Sam describes a ten-year transformation at Microsoft Developer Division from a box product delivery cycle of four years to a hybrid SaaS and on-prem business, with a single code base, triweekly delivery of new features in the service, and quarterly delivery for on-prem customers. He presents three waves of improvement and learning: first, the reduction of technical debt and other waste to gain trustworthy transparency, second, the increase in the flow of customer value, and third the shortening of cycle time to allow continuous feedback and continuous business improvement.

The current scale of the business is that there are millions of customer accounts each on–premise and in the cloud. This hybrid situation will exist for many years, and is a necessary part of the business.

Sam will give examples from monthly service reviews of key practices and metrics, such as hypothesis-driven development, funnel analysis, performance monitoring, MTTD and MTTR improvement, log analysis, root cause remediation, scale unit replication and canarying, common code base, testing cycles, georeplication, feature flags, compatibility and compliance testing.

The organizational issues of transforming from a traditional box software delivery team to a modern SaaS team will be addressed as well.