Our First Company Hackathon

[sabell2012]

Our Hackathon

A couple of weeks ago our company, Santander Consumer USA, announced that it would be holding our first internal hackathon. Come-one, come-all! The day of the hackathon would be Friday, July 26th. Our team got the notice, and looked over the requirements, but we were just interested academically, and weren't really considering entering. After receiving encouragement from our director, James Webb, product owner Ed Gowens, and CTO, Glenn Harper, we had no option but to enter: I don't usually say "no" to the executive crowd. However, I wiggled quite a bit trying to get off the hook. Glenn seemed to have an answer to every excuse. Finally I acquiesced. James, Ed, and Glenn all felt, and I agreed, that it was an opportunity to give exposure of Service-Now's development capabilities to the company.


The majority of development work in our company is done with C# and .Net. The people running the hackathon declared it to be open platform (bruhaha, their mistake!). I partnered with Greg Tijerina who has done administration and development work on Service-Now since 2009, and works with me daily on the Service-Now team here at Santander Consumer. We were given a choice of choosing our own, or picking from a list of programming tasks. The task that we chose had to be accomplished between 2pm and 11pm on the same day. The awards would simply be token (plastic trophy cups), but the winners would have bragging rights in the company. Not a big dollar affair, but still pretty cool!

Here was the list we could choose from:

1. Develop a Referral Tracking Tool for resume referrals
2. Develop an Executive Dashboard web-site which pulls in data from different configurable data sources
3. Develop a Recognition tool for teams and team members to recognize performance and win points
4. Develop a web-site where users can create customizable forms for information gathering

My-oh-my! Our entire team was taken aback at the list! Why, all of these could be done via Service-Now! 1, 3, and 4 could be done in a VERY short amount of time, while number 2 would probably take a bit of work (sic. internal Web Service on the inside of our DMZ for transferring data requests). Greg immediately pounced on number 3, and in a frenzied fit literally created the whole thing from scratch via Application Builder in a matter of minutes! Well...the administration side anyway.

This simply was not going to be a fair. We would be bringing a gun to a knife-fight.

I called up the people running the hackathon and asked if it was all right to use Service-Now. I even went so far as to explain what the tool was capable of and how quickly we could develop a complete (and I MEANT complete) application. They said that would be okay. Wow! I got the impression they didn't believe me.

So, we went with number 3. Discussed some of the potential requirements (no they were not handed to us, we had to invent the lot). And then deleted the application that Greg had created (no cheating).

That was last Thursday.

Friday came. We had done very little prep-work, but were confident that we could accomplish the task in 2-3 hours with time for polishing.

At 2pm we were collected together in our Company's largest conference hall. There was a total of six teams present. All were .net with our team being the exception. The rules were explained, and each team was asked what task they had chosen. With the preliminaries complete we started at 2:15pm.

Greg and I immediately tore into writing down all the requirements. We created an analysis document and plowed through the things we thought the application should have, and what we thought the people (both administration and users) would want. It filled about a page-and-a-half! Next we created a preliminary design document starting with the table structure. It would require two tables. One to hold the praises/award recommendations, and one to hold a list of possible rewards. We determined that the submission side would be via Service Catalog; which would allow it to be available through Self-Service. Greg named our application the "Praise Application".

We created an update set to capture everything. Then Greg used Application Builder, a wicked cool feature of the new Calgary release, to create the application, both tables, and their base forms. As we proceeded we continued to add features.

Our high-level features list:

Highlights:

1. Followed SDLC and created an Analysis and Design document to verify requirements were met, and to show progress to completion.

2. Application features:
[list=a]
a. Included both Award recognition and Praise recognition in the application
b. Report and Gauge creation — can add the Gauge to the homepage — display of count (points) information with drill-down.
c. Email notification to submitter and person receiving recommendation
d. Administration of:
[list=i]
i. Praise tasks
ii. Awards — includes expiration date and inactive awards fields with tie-in to Service-Catalog to display only active and unexpired awards.

e. Service Catalog entries for both Awards and Praise submissions
f. Self-Service tie-in to all users via Service Catalog
g. Full security ACLs included: New group of Praise_Administrators, with Praise application and reporting roles.
h. Constraints:
[list=i]
i. Cannot submit self (does not display in Service Catalog form)
ii. Cannot submit an expired or inactive award (does not display in Service Catalog form)



3. Generated a full deployment package which is immediately ready to push through to QA for testing.

4. Benefits:
[list=a]
a. Ease of application administration
b. Ease of code maintenance — minimum coding was required, and tables and forms can be easily modified
c. Ease of report creation
d. Rapid application development. Three hours for the entire application including analysis and design (2:15pm to 5:15pm).


5. Completely unit tested and 100% defect free.

Additional features (I couldn't help listing these Service-Now built-in features as well):

[*]Available 24/7/365 anywhere in the world via web access. System outages/unavailability are extremely rare.
[*]Offsite backups of all data done nightly.
[*]Since the software is contained within a SaaS development environment then code maintenance and testing can be done wherever there is web access without having to have VPN connectivity

During the entire development time I kept updating the design document (and requirements) accordingly. I even went so far as to include screen-shots. Greg and I split the tasks and clobbered everything on the list. I ended up writing exactly two lines of code. Actually half-lines of Javascript for a couple of Service Catalog variable reference qualifiers! The rest was done entirely through mechanisms already existing in Service-Now (i.e. Record Producers). Literally no other code was needed!

We finished everything including Forms, Catalog entries, record producers, email notifications, reports, gauge, role, group, ACLs, update set, requirements and analysis document, and design document at 5:15pm, and presented to everyone at the Hackathon at 5:30pm! Woohoo! The other teams appeared to still be midway through their development.

After the presentation we were given an ovation, and there were a lot of questions about developing on Service-Now. Needless to say it appeared that we had made the impression that James Webb, Ed Gowens, and Glenn Harper had hoped for.

We won recognition for completing first, and received the award for fewest lines of code! W00T!

I sent an email to the organizers with a link to the application. I also included the analysis and design document, and the list of accomplishments and benefits that the application contained.

There were several extra features we thought about adding afterward, and should our company decide to we could actually push this out tomorrow with all of the added bells-and-whistles!

Oh, and did I mention that I am pretty confident there were zero defects in the final version we delivered. 🙂

Now that was a lot of fun! I'm glad we didn't back away from participating, and our team is definitely looking forward to the next one of these!

https://plus.google.com/photos/107045726620837745814/albums/5906395935326265473?authkey=CMj6pvmNltKtRA

Steven Bell
Santander Conusmer USA