Craig is at YOW! West in Perth and sits down with Ian Randall, Engineering Lead at Pushpay and co-organiser of the Codemania conference in New Zealand and they chat about:
The size of the New Zealand banking system and small number of banks makes it very easy to innovate in the payments space
The more times you the do the things that are hard and hurt, opens up the opportunities for automation
Blameless Retrospective (John Allspaw, Etsy, 2012) – promise that there will be no retribution or consequence for decisions that anybody made during an incident, they made the best decisions that they knew at the time, they were operating in a system that allowed you to make that system in the moment – therefore means that people are not afraid to make decisions because they know they are not held to blame for making a mistake
5 Whys – don’t ask why until you reach the root cause analysis, because there are often moire contributing factors and also when you ask why you end up with who (which is blame)
WOMing – ensure it works on my machine before it leaves your laptop
There are anti-patterns with doing XP at scale, continuous delivery was born from the learnings from that
Continuous delivery is just extending continuous integration to more of the software development practice (and continuous integration requires test driven development)
Continuous delivery works because it is the application of the scientific method to software development
If you work in an iterative, imperative, experimental way and you take continuous learning seriously and take cycle time as a serious measurement you will naturally drive out agile, lean, systems theory and DevOps
Most common two ways to introduce continuous delivery to your organisation – need to get cover from senior management to make change or you do it secretly at the grass roots – the fast feedback cycle is important (build feedback in about 5 minutes and ready and deployable in about an hour)
DevOps is a terrible name – we are talking about collaborative cross functional teams and it is more than just developers and operations
Continuous delivery is focused on shortening the feedback cycle from having an idea to getting the idea into the hands of users and figuring out what our users make of the idea – that’s software development, to do whatever it takes
Continuous delivery is working in a way so that my software is always in a releasable state, continuous deployment is if all my automation says my software is in a working state I can just automatically push it to production
We have data to show that continuous delivery makes high quality software faster, creates more money for the organisations that use it, reduces defect rates significantly and makes people working in that environment happier
It changes the way you design, approach databases and the way you test
Continuous Delivery tools still aren’t mature enough
The deployment pipeline is a seriously strategic resource because it is your only route to Production – need to be able to version and test it like any other Production code
It’s as much about the culture of the team than it is about the technology, it frees teams up to do experimentation
Craig speaks to Anders Wallgren from Electric Cloud about Continuous Delivery and DevOps at the Agile 2016 conference in Atlanta. The topic of conversation included:
Critical to automate everything to eliminate manual process errors and loss of valuable data
DevOps is starting to push into complex and regulated environments like finance, health and aerospace with an emphasis on issues like performance and audibility
Automation is a great audit trail because it forces you to document what you do and it shows the process