Paddy Power Betfair puts entire IT team on call to improve software quality

Staff stopped trying to push code out on Friday evening when errors would mean a weekend call-out, says director of technology Stephen Lowe

Paddy Power Betfair has put its entire IT team on call in an effort to improve the quality of its software releases.

A recent IT overhaul at the firm involved a move into hybrid cloud, a shift to DevOps working practices, and the decision to improve accountability by putting all technology staff on call.

Stephen Lowe, director of technology at Paddy Power Betfair, explained that the development and operations team were brought together and given the skills to understand and perform one another's roles. However, the transition hasn't been completely seamless.

"The staff are all trained, and now the developers all have ops skills, so they're now much more independent," said Lowe, speaking at Computing's recent Cloud and Infrastructure Summit. "But ops still think their job is to keep the lights on. And the developers say if we're now doing all this infrastructure work, we're responsible for it."

The issue of who was responsible for what was resolved by placing all the IT teams on call, round the clock, all year. So if any hardware or software had an issue, the last person to work on it would be called in.

"What drives the culture more than anything is we put all the IT team on call. All the devs, all QAs [quality assurance], me, everyone.

"So if I release code on a Friday and it breaks on Saturday, I get a call to come and fix it. So suddenly the quality of software releases went up. And people didn't try to push through code on a Friday evening, instead they made it wait till Monday morning, so there's lots of time to test. That worked better and had more impact than all the other rules we tried to implement," said Lowe.

Earlier at the summit, David Stanley, head of platform delivery at the Trainline, said that the role of the development manager is changing, and is now accountable for costs