Building the software engineering function at a UK media broadcaster

The broadcaster had software engineers but no software engineering function. Different developers reported into different parts of the business, worked to different standards, used different tooling, shipped at different cadences. The release cadence reflected it: long, painful cycles with limited automated testing and inconsistent quality.

The brief was to bring the engineering function into existence as a coherent unit, lift its practice to industry standard, and do so without breaking the work in flight. Not a clean greenfield team build. A transformation from inside the existing team, while shipping.

"An exceptional professional I had the pleasure working with. He played a pivotal role implementing a new Software Engineering function and team within the business. His technical knowledge on coding best practice was excellent, and his capabilities implementing the right culture to enable a previously fragmented team with limited Agile exposure to trust and learn from each other, implementing many positive group initiatives to enable improved development cadence and code reliability, was truly exceptional."— Director of Systems, Software and Platform Engineering, UK media broadcaster

Culture transformations land when leadership is hands-on. An engineering lead who only manages cannot credibly raise the technical bar of a team. We default to embedded leadership that codes, not parachuted leadership that manages.

The function is the deliverable, not the process. Most Agile transformations end up being process compliance theatre. The actual deliverable is a team that ships with confidence and learns from each other.

CI/CD is not a tooling choice, it is a quality choice. Bringing CI/CD into a function is not "we set up Azure DevOps." It is "we agreed that broken builds get fixed before lunch, that flaky tests are bugs, that code reviews are mandatory, and that deployments are not events."