Improving Lean, Service-Oriented Software Development at Codeweavers Ltd

Following a successful adoption of lean and agile practices, the development team at Codeweavers Ltd has furthered its approach to service-oriented software development for the motor finance and insurance industry. Through iteratively inspecting and adapting their processes over the last twelve months, the team members have seen a change from their Kanban-style single piece flow to multiple work cells developing with separate swim lanes on a work in progress board and within fixed length iterations. The arrival of strong competition to their market led to a positive shift towards customer service and interaction with increased attention on lean planning and agility. This chapter reports on improvement in software craftsmanship with a focus on quality, largely achieved by the use of service-oriented architecture, combined with increased use of mocking for unit-testing. The perspective taken is from software team members, and in the chapter, the developers chart their own observations, improvements, and failures over the course of a year.