180612-cebitgithubfuture

Three simple ways GitHub impacts any organisation

CeBIT 2018 started yesterday with a new format aimed at attracting developers, young and old, from around the world. There are many speakers invited to talk about business change and the impact of software has on business and society.

Today, Paul St. John (GitHub), Eric Bowman (Zalando) and I will be speaking at d!talk about “The Future of Software at Scale: Digital Transformation in the Enterprise” at 14:00.

That’s a big topic to cover in 30 minutes and we will mainly speak about GitHub’s impact on the global software community, and especially on enterprises.

GitHub is a platform for integrating people and ideas, building software, automating deployment, and delivering innovations to customer. Reflecting on the past two year’s work with Deutsche Boerse, where we rolled out GitHub Enterprise in record time, there are three simple ways GitHub impacts any organisation.

Search

When we started to look at Github there were many different source code control systems used throughout the company. On any day it was practically impossible to see what software was made. It was also very hard to see who did what. The company’s source code for its most critical products was highly distributed across the company, and some even outside the company at third party developer companies. We looked at GitHub as a solution for consolidating the source code into one platform and making it searchable.

Today there are over 85 million code repositories on GitHub. This represents a tremendous body of data about software, code libraries, build health, and people. You can watch repositories, rank them with stars, create issues, and contribute by solving problems together with other developers. Across the globe, or across the silos in any business, GitHub gives you the power to find out about software and people. One of GitHub’s features is a search machine for source code and people. By the end of 2016, the majority of Deutsche Boerse’s developers and products at were on GitHub. Even the mainframe COBOL code. Finally, it is possible to search and browse around the company’s codebase. With few exceptions including the company’s “secret sauce” most of the repos were open.

Talent Collaboration

The competition for talented programmers is brutal. Hiring and training a developer is a sizeable investment. GitHub helps companies find, develop, and manage talented individuals, especially the ones already at work. Hasso Plattner, one of SAP’s founders, says “Successful companies obviously have people with ideas and energy.” At Deutsche Boerse in 2016 it was hard to spot talented developers since there was no unified platform to bring people together. No easy way to share code between the different silos. It was almost impossible to see what other developers were doing unless you sat on the same floor in the same building. Collaboration is an incredible vehicle for developing talent. Peer reviews, pull requests, documentation, gists, stars are ways for talent to meet talent. Today, no hierarchy, no email, and no titles are needed for over 1200 talented developers to work together. Worldwide there are over 28 million users on GitHub.

With GitHub, Deutsche Boerse’s Product Development Lab has also extended its software development collaboration outside the company’s borders. For example, the company’s Developer and API system, called Digital Business Platform, was coded completely on GitHub in cooperation with Ory and Originate located in San Francisco. The Public Data Set, a collection of minute by minute data and access APIs, was developed and shipped with AWS and it is under development with Google soon to appear on Google Cloud Platform.

Speed

Since the birth of cloud and AWS in 2006, the possibilities to ship new features and products have greatly multiplied. Add Open Source, mostly found on GitHub, to the mix and it accelerates the possibilities to make new software. For many established companies, Deutsche Boerse included, the challenge is not only to harness the cloud, but also to set up the Devops processes and toolchain to advantage the new technologies. “Outship the competition” is a favorite phrase of many software company product managers. And in 2016 , it resounded well with Deutsche Boerse’s top technology executive Andreas Preuss. His goal simply put was to have an idea on Monday and ship it to customers on Thursday. This seemed really impossible at the time since the company’s release cycles were longer than 18 months.

In order to automate software releases, you need excellent data about all steps. With Github webhooks into tools like Coveralls, Travis, Circle CI and many more, GitHub helps companies integrate the build, test, deploy activity thereby gaining speed, improving release cadence, and datafying the entire process. In addition, GitHub can deliver KPIs for the organisation delivering a high degree of transparency.

Summary

The future of software is hard to predict especially in 30 minutes. By looking at the Deutsche Boerse’s experience over the past two years, using the GitHub platform, including the core products GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise, plus the growing ecosystem of partner products was core to the overall change the company made in software production. The three lessons learned, or simple ways GitHub impacts any organisation, search, talent discovery and collaboration, and speed will apply to many other organisations seeking to be innovative and responsive to customer and market demands.

Thomas Aidan Curran

June 11, 2018

CeBIT 2018, Hannover, Germany