DevOps Summit: Are you a clunky Tesco, or a streamlined, DevOps-friendly Etsy, asks Cambridge Satchel CTO

'Ask how good is your technology, and how good are the people building it' advises Wooldridge

There's a sliding scale from the "clunky" etail [electronic retail] of Tesco and the more DevOps-inspired stylings of agile web presences such as Etsy, Jonny Wooldridge, CTO for the Cambridge Satchel Company, said today.

Speaking at Computing's DevOps Summit 2015, Wooldridge described a development scene in which certain old-style traditions were now becoming divorced from modern needs when building technical teams.

"Some of the systems you can buy right now in the etail or e-commerce world - you look under the hood and compare to the Lastminute.com days, where you see WebSphere, ATG and all these systems - and they haven't really changed much over the years," explained Wooldridge.

"But I can't recruit people to work on these kinds of systems - the technology is really in the 1990s in places. Which means we have to look somewhere else."

Wooldridge asked: "How good is your technology, and how good are the people building it?

"If you've got a clunky old system and a bunch of people who are disengaged and have contracts that say they don't really have to do it, you're in the legacy zone," Wooldridge also warned.

Wooldridge showed a ‘quadrant'-style diagram of etail companies and their various web development preferences.

"Etsy and companies like that say they pay top quadrant to give developer the power, and let them do what they want," he explained.

"So they are ‘top quadrant', but then at Tesco or M&S [where Wooldridge has previously worked] it still costs £1m to have a testing department, and it still takes a lot of time to get changes through, so how much are you really spending on these clunky processes? You may be paying more to individual people, but overall it's a lot less expensive."