We have 35 people working in 6 different .NET teams, for 3 different clients. That’s a lot of people to learn from and share knowledge with.
All our teams are small, they range from 3-7 people max. The applications are all a bit different but the core theme is building responsive web applications using C# and JavaScript libraries like React. We are using .NetCore for some applications and leveraging the capabilities of Azure more has been a key focus for 2019.
We are always excited about trying out new ways of delivering software. At the moment we are embracing TDD, pair programming and some teams are mob programming most of the time now. We focus a lot on releasing our software without manual steps. We are not quite at the point of releasing continuously but we do have all our regression testing running automatically after code commit and our applications are automatically (after a few human approvals) deployed into production if the tests are green.
We are passionate about clean code and work hard to ensure that the code we create is performant, secure and easy to maintain. TDD is an approach that all our teams have embraced and wherever we can we try to avoid lots of full stack testing. We'd rather ensure that everything is working as part of our automated build than wait until the system is deployed. We have experienced software testing professionals who work within the teams to help us ensure that we have appropriate test coverage - no one likes investigating production bugs so we try to prevent as many as possible as early as we can. We don't have long testing phases, but we do lots of testing!
Some of our developers have started organising the Cornwall .Net Developer meetup group and we’re looking forward to bringing people from Cornwall together to debate the burning issues and to learn from each other.
It does feel like a team, everyone working together and investing in success of team.