Slides from a July 22nd, 2014 webinar by XebiaLabs

1. Continuous Delivery Guide
for Managers
Andrew Phillips, VP Products | 22 July 2014

2. 2 Copyright 2014.
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 & Scala fan
▪ Regular meetup, conference etc. presenter

3. 3 Copyright 2014.
Housekeeping
▪ This webinar is being recorded
▪ Links to the slides and the recording will be made
available after the presentation
▪ You can post questions via the GoToWebinar Control
Panel

4. 4 Copyright 2014.
Agenda
▪ What is Continuous Delivery?
▪ Why Continuous Delivery?
▪ Case Studies
▪ Key Technical Elements of CD
▪ Continuous Delivery Across the Org
▪ How Do I Get 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
In a nutshell…
1. Define and implement a delivery pipeline that validates
a new candidate release
2. Make small changes to your existing system based on
customer behavior
3. Push the change through the pipeline and, if it meets
all the quality requirements, to production
4. Repeat

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What is Continuous Delivery
▪ A different way of thinking about delivering software
▪ Mindset: away from Big Chunks towards incremental
improvements
▪ Reactive customer dialogue

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Why Continuous Delivery
▪ Competitive pressure
▪ Faster time-to-market
▪ Increased application quality
▪ Greater customer responsiveness

9. 9 Copyright 2014.
Why Continuous Delivery
▪ Important to remember: CD is a means, not a goal
▪ Need to determine first to what extent this makes sense
for your organization!

10. 10 Copyright 2014.
Why Continuous Delivery
▪ Important to remember: CD is a means, not a goal
▪ Need to determine first to what extent this makes sense
for your organization!
▪ Example: “We want every change to go live within 30min”
▪ Example: “We want every change to be revertable within
10min”
▪ …

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Case Study #1
▪ Vertical: Retail
▪ Previous situation: 2 yearly releases (spring and autumn),
“Thanksgiving change freeze”
▪ $50k investment in testing to verify stability of new
promotions
▪ Also invested in easier rollback
▪ Can now roll out promotions at short notice with high
confidence to take advantage of e.g. pre-Christmas events

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Case Study #2
▪ Vertical: Insurance
▪ Previous situation: Quarterly releases, high error rate and
post-release effort
▪ Losing customers to competitors with better online and
mobile offerings
▪ Invested in architecture changes to allow individual
services to be updated independently
▪ Now release once a sprint to QA, once a month to prod

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KeyTechnical Elements
▪ The Delivery Pipeline
▪ Pipeline Orchestration
▪ Build Automation & Continuous Integration
▪ Automated Testing
▪ Deployment Automation
▪ Environment Provisioning

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KeyTechnical Elements
The Delivery Pipeline
▪ Concept that defines the sequence of tasks that need to
be carried out to take a new candidate release (per
commit, per sprint, monthly…) from source code to
production
▪ Defines the steps, conditions, required quality levels to
pass from one step to the next, as well as the responsible
team(s)

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KeyTechnical Elements
Pipeline Orchestration
▪ The concept of the Delivery Pipeline needs to be
represented and controlled in some way
▪ Tooling to do this needs to provide, flexible orchestration,
comprehensible insight as well as, ideally, analysis and
improvement guidance

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KeyTechnical Elements
Automated Testing
▪ One of the more challenging aspects to retrofit onto an
existing application
▪ Testing is critical to ensuring your systems stay up and
running, especially with frequent changes!
▪ Downstream challenge: how to make sense of the data
produced by all the tests and test tools?

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KeyTechnical Elements
Environment Provisioning
▪ “No test environment available” is an immediate
bottleneck to ramping up the frequency of your pipeline
runs
▪ Shared environments #1 cause of deployment failures
▪ Spinning up new environments much easier with
virtualization, but is becoming more challenging with
microservices/SOA and IoT

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Continuous Delivery Across the Organization
▪ CD is not just a technical initiative!
▪ Will impact multiple groups across the organization if done
successfully
− Development
− Testing/QA
− Operations
− Release Management
− Service Management
− Business

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Continuous Delivery Across the Organization
Development:
▪ Iterative approach towards developing smaller features
and making them available earlier
▪ Focus on making the desired change automatically
verifiable and its impact measurable
▪ Architecting applications to allow for small changes

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Continuous Delivery Across the Organization
Testing:
▪ Early involvement in the development lifecycle
▪ Focus on measuring all relevant aspects of application
quality
▪ Challenge: effectively manage growing test sets and
combinations of test tools
▪ Need to maintain the trade-off between
time/cost/overhead of tests and information gained

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Continuous Delivery Across the Organization
Release Management:
▪ What is the role of RM in a Continuous Delivery
organization?
▪ Many “classical” release activities are covered by the
pipeline
▪ Can become the “business interface” to the delivery
pipeline and coordinator of all the related pipeline streams
▪ Ongoing activity!

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Continuous Delivery Across the Organization
Business:
▪ “Continuous Delivery puts the business behind the wheel”
▪ The “customer behavior – improvement idea – delivery”
cycle is ongoing…no longer once or twice a year
▪ Requires ongoing participation from the business (Product
Owner etc.) to be effective
▪ Business buy in is key to a successful CD environment!

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How Do I Get Started?
1. Determine goals for your CD initiative
2. Get business buy-in and executive support
3. Identify a candidate team/project
4. Make a baseline
5. Determine phases/milestones for the initiative
6. Value Stream Analysis

24. 24 Copyright 2014.
Resources
▪ Learn More About CD:
− Get the eBook for Managers: go.xebialabs.com/IT-Managers-Guide-to-CD.html
− Visit XebiaLabs Resource Section: xebialabs.com/xl-resources/
▪ Get started today!
go.xebialabs.com/XL-Platform-Trial.html
▪ Stay informed:
blog.xebialabs.com
@XebiaLabs
vimeo.com/xebialabs

25. Thank You!