiming to reduce repetitive labor and improve r&d efficiency.
After a year, Tencent has made some progress in internal code opening and technology coordination.
Up to now, in the Oteam of Tencent CI, 303 developers from all over Tencent have submitted their plug-ins, which are used to connect with the internal systems used by various business groups in the PROCESS of CI.
Data from the report also showed that in terms of technical collaboration, the person who participated most in cross-team R&D projects within Tencent contributed to 24 collaborative projects. The r&d collaboration project involving the most departments gathers the wisdom of 12 departments; The department with the highest participation in team collaboration participated in the construction of 113 R&D collaborative projects.
In terms of internal open source, Tencent’s overall internal code open source rate increased from 20% at the beginning of 2019 to 70% at the end of 2019, and code co-construction has become a trend. Among them, more than 4400 collaborative code bases were added in Tencent in 2019, and Q4 increased 56.3% compared with Q1. This includes 53 in-house key open source projects (involving more than 400 code bases) working together.
In 2019, the cooperation between Tencent and the open source community also developed to a new stage. The Angel project completed the technological evolution from a single model training platform to a full-stack machine learning platform, and successfully graduated from LF AI Foundation. The TARS project has become a microservice development framework in the open source community that supports only five development languages and has a complete service governance and operation platform. In addition, Tencent has joined the LF Edge Foundation as a founding member to promote the development of Edge computing software and hardware open source technology together with industry partners.
Open source synergy, Tencent new code culture formation
In 2019, Tencent not only realized the optimization of technology research and development environment through open source collaboration, but also formed a brand new code culture.
In fact, the birth of Tencent code culture can be traced back to 2013; At that time, under the background of upgrading the company’s “open” strategy, Tencent proposed the “open, reuse and joint development” of the code. In the past, Tencent’s open source culture was more bottom-up. However, after the establishment of Tencent Technical Committee in 2019, a top-down open source coordination mechanism was established, and Tencent’s new code culture with “open source, coordination and cloud growth” as the core grew rapidly.
In January 2019, under the guidance of Tencent Technology Committee, Tencent technology community “Code Customer” and “Technology Map” were launched. In nearly a year, more than 80% of the technical staff visited the codeuser community and technical atlas every month for technical discussion and collaboration. The number of questions on the community reached nearly 3,000, and the answers and comments reached 150,000 times. 94% of the technical problems were answered.
On November 11, 2019, On the occasion of its 21st anniversary, Tencent announced corporate culture 3.0, which upgraded “cooperation” to “collaboration”. This change in fact have clear value orientation, is to “open collaboration, the continued evolution”, in a sense, this also fully fit the tencent internal code technology and culture: internally to enlarge pattern, open borders, together with organizations as open source, with thinking methods and tools to collaborate and conform to the Internet.
It is worth mentioning that Tencent’s internal technology culture is also fully reflected in Tencent’s fight against COVID-19 in 2020.
COVID, according To a report in 2020-19 during outbreaks, tencent rapidly attack, in wisdom education, medical treatment, telecommuting, wisdom, e-government and other fields To launch the corresponding service, tencent conference, enterprise WeChat, TAPD, tencent worker bees, tencent have Shared much money To B product upgrading comprehensive functions such as open, free, To support the fight against COVID – 19 outbreak.
In the future, Tencent hopes to create a more excellent code culture. As Lu Shan previously said inside Tencent:
I hope that the future new employees will feel that it is very happy to do development in Tencent, to learn a lot of things, to see a lot of excellent code. People talk not only about the culture of Silicon Valley, but also about the code culture of us Chinese developers.