Tag Archives: continuous integration

Episode 171 – Beyond Legacy Code with David Bernstein

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Craig is at Agile 2017 in Orlando, Florida and speaks with David Bernstein, author of “Beyond Legacy Code“, and they chat about agile technical practices:

  • Agile does have something to with software development
  • Agile 2017 talk “Create Software Quality
  • The real value of Agile is in the technical practices so we can build iteratively, but still very few people practice them
  • The future is already here, but it is not very well evenly distributed – the same applies to Agile
  • Companies are being consumed by their technical debt and they don’t even recognise it
  • What is always cheaper in the virtual domain is building quality
  • Continuous Integration makes the most painful thing in software development (integration) our greatest asset – this in turn gives us feedback
  • We don’t necessarily know there is a better way to do things – but there is a better way to do things
  • We traditionally think of software as a write once event, but it is write many – users want it changed
  • We think procedurally so object oriented code often ends up being procedural with a class statement wrapped around it
  • Test First Development – very few developers know how to write a good test because they haven’t been taught, it was intended to assist with refactoring
  • Studies show about 10% of people follow the Agile technical practices like XP, and only 10% of those are doing it correctly
  • The mindset of testing is different to the mindset of coding and they are mutually exclusive (in the same way we need editors when writing a book)
  • Refactoring is at two levels because we learn in chunks – we need to do while doing test first as well as in the large
  • “The Art of Agile Development” – spend 10% of your time refactoring
  • Communication – say what, why and for whom before how – we think in implementation
  • CLEAN code – cohesive, loosely coupled, encapsulated, assertiveness and non-redundant
  • Need to understand what quality means in software
  • Troy Magennis talk “I love the smell of DATA in the morning (Getting started with Agile Data Science)“

TheAgileRevolution-171 (34 minutes)

Episode 149: Continuous Delivery with Dave Farley

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Craig, Tony and honorary Revolutionist Pete Sellars are at YOW! Conference and sit down with Dave Farley, co-author of “Continuous Delivery” and they chat about the following

  • 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
  • YOW! 2016 presentation “The Rationale for Continuous Delivery“
  • 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
  • Scott Ambler’s “Refactoring Databases” book
  • 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

TheAgileRevolution-149 (40 minutes)

Episode 120: Microservices & The Lean Enterprise with James Lewis

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jlewisCraig is at YOW! Conference and has a conversation with James Lewis, best known for his work around microservices at ThoughtWorks. They discuss:

  • “Microservices: a definition of this new architectural term” article with Martin Fowler
  • Huge cycle of hype around the term “microservices”
  • You have to run so fast to keep up with the great people at ThoughtWorks you end up accidentally doing interesting things
  • Cruise Control became Cruise that became GoCD which was open source then went commercial and then went back open source
  • Extreme Programming (XP) is complementarianism – the sum is greater than the parts
  • YOW! 2015 talk “Microservices – Building Software that is #neverdone“
  • Microservices – systems that are composed of parts that you can independently throw away – the analogy of “My Family’s Axe” (Terry Pratchett)
  • Business and architecture isomorphism – if you look at your architecture you should be able to see your business represented in it and vice-versa
  • Disruption is causing organisations to think about organisational design as well as architectural design
  • Microservices is a style that is applicable for certain circumstances, it is not one size fits all – follow the 16th rule of Unix programming “distrust all claims for one true way”
  • For microservices, Amazon and AWS was the game-changer
  • If you are not building software using the Agile practices these days, you have probably gone down “the wrong trouser leg of history”
  • Lean Enterprise is an evolution and description of current thinking
  • Geek crushes on Don Reinertsen and Dan North
  • Agile methods need to focus on flow rather than scaling and structure
  • ThoughtWorks Technology Radar – point in time snapshot on what is going on in current projects, throw systematic darts at the wall, vote on over 300 items to whittle down to 100 items,
  • Stationery driven decision making – sticky notes!
  • Sam Newman book “Building Microservices”

TheAgileRevolution-120 (31 minutes)