By Michelle V & Chris S
On July 25th 2018, ActioNeters across the D.C. Metro area banded together to form the ActioNet A-Team in order to compete in the “Great Agile Challenge”. This was the very first “hackathon” event and was hosted at Microsoft’s HQ in Chevy Chase, MD. Competing Agile Teams were given only a few hours to develop a responsive BYOD application hosted in the Azure cloud. Grading criteria also included the use of a Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline and adherence to Agile best practices. Two of our ActioNet teams joined forces and elected ten of their finest to jump into the unknown maelstrom about 2 weeks prior to the event. Very short on time and with no knowledge of what to come, these select few came prepared and worked together demonstrating what being an ActioNeter is all about.
The A-Team of Azure Cloud engineers, software developers, a scrum master and automated tester combined their talents to build a framework for competitive development. The use of Slack for ChatOps kept all team members communicating and allowed for immediate reporting and logging of build activity. The team leveraged this functionality throughout the event to exchange information and share their thoughts. The Agile Kanban framework was key to maintaining visibility into teammate activities and ensuring that impediments did not become show stoppers. The CI/CD pipeline as a whole allowed multiple developers to work at full speed resolving any dependencies as soon as they arose producing higher quality work on a more frequent basis. Automated test building further improved the quality of the solution in a more efficient manner resulting in quicker turnaround times on bug fixes meaning more development was accomplished. Leveraging the Azure framework, easy-to-use Microsoft tools, along with a few 3rd party applications, the A-Team, team with no prior experience, was able to collaborate and produce a functional, scalable product in mere hours. Stay tuned for future opportunities and perhaps you too can join ActioNet’s A-Team!
The ActioNet hackathon team worked hard to create an application at the July 2018 Microsoft hackathon