Turning Uncertainty into Success: How a Modern Approach can Thrive in a Conservative Environment

Successfully implemented agile practices in a conservative waterfall environment by taking an incremental, coaching-focused approach rather than forcing radical change

Employed evolutionary architecture principles to handle uncertainty, using fitness functions to guide architectural decisions around performance, scalability, and cost

Leveraged cloud-native Azure components and serverless computing to create a flexible, scalable system that could handle growing volumes of data from digital meters

Implemented comprehensive automated testing strategy including unit tests, integration tests with containers, and snapshot testing to enable rapid feedback and validation

Moved from monolithic batch processing to event-driven architecture using Azure Functions and event queues while maintaining compatibility with legacy XML/SOAP interfaces

Established CI/CD pipelines with automated checks for code quality, security and performance across multiple environments

Engaged stakeholders early and often through dedicated product owner involvement and regular refinement sessions to gather feedback

Created loosely coupled components that could be independently scaled and modified as requirements evolved

Used infrastructure as code (Terraform) and configuration files to manage multiple environments consistently

Achieved performance improvements by continuously monitoring metrics and making targeted optimizations based on actual bottlenecks