test automation tools

Continuous Delivery eBook from Zend – views from 29 authors

Posted on August 29, 2014August 28, 2014 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I was recently asked to contribute to an eBook from Zend about moving to Continuous Delivery (CD). The 29 authors in the book share a wide range of experience with CD, and there is plenty of useful advice; the contributions from Mathias Meyer (@roidrage), Kate Matsudaira (@katemats), and Jamie Ingilby (@jamiei) are particularly worth reading, I think.

In my section of the book I explain how using ThoughtWorks GO to model the testing and release steps (effectively part of the value stream) we won trust from several different people and teams during a move to CD. Using a prototype also helped us to validate the activities undertaken:

We tried to empathize with their situation and, using role-based security in the deployment pipeline, uncovered enough information to give them a sense of visibility and control.

Without being able to visualise and communicate easily the activities we were automating, progress would have been slow or even blocked.

Get a free copy of the eBook here: http://bit.ly/ZendCDbook

Operability: a DevOps cornerstone – new eBook from HighOps

Posted on June 2, 2014 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

One of the driving forces behind DevOps is the increasing prevalence of complex, distributed software systems which calls for a substantially different approach to building ‘business’ software systems: an approach that anticipates and expects failures, transient behaviour, emergent states, and unpredictability; and ensures that failure responses are gradual, graceful, and graphable.

‘Making software work well’ in this dynamic, interconnected world is the focus of Software Operability, a subject I have been writing and speaking about for some time.

I recently began working with IT operations experts HighOps (@gotHighOps) and we have published a free eBook Operability: a DevOps Cornerstone. The book covers the fundamentals of operability, why it’s relevant, how to build and sustain a focus on operability,and how operability relates to both DevOps and IT service management approaches such as ITIL.

If you lead the Technology division, head up a software development department or IT operations department, or lead a development or operations team, and want to understand why and how to make your software systems work better, then this book is for you. If you are involved in Service Transition or Service Operation, this eBook will help you to make the case for a strong focus on the operational aspects of the software being delivered. Similarly, if your role is a Software Architect, you will find here sound practical guidance for improving how your software works
in Production.

Download the HighOps eBook ‘Operability: a DevOps Cornerstone’ here.

Comic Relief, @garethr, @LordCope, and CloudFoundry at QConLondon 2013

Posted on March 14, 2013March 14, 2013 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I attended QConLondon 2013 last week; what I took from the first four sessions in the Building for Clouds track was: cloud API and infrastructure automation tools have now solved most of the ‘easy’ cloud problems, but harder challenges (such as automating clusters) remain. The sessions were from Tim Savage (@timjsavage) and Zenon Hannick (@zenonhannick) on Comic Relief’s unique challenges with performance testing, Gareth Rushgrove (@garethr) on how to avoid PaaS lock-in, Stephen Nelson-Smith (@LordCope) on how to use Chef to give you ‘optionality’ with different cloud vendors, and Andrew Crump (@acrmp) and Chris Hedley (@ChristHedley) on the CloudFoundry cloud platform.

Continue reading Comic Relief, @garethr, @LordCope, and CloudFoundry at QConLondon 2013

Avoiding Legacy with Deployment Automation and Infrastructure-as-Code

Posted on June 19, 2012September 28, 2020 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Learning from ‘Working Effectively with Legacy Code’ by Michael C. Feathers

Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael C. Feathers is a classic software development text. Not only is it still completely relevant when working with code, seven years after it was published, but also the approaches it advocates at the source code level are becoming essential to apply at the component and system integration levels too as our software systems become more complicated and polyglot, and we learn to fully automate our deployments and treat our infrastructure as code.

Book cover: Working Effectively with Legacy Code

For an overview of the book itself, read my review of ‘Legacy Code’ on Amazon.co.uk. I describe the different sections and how each is useful in a particular context. The rest of this article will focus on other aspects of Legacy Code, particularly the ‘why’ of changing code, and the implications for Continuous Delivery, infrastructure-as-code, and deployment automation.

Continue reading Avoiding Legacy with Deployment Automation and Infrastructure-as-Code