Tencent’s agile R&D war

“We can come up with something different today, and then we can see it very quickly because we can get it online very quickly, and then we can validate it, and if it’s wrong, we can take it offline, and if there’s room for improvement, we can change it next week. It’s a process of continuing to implement your ideas.”

In 2016, the importance of “agile development” was specially mentioned in the annual management team leadership conference of Tencent wechat business Group.

At this point, distance from them to take over QQ mailbox has been ten years.

This year was the 10th anniversary of TAPD’s birth.

I recall that when I took over QQ Mailbox in 2005, QQ mailbox ranked very low in China, and no one paid attention to it. “It can be said that it was a mess”, but the team was still very devoted to doing it well.

All the work is carried out in accordance with scientific process management and scientific RESEARCH and development design methodology. As a result, users come in and find the product is very slow, every operation is very cumbersome, and all the functions seem to have no highlights, so users quickly lose.

“I think back to all the things we did that year, and in one sentence, a very mediocre team took some very mediocre methods to make a very mediocre product, and it was unconscious.”

Unknowingly, everyone thinks they are doing things in the most reasonable and common way, and when they fail, they realize that all the methods are wrong.

In 2006, the Email team decided to take the plunge and assembled a small team of 10 people for “one last try” — “we all knew the product would die, but if it didn’t, we’d figure out a new way.”

The team is called “agile teams”, the method used is “agile project management” – the so-called “agile”, in the words of mail team, is really very quickly, “when I found the first night we have a need to change something, I send an email out, sometimes found this thing has been converted to work in the morning, went live, It’s definitely a good feeling.”

02

Speaking of this delightful “agility”, we have to mention Tony, one of the founders of Tencent, in an exchange in the United States in the same year.

At that time, Tencent already had a scale of 2,000 people. How could the team maintain continuous innovation, flexible response, and achieve efficient coordination and fast delivery? A set of effective research and development concepts and methods are indispensable.

To this end, Tony led his team to the United States to communicate with Google, Yahoo and other companies. After coming back, he personally promoted the establishment and implementation of the whole Tencent Agile R&D system.

Different from the strict control of traditional waterfall development, agile development emphasizes highly collaboration between people and flexible response to changes. Its values of “simplicity, communication, feedback and courage” are more suitable for projects that are innovative or need to seize the market in the Internet era.

Tao refers to the core idea and concept of Tencent’s RESEARCH and development, namely, the agile idea of “taking user value as the basis, agile iteration, small steps and fast running, encouraging user participation, continuous delivery and gray verification”.

Method refers to Tencent’s research and development culture and organization. On the basis of functional organization, Tencent introduces Feature Team as the minimum operational unit of business, and conducts agile delivery centered on users.

Technology refers to the practice of Tencent’s R & D system, which is mainly composed of project management practice and R & D engineering practice. The project management practice abstracts and integrates the mainstream agile RESEARCH and development ideas such as Scrum, XP and FDD. Research and development engineering practice from the perspective of research and development, delivery, etc., continue to carry out CI, CD construction, two-prong, fast and high-quality delivery of user value.

TAPD is the platform that carries these ideas and practices. The whole platform is based on the complex internal R&D scenarios of Tencent, with the characteristics of integration, agility, automation and intelligence, which can support the differentiation of r&d process management of different teams.

As the first to “eat crab”, the TAPD team faced a new challenge.

“When we had our first morning stand up meeting, a lot of people were dismissive; Not to mention pairing programming, using whiteboards to track progress, and continuous integration to collect feedback, all of which seemed to many at the time to be a sham.”

The TAPD team is standing for their morning meeting

In its first few years, the TAPD platform experimented with different functions and evolved into a one-stop platform covering the entire Agile R&D lifecycle, from product concept formation, product planning, requirements analysis, project planning and tracking, quality testing, build release, and more. At the same time, the team insisted on standing up for the morning meeting at 9:30 every day, and PM quickly dealt with the morning meeting problems according to the “one-hour decision” principle. Set up the target board in the most prominent position near the team, draw the time measurement & progress burning chart, all team members can update in time; Programmers work in pairs, refactoring code in iterations; Invite users to participate in product design, testing and other r&d processes; Continuous delivery at an iteration every two weeks, gray validation… In less than a year, TAPD1.0 implemented 542 features and completed 22 iterations.

“Build platforms and rules first, and then influence others.”

At that time, a Lemon Team was set up. With the slogan of “Make Others Great”, they helped Tencent staff train agile project managers and build a harmonious Team with high performance, so as to continuously produce the project results with the best value.

The team carried out “ground push” in more than 40 departments of the company, focusing on watermelon fields, project progress, timelines, discussion boards, agile pioneers, etc., to make each team feel agile and practice agile. Over time, the activity of the discussion boards became a measure of team communication efficiency, and the project’s agile index became the result of competition among teams… Up to now, standing up for morning meetings has always been the habit of all Tencent r&d teams.

This system in Tencent’s first pilot team, including QQ mailbox.

“At that time, a lot of software development teams thought it was normal, it was normal for decades, but when it was actually implemented, it wasn’t always delivered on time. Over time, team members became less concerned with the release date, and with the mindset that it would be released as soon as it was done, no one took the release date as a commitment. Sometimes requirements are adjusted before a release has been made. “It’s a vicious cycle of changing requirements and not being able to deliver on time, and it drains away the team’s energy and passion.”

Once in agile mode, the QQ Mailbox team started experimenting with moving from disorderly releases to fixed monthly releases. At the beginning, we could not accept it and thought it was very stressful, but later we gradually felt all kinds of benefits.

“The first is to be able to quickly solve problems that annoy users; Second, requirement changes are gradually reduced until eliminated; At the same time, after the team rhythm solidified, internal friction reduced, efficiency improved; Most importantly, users have come to expect new features every time QQ mailbox brings them, and their engagement has become stronger!”

Through the agile transformation, QQ mailbox not only reversed the user reputation, but also won the favor of many users, so in just two years from the unknown mailbox industry to the first in China.

And this process of agile transformation, on another level, gave birth to the outbreak of wechat.

Back in the early stage of wechat, there were only about 10 people in the iOS project team of wechat. They cooperated well with each other and could communicate with each other face to face. This small and agile team successively released core functions such as voice call, checking nearby people, shaking and drifting bottle.

The product gradually became famous, and the staff expanded to 30~50 people. In order to solve various problems such as chaotic demand management, frequent changes, and delivery delays, the team introduced TAPD, and with the help of TAPD, completed key problems such as stable iteration pace and defect follow-up. When wechat entered a stable period and the team size expanded to hundreds of people, higher requirements were put forward for more perfect reports, project progress, multi-project collaboration, release and follow-up, etc. TAPD was also developing and maturing accordingly and could provide better support through flexible modules and function configuration.

In 2014, wechat reached 500 million monthly active users. With the growth of business, in addition to the needs of its own wechat APP, wechat client development team needs to cooperate with different teams (such as payment team, open platform, games, etc.). Complex work interfaces tend to lead to uncontrollable requirements, which further increases the difficulty of on-time delivery. Most troubling of all, it is difficult for multiple teams to coordinate their steps.

In order to improve the delivery speed, wechat divided the whole development team into several feature development teams according to the business development situation. Each team divided into branches to ensure the independence and rapid and flexible innovation of small teams. Moreover, some efficiency improvement tools were further developed on the development interface provided by TAPD. Although the research and development process has changed, TAPD has the characteristics of flexible expansion and can be seamlessly supported. It is still a trusted platform for research and development, communication and collaboration of wechat team.

“Products have their own users, and our users are those product teams.”

Looking back at TAPD itself, the iteration around business development was an expression of the agile mission team.

In 2009, with the rapid development of TAPD, how to meet the differentiated agile development of 1600 project r&d teams in the collectivized environment and the r&d collaboration across many countries in the international environment became a new challenge for TAPD. In June of that year, TAPD launched with version 3.1, which was the backbone of the Agile r&d lifecycle. In March 2010, the international version was launched, supporting overseas distributed research and development collaboration; In May 2011, open platform and T Rubik’s Cube were launched to support differentiated agile practices. In June 2012, the project template function was launched, depositing several sets of Tencent classic R&D templates; In November 2013, module decoupling was completed to form a scalable product solution; In October 2014, TAPD4.0 was released to simplify functional interaction and further improve r&d efficiency.

During the internal service period, TAPD not only improves the efficiency of team collaboration, but also helps the team to be agile and self-adaptive, realize the transparent sharing of resources, eliminate information islands, and break the bottleneck of collaboration with efficient distributed collaboration. Not only support the development of tencent agile thought, precipitation, curing the tencent’s best team also agile practices, gradually formed the four development model has the characteristics of tencent: from stable iteration to extreme edition, from the scale to the integration, whether it’s QQ, WeChat or king glory, different business scenarios can find suits own agile development model.

That’s what’s driving TAPD’s Legoization. In order to meet the needs of differentiation at the same time, TAPD realizes flexible customization of each module through the customization engine on the basis of its original capabilities, and provides rich API interfaces on its open platform to support the access of third-party applications. From this, the team can assemble tapDs as needed, like building blocks.

Over the past 14 years, With the help of TAPD, Tencent’s tens of thousands of internal products have been able to take the lead in the market with rapid iteration and small steps. TAPD is also iterating on its own functionality through the work of different business lines and teams of different sizes, and has accumulated these agile practices to pave the way for “going global”.

At the end of 2014, TAPD got its first external client: same-trip travel.

At that time, Tongcheng Tourism was in urgent need of a set of agile R & D solutions to improve the efficiency of R & D. Wang Qiang, the vice president, paid a special visit to The company at Tony’s recommendation, and after learning about TAPD, he strongly hoped that TAPD could be used. Through this cooperation, TAPD helped Tongcheng travel successfully transform from waterfall research and development model to agile research and development model, with agile iteration, small steps and quick steps, to seize the first opportunity in the rapidly changing travel market.

In 2015, Meituan merged with Dianping, making efficient collaboration between the two companies a huge challenge. TAPD help Meituan and public comments on from the initial research and development team management mode transformation, to face the unity of the r&d management tools and methods combined, to face the business expansion, team scale, the challenges of help Meituan comments on perfect step by step to resolve the related challenges, and combine the actual situation of Meituan comments, made with Meituan comment on internal system of get through, It greatly helps Meituan-Dianping to reduce the cost of R&D management and improve the efficiency of R&D management.

Adhering to Tencent’s concept of openness and connectivity, TAPD gradually provides services to the outside world and shares Tencent’s agile R&D experience and practice of more than ten years to more enterprises. Relying on the voices of the former employees in Tencent, the company has accumulated a number of high-quality grayscale customers and verified the feasibility of its external service direction on them.

After TAPD4.0 was released, TAPD cloud was built to serve the open ecology.

In May 2017, TAPD officially provided full external services. In just three months, the total number of external users exceeded 30,000, realizing the goal of serving another Tencent in terms of user scale. The number of registered companies has also grown from less than 600 initially to more than 7,000. Since its opening, TAPD has successfully provided industry-leading agile collaboration solutions for customers from different industries such as social networking, gaming, O2O, tourism, finance, e-commerce, medical care and video. The total market value of enterprises in cloud services has exceeded 100 billion YUAN.

While serving cloud customers, TAPD actively contributes to the SaaS ecosystem construction of Platforms such as Tencent Cloud and enterprise wechat. In order to enhance the industry competitiveness of Tencent Cloud r&d overall solutions, TAPD has in-depth cooperation with Tencent Cloud to participate in the construction of DevOps solutions, providing One-stop service throughout the whole life cycle of Agile R&D for Tencent cloud customers. Through the cooperation with enterprise wechat, TAPD launched the official application market, on the basis of team communication, to bring professional agile collaboration solutions for enterprise wechat customers, to help enterprise management more efficient.

Both internally and externally, TAPD continues to enrich the agile collaboration ecosystem with the vision of “building the most competitive agile r&d platform in the industry” to provide higher user value.

In 2018, Tencent 930 reform, formally entered the industrial Internet; By this time, TAPD was already running fast on the way to B.

Based on past agile practices, TAPD launched three solutions, lightweight collaboration, Agile R&D, and DevOps continuous delivery, to meet the needs of project collaboration and R&D management of teams in different industries, different sizes, and different maturity levels, and to achieve user value delivery. At the same time, in the engineering practice, it also integrates the mainstream r&d collaboration tools in the industry, and seamlessly integrates with the project management process. For access to self-built platforms, TAPD’s open platform also provides a standardized access process to help the team build one-stop delivery capabilities throughout the entire product development lifecycle. Up to now, Tencent’s Agile r&d platform TAPD has served more than 10W enterprises and has been recognized by benchmark customers in various industries.

If 930 reform is an agile iteration of Tencent, then TAPD is a grayscale verification. In the face of the outside world’s doubts about Tencent’s genes, TAPD proved once again with its agility that although an elephant is big, it is not difficult to turn around if every cell has the ability and desire to repair itself.

One longtime Tencent employee said he sometimes misses small teams because when there are more people, a lot of processes are created. But for a very small team, people can sit around and turn around and say, here’s a problem let’s solve it.

He doesn’t miss small teams so much as agile — and agile isn’t just for small teams.

In early 2020, the outbreak of COVID-19 prevented many r&d teams at home and abroad from resuming work. To that end, TAPD offers the enterprise version for free for six months. Dxy Garden, which brings epidemic maps and epidemic prevention knowledge to the public, and Kyushutong Logistics, which responds to the demand for on-site logistics of supplies and medicines in Wuhan, are both cooperating quickly on TAPD.

Internally, TAPD is also a “gas station” for Tencent’s agile fight against the epidemic. During the epidemic, TAPD supported the rapid iteration of digital tools such as health code, ride code, smart medical care, telecommuting, online education, government affairs and people’s livelihood. To date, there are over 1 million agile r&d and collaboration projects in over 50 countries on TAPD, a 10-fold increase over the same period last year.

This year marks the third anniversary of TAPD’s opening to the public. In three years, hundreds of thousands of businesses have become TAPD users. During this period, TAPD users futu Securities, Weimeng, Bilibili and other dozens of companies successfully went public. Over the past year, TAPD has completed 30 million collaborative tasks and sent 115 million work alerts, saving each user an average of 25 working days, or one month of work per year, according to statistics.

From an internal research and development tool to an infrastructure in the industrial Internet, TAPD has gone through 14 years. In the changing times, TAPD has gone further from Tencent and gradually evolved into one of the mainstream technology philosophies of the contemporary era.

Deep in the core of “agile”, it is also the attention and respect for people in Tencent’s technical culture.

“The biggest difference in Agile r&d compared to traditional r&d is that it focuses on communication and sees people working together.” Technology itself has no thought, but in the persistence of generation after generation of technical people, has a soul; The process itself has no temperature, but in the attention to people again and again, the release of warmth.

– > [listen TAPD little sister to tell the story of tencent agile development] (https://v.qq.com/x/page/s3152kzhg5k.html)