Things I (Don’t) Like About Continuous Delivery – LondonCD meetup June 2017

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This is part 4 of a 4-part series of articles based on discussions at the LondonCD meetup group on 12 June 2017. The other posts are linked at the end of this article.

Our 4th Open Space discussion challenged people to identify the things that they don’t like about the Continuous Delivery book: things that don’t work in practice, things that are plain wrong, etc. – a slightly cheeky session!

tl;dr: Jez Humble and Dave Farley – authors of Continuous Delivery – did not get anything wrong in their book but they “did not say enough” about the culture/people aspect of Continuous Delivery. People and culture are tricky – who knew?! 🙂

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Continuous Delivery for Legacy/Heritage Systems – LondonCD meetup June 2017

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This is part 3 of a 4-part series of articles based on discussions at the LondonCD meetup group on 12 June 2017. The other posts are linked at the end of this article.

Applying the principles and practices of Continuous Delivery for new software is fairly straightforward (at least, until you deal with data and databases). However, existing “legacy” systems that were built without many automated tests and without much concern for repeatable deployments of discrete functionality pose a challenge for moving to Continuous Delivery.

Office Lens 20170612-205923

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Difficulties and Solutions for Continuous Delivery with Databases – LondonCD meetup June 2017

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This is part 2 of a 4-part series of articles based on discussions at the LondonCD meetup group on 12 June 2017. The other posts are linked at the end of this article.

Continuous Delivery for web applications is (in 2017) largely a solved problem but where data and databases are concerned, Continuous Delivery becomes more difficult (I have written quite a bit about Continuous Delivery and Databases on the Redgate Simple Talk website – worth a read if you’re interested). In the meetup, we explored some of these challenges and some solutions to Continuous Delivery for databases. (Thanks to Alex Yates of DLM Consultants for his expertise in facilitating the discussion!)

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Continuous Security in Continuous Delivery – LondonCD meetup June 2017

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This is part 1 of a 4-part series of articles based on discussions at the LondonCD meetup group on 12 June 2017. The other posts are linked at the end of this article.

How do we continuously address security concerns with modern software development? That was one of the questions we discussed and tried to answer at LondonCD meetup group on 12 June 2017. “The yearly PEN test is dead!”, said one person, meaning that reliance on an infrequent, specialist test to address all security problems is simply not good enough any more.

Office Lens 20170612-201113

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July 2017 meetup report

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IoT Leeds

The IoT Leeds meetup returned to Futurelabs on Monday 24th of July for our second event. The end of July is a difficult time to convince people to come out to a tech meetup, the schools have broken up and most people are thinking about their holidays, but we had a really great turn out and it was great to see how engaged and interested everybody seemed to be.

I think the good turnout was down to the interesting speakers we had lined up. First up was Alan Pope of Canonical talking about Snapcraft. Canonical are the company behind Ubuntu Linux which is ubiquitous in the cloud and is beginning to make inroads in IoT devices too. Snapcraft allows app developers to produce “snaps” of their applications which allow those applications to run on a wide range of Linux platforms in a reliable and isolated manner, taking away the complexity…

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The transformational power of Continuous Delivery

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I was recently asked to answer some questions about Continuous Delivery for someone’s undergraduate university research. The questions were interesting, so here are my answers 🙂

  1. What do you feel are the benefits of adopting Continuous Delivery?
  2. How do you feel adopting Continuous Delivery has affected your development cycle?
  3. Do you think Continuous Delivery is an important approach for a company to pick up, If so Why?
  4. How do you think Agile compares to more traditional models like Waterfall?
  5. What is the biggest change you’ve noticed since adopting Agile?
  6. What do you foresee in the future for these models in the industry?

1. What do you feel are the benefits of adopting Continuous Delivery?

The benefits of Continuous Delivery are huge:

  • Greater focus on finishing and shipping.
  • Increased awareness of need for setting up the work to enable feedback and learning.
  • Sense of ‘flow’ within teams.
  • Decisions made using actual data rather than opinions alone.
  • Higher quality software.
  • More joy in work.

(Can I stop yet?)

2. How do you feel adopting Continuous Delivery has affected your development cycle?

(Answering on behalf of our clients) Continuous Delivery has helped us to increase the ownership over software and focus on the value-add things that our organisation produces, rather than ceremonies around testing and releasing.

3. Do you think Continuous Delivery is an important approach for a company to pick up, If so Why?

Yes: adopting CD properly can be truly transformative for the organisation as a whole. IT becomes a means to receive rapid feedback on product/marketing/service offerings, allowing the business to invest more wisely and do more with less risk and lower costs.

4. How do you think Agile compares to more traditional models like Waterfall?

Agile is woefully misunderstood (as was Waterfall) so in that regard, they are similar (!). Truly agile organisations are rare because agility challenges entrenched, comfortable positions within an organisation. Agile done well really makes the nature of an organisation transparent.

5. What is the biggest change you’ve noticed since adopting Agile?

(Answering for our clients) We’re able to improve the software delivery part of the process, but this has highlighted the lack of clarity and vision in the Business.

6. What do you foresee in the future for these models in the industry?

We’re starting to see a backlash against Agile and DevOps already, because people misunderstand or misrepresent what’s going on. Things like SAFe seem to be rebranded PRINCE2 which is a shame. Essentially, many organisations are going to fail because their management does not see the need to change.

At Skelton Thatcher Consulting we have put together a handy Continuous Delivery checklist template (on Trello) to help you assess the things you need to address within your organisation:

2017-03-20--cdchecklist.info

See cdchecklist.info 

 

Slides from talk on Rancher + GoCD at Amsterdam CD meetup

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I gave a talk at Continuous Delivery Amsterdam meetup group on 08 Feb 2017:

Using Rancher for highly available deployment services with GoCD and TeamCity

Tools like GoCD and TeamCity are excellent components of advanced Continuous Delivery deployment systems. They help us focus on deployment pipelines and the flow of changes, rather than “builds” or “environments”. We can further enhance these tools by using frameworks like Rancher to manage GoCD and TeamCity as highly available, always-on deployment services. In this talk, we’ll see how to use Rancher to run deployment pipeline tooling like GoCD and TeamCity, and how this lets us focus on the important parts of Continuous Delivery: getting changes to Production safely and rapidly.

The slides are here:

(Thanks to my colleague Rich B for his sterling work on Rancher+AWS)

The other talk (from Wouter Lagerweij) on testing in a CD world was really excellent – the slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/wouterla/testing-in-a-continuous-delivery-world-continuous-delivery-amsterdam-meetup