Three Pillars of Continuous Delivery Culture, Processes and Tools

Andrew Phillips, VP Products | 19 Nov 2014

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About Me

▪ VP Products for XebiaLabs

▪ Lots of enterprise software development on high-performance

systems

▪ Been on both sides of the “Dev…Ops” fence

▪ Active open source contributor and committer:

jclouds, Akka, Gradle and others

▪ Cloud, PaaS & JVM language fan (mainly Scala, Clojure)

▪ Regular meetup, conference etc. presenter

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About XebiaLabs

▪ Leading provider of delivery automation software focused

on helping companies deliver higher quality software

faster.

▪ Reduce development applications costs

▪ Accelerate application time to market

▪ Bridge the gap between Development and Operations

Global Customers, Global Success

and more…

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Agenda

▪ Lightning Continuous Delivery Recap

▪ Tooling, Practices, Culture…how do they relate?

▪ Bootstrapping a CD Culture

▪ Crossing “Quick Win Chasm”

▪ Practical Examples

▪ Getting Started

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What Is Continuous Delivery?

“Continuous delivery is a set of patterns and best practices that can

help software teams dramatically improve the pace and quality of

their software delivery.”

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What Is Continuous Delivery?

▪ A delivery pipeline?

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What Is Continuous Delivery?

▪ A delivery pipeline?

▪ A type of release process?

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What Is Continuous Delivery?

▪ A delivery pipeline?

▪ A type of release process?

▪ An IT methodology?

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What Is Continuous Delivery?

▪ A delivery pipeline?

▪ A type of release process?

▪ An IT methodology?

▪ A different way of doing business?

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Why Continuous Delivery?

▪ Competitive pressure

▪ Hot trend

▪ Clear business values

− Accelerate time to market

− Increase application quality

− Increase customer responsiveness

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Why Continuous Delivery?

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Aside 1: Continuous Delivery & Agile

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early

and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

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Aside 1: Continuous Delivery & Agile

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Aside 1: Continuous Delivery & Agile

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early

and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

Principle #1 from the Agile Manifesto

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Aside 2: Continuous Delivery & Devops

▪ Flood of overlapping messaging in this space right now

▪ Analysts and new vendors piling on to the bandwagon

▪ Rather difficult to parse it all at present, especially if you’re coming at this now

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Aside 2: Continuous Delivery & Devops

▪ Flood of overlapping messaging in this space right now

▪ Analysts and new vendors piling on to the bandwagon

▪ Rather difficult to parse it all at present, especially if you’re coming at this now

▪ Key point: Whatever you call it, make sure you have some defined goals that

are intended to provide some measurable business value

▪ Happy to debate and discuss definitions over lunch!

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Culture: set of values, beliefs and

traditions

Practices: behaviours and actions that

derive from these values and beliefs

Tooling: instruments used to carry out

the behaviours and actions

Three Pillars

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Three Pillars

Culture

Practices

Tooling

is expressed through

carried out using

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Three Pillars

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A Bit About Culture

▪ Once it’s reached a cultural level: extremely resilient to problems

− If the tooling breaks, people will fix it

▪ Internal motivation to carry out the practices and make them work

▪ (Risk of groupthink, so tolerance of open minds is important

− Something for a lunchtime discussion)

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A Bit About Culture

▪ Problem: culture is hard to impose from the top down

− Look at history!

▪ And most organizations are not at the point where a culture is in place

− They’re just starting out on their CD journey!

▪ So...what can we do about this?

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Bootstrapping a CD Culture

▪ Let’s look at those three pillars a different way

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Bootstrapping a CD Culture

Culture

Practices

Tooling

is expressed through

carried out using

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Bootstrapping a CD Culture

Culture

Practices

Tooling

is expressed through

carried out using

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Bootstrapping a CD Culture

Culture

Practices

Tooling

whose effects give rise to

enables

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Bootstrapping a CD Culture

▪ Key point here: inverting the causal relationships!

▪ Why start with tooling & practices?

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Bootstrapping a CD Culture

▪ Easy to get up and running

− Certainly compared to culture!

▪ Low risk

− Largely free or low-cost tools

− “Skunkworks-able”

▪ Quick, demonstrable effects

− Go after the low hanging fruit!

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“Quick Win Chasm”

▪ A story…

− ACME Inc. has heard of this amazing tooling that can help automate their software delivery process

− Consultants come in a build a delivery pipeline

− Runs fine for a while

− Not easy to adapt to new projects, as the consultants have moved on

− Then some parts of the pipeline start to fail, and are switched off or bypassed

− …

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“Quick Win Chasm”

▪ Lesson: Tooling by itself only goes so far

− Even if it’s very reliable!

▪ Resilience comes from making this part of your DNA

▪ This Is Not Easy!

− Especially since the temptation is to see the initial improvements and stop there

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Crossing Quick Win Chasm

▪ Five key points

− Get management buy in

− Find someone who’s “been there”

− Create champions

− Make things visible

− Communicate, communicate, communicate

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Tooling

− Code review

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Tooling

− Code review

− Continuous Integration

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Tooling

− Code review

− Continuous Integration

− Deployment

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Tooling

− Code review

− Continuous Integration

− Deployment

− Testing & quality

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Tooling

− Code review

− Continuous Integration

− Deployment

− Testing & quality

− Provisioning

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Tooling

− Code review

− Continuous Integration

− Deployment

− Testing & quality

− Provisioning

− Orchestration

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Tooling

− Code review

− Continuous Integration

− Deployment

− Testing & quality

− Provisioning

− Orchestration

− Monitoring

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Practices

− Keep changes small

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Practices

− Keep changes small

− Quality before functionality

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Practices

− Keep changes small

− Quality before functionality

− Put the test up front

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Practices

− Keep changes small

− Quality before functionality

− Put the test up front

− Everyone involved early

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Practices

− Keep changes small

− Quality before functionality

− Put the test up front

− Everyone involved early

− No more (code) than necessary

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Practices

− Keep changes small

− Quality before functionality

− Put the test up front

− Everyone involved early

− No more (code) than necessary

− Ongoing user dialog

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Practices

− Keep changes small

− Quality before functionality

− Put the test up front

− Everyone involved early

− No more (code) than necessary

− Ongoing user dialog

− Delivery tooling = serious tooling

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Culture

− We can always do better

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Culture

− We can always do better

− Our service, our features, our users

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Culture

− We can always do better

− Our service, our features, our users

− ‘Us’ includes the business

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Culture

− We can always do better

− Our service, our features, our users

− ‘Us’ includes the business

− Tools work for the team

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Let’s Get Practical

▪ Culture

− We can always do better

− Our service, our features, our users

− ‘Us’ includes the business

− Tools work for the team

− Nobody goes home if the build delivery system is broken

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Getting Started

▪ Get a baseline: Value Stream Analysis

− Open mind: We Can Do Things Differently

▪ Define incremental goals

− No Ocean Boiling!

▪ Start with tooling

− Go after low-hanging fruit

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Getting Started

▪ Testing and quality

− More investment and backfilling required

− Requires buy-in

▪ Adapt your architecture to allow for smaller changes

− Greenfield? Lucky you!

− Otherwise, will need to tackle this eventually

▪ Full-time business focus

− It’s about putting the business at the wheel!

− Often need some persuasion to actually drive…

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More Info

▪ Get started today!

www.xebialabs.com

www.xebialabs.com/trial

▪ Stay informed:

blog.xebialabs.com

@XebiaLabs

youtube.com/xebialabs

53 Copyright 2014.

Get In Touch!

▪ Andrew Phillips

aphillips at xebialabs dot com

▪ Talk over lunch or at the XebiaLabs table

▪ Don’t forget to stop by the table for more information (& swag)

54 Copyright 2014.

Get In Touch!

▪ Andrew Phillips

aphillips at xebialabs dot com

▪ Talk over lunch or at the XebiaLabs table

▪ Don’t forget to stop by the table for more information (& swag)

Thank You!