ThoughtWorks’s Vladimir Sneblic today held the excellent Continuous Delivery course at QCon 2013 together with his colleague. Expanding on the well-known must read from Jez Humble, the tutorial included anectodal stories, case examples and professional materials.
In a nutshell, Continuous Delivery proposes to improve the painful – at least in most larger companies I know of – process of software delivery from development to operations by increasing delivery / deployment frequency. There are multiple reasons to do this. Massively increasing delivery frequency:
- decreases the increment size, reducing the risk resulting from the scope of the change,
- forces to focus on the delivery process and drives automation efforts,
- uncovers the necessity to cooperate especially between Dev and Ops,
- shows the urgency to improve the structural deficiency in Ops,
- and ultimately reminds of the importance of Ops in the context of software development.
However, implementing Continuous Delivery is a major change effort. The following is a list of things to implement, supposing that an agile software development is already in place:
- Continuous integration
- Trunc is always production ready
- Automated testing
- DB migration tools
- Agile infrastructure
- Comprehensive confugration management (Everything is in version control)
- DevOps
In larger corporations this results in a major organizational transformation to be pitched at the level of the corporate CIO.
