Key takeaways - Continuous “everything” is at the heart of agile and devops - Continuous activities result in faster delivery and higher quality - Rapid feedback and practice are essential for confidence in your delivery process View webinar recording - http://testhuddle.com/resource/continuous-everything/

1. Continuous Everything
How Agile is Changing the
World Forever
Jeffery Payne, Coveros
@jefferyepayne
Coveros improves the agility
and security of software
applications, teams, and
enterprises

2. Everything In Agile Is Continuous
Continuous
Planning
Design
Coding
Improvement
Learning
Testing
Integration
Delivery
Security
Deployment

3. Definition
con·tin·u·ous
/kənˈtinyo͞oəs/
adjective
1. Forming an unbroken whole;
without interruption.
2. Another term for progress.
Synonyms:
unceasing, uninterrupted, unbroken,
constant, ceaseless, incessant, steady,
sustained, solid, continuing, ongoing,
without a break, nonstop,
around/round-the-clock, persistent,
unremitting, relentless, unrelenting,
unabating, unrelieved, without respite,
endless, unending, never-ending,
perpetual, everlasting, eternal,
interminable;

4. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.
Welcome changing requirements, even
late in development. Agile processes
harness change for the customer's
competitive advantage.
Deliver working software frequently, from a
couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a
preference to the shorter timescale.
Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project
Working software is the primary
measure of progress
Agile processes promote sustainable development.
The sponsors, developers, and users should be able
to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
Continuous attention to technical excellence
and good design enhances agility.
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly.

5. Perpetual motion is motion that
continues indefinitely without
any external source of energy

6. What Continuous EVERYTHING Gives Us
• Rapid Feedback
• Ability to Embrace Change
• On-going Customer Value
• Practice
• Confidence for Delivery 1816 Water Screw

7. Rapid Feedback
• The Agile Mantra is ‘Fail Fast’
• You learn more from failure than
success … so rapid feedback means
fast learning!
• Push downstream activities as early
in the process as is possible to
reduce rework
Capillary Bowl

8. Ability to Embrace Change
The Agile Bet
If the cost of change can be kept low over time, the
cost savings that result from early feedback will far
outweigh the added costs of early change.

9. On-going Customer Value
• Customers don’t know what they want
until they SEE it!
• Releasing software becomes a business
decision, not a technical one
• Focus on Minimum Viable Product
(MVP) to delivery value faster
de Vinci Wheel

10. Practice
“Practice Makes Perfect”
-- Anonymous
“Practice Does Not Make Perfect. Perfect Practice Makes Perfect”
-- Vince Lombardi
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work”
-- Thomas Edison
Early, repeated activities greatly increase your confidence by release

11. Confidence for Delivery
• Gain confidence that a release is a viable
candidate for production
• How confident are you when:
• software is integrated at the end of lifecycle?
• test execution starts after a code freeze?
• software is built to requirements that were defined
9-12 months ago?
• software is deployed and tested on a production-like
environment for the first time right before product launch?
Archimedes Screw

12. Enablers for Continuous EVERYTHING
• Automation
• Virtualization
• Collaboration
• Being Agile

13. Automation
• Non-automated activities will only get
you so far on your agile journey
• Teams following agile often make good
initial progress only to bog down
• Agile is a Russian Doll
• At some point you must automate not
only to improve but even to stay afloat

14. Virtualization (and cloud)
• Virtualization is the creation of a virtual
version of something, such as an operating
system, a server, a storage device or network
resources.
• The benefits for virtualization are compelling:
• Significantly reduces setup/teardown times for
envs and testing
• Enables infrastructure as code
• Reduces and eventually eliminates human error
with environments
• Every environment can look like production

15. Collaboration
• Pairing
• Co-location
• Team-based activities
• Customer and stakeholder reviews

16. Being Agile

17. Instead of ‘Why’,
the new paradigm is ‘Why Not’
• Why not run all regression tests over night?
• Why not push prod like environments to all devs?
• Why not run things in parallel to speed up work?
• Why not check in code regularly?
• Why not push performance testing into Sprints?
• Why not regression test every hour?

18. How to Get Started
• Optimize your process
• Improve automation
• Improve environments
• Improve your team
• Find a champion

19. Optimize your process
• Understand your delivery process even if it’s manual
• Identify constraints that reduce
throughput
• Dealing with constraints
• Reduce work in progress
• Reduce wait times
• Reorganization process

20. Improving Automation
• Start by getting your continuous integration capabilities up and running
• Build AND Test
• Automate the setup
of a test environment
• Automate some testing below
the UI
• Cucumber and other BDD
tools ease this process

21. Improving Environments
• Make all environment as similar as possible (production-like)
• Push environments to teams
• Benefits
• Ability to move assurance
activities earlier in the process
• Fewer variations / variable to test
• Higher confidence in delivery

22. Improving Teams
• Concentrate on the Principles
of Agile instead of the process
• Frequent retrospectives
• Focus on controlling technical
debt
• Sustainable pace

23. Find a champion
• Identify a senior executive who
will evangelize Agile
• Provide air cover for change
• Remove impediments to your
progress

24. Thank You!