Mingle® helps Rackspace deliver business

value with high predictability while staying

a step ahead of changing business priorities
Deck: How an enterprise-level hosting company capitalizes on Cloud
Computing, plans for IPv6 transition, delivers continuously and shifts
development priorities on a dime applying Agile and using
ThoughtWorks Studios' Mingle

www.thoughtworks-studios.com
Executive Summary
Rackspace credits its commitment to exceptional customer service, branded Fanatical Support®, for making it the
leading specialist in the Hosting and Cloud Computing industry; that can-do culture extends from the trenches to the
executive suite. Since 2007, the Mingle Agile project management solution has been the linchpin for a globally
distributed development team that internally supports Rackspace® offerings in a quicksilver market. Despite multiple
changes in priorities such as provisioning the new Rackspace Cloud for over 110,000 customers and dealing with
impending Internet Protocol version 6 address (IPv6) issues, the team has not slipped a single scheduled release in
2010. Mingle provides Rackspace management with actionable insight into their teams’ velocity and other metrics
while adapting to the company’s evolving processes. This allows Rackspace to practice “real Agile”: consistently hit a
four-week delivery timeline with high predictability, master strategic new technology, and maintain transparency in
the business.

The Culture
Agile is everywhere at Rackspace, where you'll find people:
nHolding a sprint planning meeting atop a mountain
nHiring outspoken blogger Robert Scoble to launch the Building 43® Internet think tank
nRetrofitting an abandoned shopping mall as company's headquarters in San Antonio, Texas

The Customer
Name another company
Founded in 1998, Rackspace has headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, nine data centers
in the world that hires a
around the world and more than 3,400 employees. Its three core products are video journalist to go
Rackspace® Managed Hosting, The Rackspace Cloud™, and Rackspace® Email & Apps. around and interview
Three years ago, an internally-facing team developing systems to provision data center other companies. I
servers and networks dove into a strategic new programming technology and began study the bleeding edge
using Mingle, the lightweight project management solution from ThoughtWorks of the Internet, then
Studios, as the nexus for their activities. The pioneering software development group bring that back into
counts 18 developers and one business analyst. To speed the learning curve for Ruby Rackspace so they can
respond to market
on Rails, a high-productivity, open-source platform that is crowding out Java in
conditions. This
enterprise market share, Rackspace also worked with ThoughtWorks. Both for company is managed
architectural and productivity reasons, Ruby turned out to be an especially fortuitous better than any other
choice, given the shift toward cloud computing. So did Mingle, according to Rackspace. that I've worked for.

Scoble

The Challenge
As anyone following IT knows, “the business of hosting has been changing rapidly,” says Troy Toman, Director of
Software Development in San Antonio. “We are constantly opening new data centers, taking on new kinds of
hardware and offering new services. We might need to enable the provisioning of a completely new
service or device and we want to get it to market—fast. Being able to model those new services and change our
development priorities quickly is the reason Agile and Mingle have been so good for us.”

Agility requires constant vigilance, however. For example, when they began Agile software development, Rackspace
Chief Technology Evangelist Dirk Elmendorf was a proponent of seven-day sprints to keep the team at a

Copyright 2011 ThoughtWorks Inc. All rights reserved | www.thoughtworks-studios.com

productive clip. While the practice instilled excellent habits around requirements tracking via Mingle Story
Cards and Trees, the metrics told another tale: Mingle's velocity charts showed activity spikes around every two
weeks: “We were actually delivering value every two weeks. Once we changed to two week iterations, we saw a
more constant flow of velocity.”

Also, the team had accelerated productivity using Agile techniques, but needed a big-picture focus to meet
governance goals and stay ahead of the market. By raising the abstraction level to “Epics” or Master Story Lists
defined in Mingle, the team was able to better support the course being set by the business. “We were going week
to week and accomplishing work, but not necessarily making progress on those big goals,” says Toman. “If you look
when our project kicked off with Mingle, we were purely a managed hosting company—Cloud Computing wasn't a
big thing. But in the summer of 2009 we realized the focus was now on the cloud. We had new tactical objectives.”
That wouldn't be the only fork in the road.

Copyright 2011 ThoughtWorks Inc. All rights reserved | www.thoughtworks-studios.com

The Changes
Rackspace configures, provisions, and manages dedicated servers, firewalls, load balancers, and other equipment. In
Cloud Hosting, most of those services are virtualized. When the market shifted, the internal software development
priority changed from “supporting large numbers of customized solutions to supporting really large numbers of
standardized solutions,” Toman explains. “We reprioritized our whole development stack. We kept the development
team working while our analysts went off and figured it all out.” This was a contrast to Toman's past experiences:
“When I've been involved in a development project that was waterfall (with fixed deadlines and deliverables) in the
past, when we had a reprioritization like this, we were thrown into upheaval.” This time, instead of losing an entire
quarter to planning, the team was able to turn on a dime and reorient their resources in less than 30 days—while
developer productivity continued apace.

The team has reengineered its process to take advantage of Mingle's Tree capabilities by defining Epics such as “Auto
Discovery for a Cabinet,” “Server Provisioning,” or “Server Recycling.” Burn-down charts underneath each Epic show
not only velocity but also scope creeps across disparate efforts. That focus has enabled the team to continually
ramp-up technical expertise and scale rapidly to meet market demand.

A new drama that looms this fall is the Hosting industry's version of Y2K: the transition to IPv6 as the number of
available IP addresses runs out under the previous protocol. Talk to Toman for a few minutes and you'll hear
one after another example of how much he's had to juggle changing goals like these. But he's found that the use of
Mingle to track Story Cards and provide metrics about the team's current and past performance has led to a finely
tuned delivery process that can handle upheavals easily, in a matter of hours.
In 2010, we have not
only hit every release
date without slipping
any high priority
features, we've also
met every major
Ipv6 milestone.

Copyright 2011 ThoughtWorks Inc. All rights reserved | www.thoughtworks-studios.com

The Rackspace Results
As Rackspace evolves its use of Mingle, the tool has become key to averting chaos and delivering results,
according to Toman. Read on for the highlights:
Flexibility: Change has been the only constant over the past three years. As new priorities push aside existing
projects, in as little as an hour, Toman can drag and drop cards from Virtual Story Walls and estimate when tasks and
projects will be completed.

Global Collaboration: “There isn't any way we could be working as closely between our global teams without
Mingle.” The transnational team meets once a day by video conference and keeps track of all related Story Card
conversations via the Mingle and Google Wave integration.

Adaptability: “Mingle has given us the freedom to evolve our process in the way that works best for the business.”
When a new card attribute, the planning estimate, was added alongside the task estimate, it was easy to
retroactively update this value on a large backlog of completed cards to determine trends going forward.

Acceleration: “Test-driven development has been a boon for making the codebase easy to understand and allowing
us to move fast without making a lot of mistakes.” In Mingle, test management and defect tracking are tightly
coupled to requirements. Rackspace has gained insight on bug status, testing progress, and project risks via visual
defect workflows, bug-story links and card comments, and histories, as well as other artifacts.

Management Visibility: “We use the Mingle Query Language to pull out graphs. We build a view that the
finance team wants to see, my customers have a view around delivery and there's an overall velocity view that my
managers care about relative to productivity.”

Right-Weight Process: “Our developers have never once complained about Mingle. It's probably the only tool we use
where I don't have a developer begging me for an alternative.” From a governance perspective, no one has to know
Mingle: “Reports we generate get pulled into slides and distributed to executives and we don't have to answer
questions wondering what we're doing.”

Continuous Delivery: “Mingle lets us do real Agile. It used to be, 'In this release we'll do this amount of features.'
Then, the four-week release goes to six weeks and you get into this unpredictable, feature-driven cycle. With
Continuous Delivery, we ship every four weeks. We can see where everything is in pipeline at any given time. It's
not so much about delivering faster but about being more predictable to the business.”

People can use Agile as

Back to the Culture an excuse to say 'Oh, it
And that Agility pervades Rackspace. Chief Technology Evangelist Elmendorf is genial as will be ready when it's
he describes how the company only builds out as much as it knows it will need and ready’- Using Mingle,
our business knows
use. Clearly, Rackspace isn't afraid to backtrack if it needs to.
what it's going to get.

“There's nothing worse than being under the thumb of a lot of cost that you can't get
Toman
away from. I think that's aside effect of our nature but also from living through the bubble,
when people made bad business decisions and that kept building on itself,” Elmendorf told Scoble recently.
“It's like being at that blackjack table and you keep doubling down, hoping it's going to work out in the end. And
for most companies it didn't work out.” Mingle's adaptability enables Rackspace to stay a step ahead of changing
business priorities, while flexibly responding to their unique project processes. Additionally, as Rackspace’s system-
of-record and collaborative team space, Mingle provides actionable insight and real-time visibility for the entire
team.

Copyright 2011 ThoughtWorks Inc. All rights reserved | www.thoughtworks-studios.com

 About ThoughtWorks Studios
Mingle Benefits
ThoughtWorks Studios is a global leader in Agile software development tools, and its Easy-to-Use Interface
products can be found in development organizations seeking sustainable Agile Mingle's user interface recreates the
adoption. The company's Adaptive Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution card wall experience in an online
provides a platform for managing all aspects of software development, from environment. This shared space
available to all team members
requirements definition and project management to test automation, quality
provides visibility into the movement
assurance, and release management. Adaptive ALM comprises the integration of three of work from development through
products: Mingle (Agile project management), Twist (Agile testing), and Go (Agile to deployment.
release management). Each tool is available as part of a complete lifecycle solution or as
a standalone product. Backed by more than 17 years of experience in Agile delivery, Improved Collaboration
ThoughtWorks Studios is the product division of ThoughtWorks Inc., a pioneer in Agile With Mingle, development teams
development. ThoughtWorks Studios has over 400 customers in more than 20 can work directly with business
countries, including 3M, Honeywell, BBC, eBay, Barclays, Vodafone, McGraw-Hill, and stakeholders throughout a project,
Rackspace. The company headquarters is located in San Francisco and Bangalore, with from recording feature requirements
offices in London and select cities in Europe, Asia, and Australia. For more information, in a story card to showing overall
development progress. Managing
visit www.thoughtworks-studios.com.
their projects in Mingle allows
team to show consistent and
predictable product progress to
business stakeholders.
Mingle, an Agile management and collaboration tool,
provides a common workspace for all team members and
an automated system of record for all projects. Mingle can Engineering Best
adapt any existing workflow process and easily manages Practices
daily development activities. Offering true-to-life visibility Mingle reduces tedious tasks such as
in the entire development process for all stakeholders, manually determining project status,
Mingle helps development teams become more open and which provides more time for each
collaborative. team to focus on software delivery
rather than the software tool. With
this emphasis on production, teams
more easily adopt engineering best
Go is a solution for Agile release management, which practices.
enables businesses to release software on demand. Go
improves collaboration between developers, testers, and For further information or to request
operations and provides fast feedback on the production a demo, please call:
+1 415-273-8499/1-877 624-8467
readiness of your software. Using Go, teams can model the (NA, Business hours CST)
delivery process, perform push-button deployments, and
trace from deployments back to version control. +44(0)20-7497-4500
(EU, 9:00am to 5:00pm GMT)

+91-80-43233732/+91-80-43233722
(APAC and Africa, 9:30am-6:00pm IST |
Twist, an automated Agile testing solution, provides
4:00am-12:30pm GMT)
English-like constructs, making the testing process more
productive for all team members. As applications grow in Email: studios@thoughtworks.com
complexity, Twist helps to more easily maintain complex
test suites. These suites keep pace with application
development and are held as long-living assets.

ThoughtWorks Studios
CALL: 512-467-4956 (sales) EMAIL: studios@thoughtworks.com
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WEB: www.thoughtworks-studios.com
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