To ship or not to ship

speaker: Kevin Ng, Expedia Asia event: Hackers and Painters ** Expedia is an online travel agent margins is in hotels ** release process used to be in C++, release once in two months moved to Java, release once a week able to make template changes in an hour ** test and learn statistically test changes to the site that increase sales/margin urgency messaging every month more than a hundred tests globally to build a business case to grow the team, about 10x ROI ** bottom up adoption except for central points of coordination, each team has the freedom to choose their own tools/practices