Zalando Quality Engineering Journey-From Monolith To Microservices
Zalando Quality Engineering Journey-From Monolith To Microservices
Zalando Quality Engineering Journey-From Monolith To Microservices
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1 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25
Zalando Quality Engineering Journey—From Monolith... https://qeunit.com/blog/zalando-quality-engineering-j...
Retail being one of the sectors with the highest competition, players acting in that
space have no choice but to reinvent themselves on a continuous basis.
Zalando started in 2008 just a couple of days before the financial crisis, rapidly
expanding in countries the following years with its free shipping and 100 days
return policy.
Its technology landscape started like many companies with a monolith architecture,
but faced limitations from 2013 requiring them to change their software paradigm.
This article shares Zalando’s Quality Engineering transformation journey and the
business and technology outcomes part of their today’s competitive advantage.
2 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25
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The company opened many countries with a constant rhythm, Austria in 2009,
Netherlands and France in 2010, to multiple ones afterward.
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3 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25
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The scale represented more than 2 million orders, or 4200 orders per minute
during the Black Friday back in 2018.
The initial architecture was supporting the business with teams that, in their own
words “built their own system and added features for 5 years” without the need to
evolve.
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These core and underlying issues directly impacted the business in the 3 areas of
Productivity, Innovation and Growth.
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That vision aims to unlock the flow of innovation Zalando needs to continuously
improve its value proposition and meet the growth target.
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A strong emphasis is set to “building the right thing” before “building the things
right” with Shift-left methods supporting faster experimentation cycles.
7 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25
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User Experience
Zalando leverages specific methodologies and counter-forces to ensure a
consistent user experience especially with distributed teams and architecture.
Each software change is first assessed for its contribution to customer journeys, to
then retain the most valuable scenario that is tested through rapid user interface
testing.
Non-functional requirements
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The second challenge is to accelerate while ensuring non-functional
communication andrequirements
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and contain the technology complexity to deliver not only Speed, but Quality
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at any
Speed.
8 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25
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Aligned with the focus on the user experience, Zalando implements High-
Perceived Performance measuring performance and rendering from the customer
view.
One example is in Compliance & Security where the 4-eyes principle, audit trails,
enforced identity and access management, and data protection are defined.
Lastly, as teams must be “autonomous and deliver with efficiency”, the Tech Radar
is set to let teams guide their choice through Adopt, Trial, Assess and Hold states.
And the cost of rework exponentially increases with time, requiring them to detect
issues earlier to fix them at quicker and a lower cost.
Continuous testing techniques are also adopted to inject minimal testing for fast
feedback loops, namely with unit test and functional test, aligned with Agile Testing.
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well.
Urbanization
Technology urbanization is the city planning of the information system functions,
applications, services and flows to meet business objectives maintaining a global
consistency.
Each domain supports a clear team ownership of services and data for that specific
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perimeter, and also makes them responsible to expose their data assets through
federated data layers.
Teams also adopt the “Shared concept of core business entities” to improve the
integrations and composability of services built by multiple teams.
This top-level organization is the basis for building the so-called “microservices”.
Modular services
Each application part of the global application landscape is then built following the
MACH principles of Microservices, APIs, Cloud-native & SaaS & Headless.
One key precondition is to build the services in an event-driven way with hooks
and event connectors to maximize the technical, temporal decoupling, and
scalability.
11 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25
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Development platform
Autonomous development teams delivering microservices need a good degree of
automation from the building, deployment and operational stages.
Zalando’s teams can provide standard Code Bootstraps that include deployment
and monitoring capabilities for approved technologies leveraging its Tech Radar.
12 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25
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The first product is named Stups.io, a secure framework for Docker based
Application on top of Amazon Web Services for the provisioning, deployment and
monitoring of microservices.
The key challenge is to keep the performance while having a high degree of
change, ambiguity and business growth happening at the same time.
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• Radical Agility
13 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25
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• Quality Culture
• Performance Management.
Radical Agility
The Agile movement has spread in a variety of organizations, alongside many
methodologies such as the Scale Agile Framework, Sociocracy, or Scrum.
Zalando needed something with more impact than a methodology to power its
autonomous teams to iterate within a defined frame across the organization.
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Figure 9: The Radical Agility model building upon the Agile principles, Team Mood.
The system is based on the three pillars of Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose to
guide the team in their decisions and rapid adaptation required, from the user
experience to their skills.
One example is the checkout vision cascading from the company vision as “Allow
customers to buy seamlessly and conveniently”.
Quality Culture
Delivering software aligned with the Quality Engineering paradigm requires building
better in the first place to continuously accelerate for sustainable growth.
Autonomous teams that must iterate fast with an end-to-end responsibility cannot
have the quality responsibility delegated—it must equally be their own.
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This quality definition clearly makes teams responsible to build quality software in
the first place using manual and automated techniques depending on the maturity
and radar.
That moment marks the change where “QA team is a thing of the past.” and “You
and your team are responsible for your code’s behavior: There’s no other safety
net.”
Performance Management
The level of autonomy and empowerment given to enable them to iterate with much
more velocity and make decisions for ensuring the quality at speed of their
products.
The role of managers is therefore far from micromanagement that must focus on
the big picture and global consistency with the time now available.
The Quality Engineering mantra of “linking the outputs to the outcomes” is one
of the main responsibilities of managers, accountable for generating valuable
outcomes.
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Responsibility model
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The radical agility model needs a clear responsibility model for efficient and rapid
decision-making across the organization.
Each autonomous team has a defined set of decisions they can take themselves,
usually with guides and recommandations like with the tech radar.
That model of decisions limits the number of decisions raised to governance and
other board instances that are slower, and may not have enough local information.
One good example is for architecture decisions that are usually taken centrally in
many organizations, resulting in a limiting factor and frustration for the all teams.
The responsibility of “delivering amazing products” is also not only the one of
technology or engineering—it becomes the responsibility of the team including the
business.
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Team topologies
The Radical Agility model is about being able to move in parallel while minimizing
the number of alignment points to keep iterating with speed.
Firstly, cross-functional teams become the norm for creating autonomous teams
with an end-to-end responsibility, sometimes in the form of Feature-teams.
Lastly, interactions between the teams are designed to limit the number of
interactions following the possible models of team topologies.
Figure 13: Zalando Engineering organization with main team topologies and interactions.
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Quality Engineering roles
19 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25
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The last piece of organization are the evolving roles that will materialize the
concept of autonomous teams, empowerment, and mastery.
That first role bridges the gap between business and technology teams that else
have the tendency to work on different priorities and rituals.
But the company was also a pioneer with the implementation of two practices that
do improve the talent attraction and retention.
20 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25
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Cutting-Edge Technologies
Riding a classic car is enjoyable on week-ends but it can be a nightmare in case of
mechanical issues on the road, or for everyday driving.
The same analogy can be done with software where in addition, everything that is
recent and trendy attracts more engineers to work in that context.
It was not easy to grasp the complexity and delivery processes at Zalando and
things changed with the microservices architecture allowing for more independent
deployments.
The decentralization of components with the radical agility and techniques such as
the Tech Radar enabled teams to deploy modern technologies at scale.
compared to the commercial one, also helping the tech stack modernization and
21 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25
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attraction.
But Zalando went further by making it part of its technology and skills strategy.
The company grew a series of internal products through its radical agility and
platform team to solve concrete engineering problems, usually not available in the
market.
Figure 15: Zalando’s open source dynamic, organization, and projects, Zalando.
The model was even set as “open-source first” for sharing services between
teams, increasing the modularity and interoperability of products internally and
externally.
The last significant advantage of open-source was to scale the development and
maintenance of their open-source products through the community with less
internal hires.
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22 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25
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Figure 16: Zalando has now equal or more external than internal contributions, 2018.
Remote-friendly organization
Zalando grew its engineering teams through its main “Tech Hub” located in
Germany from its roots in the country, opening smaller ones later.
Opening in other countries such as Helsinki, Zurich and Lisbon even if this last one
closed, followed to support the growth of the teams.
In 2020, the company set clear remote guidelines mainly about common sense and
rituals to implement as an organization like daily standups via chat and video, 1:1.
The goal was not to build microservices, grow the teams, and evolve the
technological stack—these were only means enabling the company to thrive.
The Black Friday in 2019 let them acquire 840,000 new customers while the
accelerated cycles of software powered the NPS from -2.90 to 10.81 between Q4
2017 and Q4 2018. By subscribing you agree to receive
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23 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25
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Figure 17: Zalando business performance in 2018 and 2019 during the transformation.
Figure 18: Zalando was able to continuously reinvent its business through you
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Zalando was fighting for survival with a canned architecture constrained by external
24 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25
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That investment allowed them to grow their own business capabilities, which later
on evolved to a platform ecosystem of business services.
The initial limitations on productivity, innovation, and growth are long gone.
The transformation on the five domains of MAMOS made the difference to achieve
sustainable growth, avoiding getting back to old habits or just creating more
problems.
Quality at Speed software is the competitive advantage letting them adapt faster
than competitors, testing and scaling the most valuable ideas and opportunities.
The speed at which they can adapt is like a compounding investment, and they are
continuously increasing their Quality Engineering maturity.
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New roles like Principal Engineer also came up, as well as an experimentation
platform, personal development budget, mentoring, or micro frontends.
References
Adrian Bridgwater (2016), Radical Agility As A Business-Technology Principle.
Forbes.
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Dan Woods (2017), How Platforms Are Neutralizing Conway’s Law. Forbes.
Eric Bowman (2016), Radical Agility 101: Study Notes. Zalando Engineering Blog.
Jan Brockmeyer (2021), Micro Frontends: from Fragments to Renderers (Part 1).
Zalando Engineering Blog.
Jan Brockmeyer, Maxim Shirshin (2021), Micro Frontends: Deep Dive into
Rendering Engine (Part 2). Zalando Engineering Blog.
27 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25
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Stephanie Cadieux and Miriam Lobis (2018), The journey to an agile organization
at Zalando. McKinsey.
Tim Kröger, Henning Jacobs (2020), How to work remotely at Zalando. Zalando
Engineering Blog.
Licence
The Quality Engineering Framework, Manifesto & MAMOS are licensed under a
Creative Common Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-
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28 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25
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“We need microservices.” That’s one sentence heard many times wondering if they are
worth it, if we really need them,…
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MACH is about Quality Engineering. Endless debates about Microservices have gone in
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30 of 30 02/09/2022 10:25