BONUS: Dave Farley interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 1

We talk about testing strategy; business benefits of Continuous Delivery; main challenges when adopting Continuous Delivery and resources to help you and your team get started.

Dave got started with Continuous Delivery in a project that sounds pretty much like any large project that is struggling. There were 200 people working on the project, the tests were written after the code, which inevitably led to a nightmare of brittle tests, high coupling between test code and implementation code.

Dave got interested in Extreme Programming and things started changing.

Read on to get access to all the resources Dave lists in the podcast.’

Untangling the brittle tests

The team assessed their situation and found that there were some tests missing, and a lot of work was needed to keep the automated tests running.

This led the team to discover BDD or Behavior-Driven-Development, an approach to higher level tests that would help them untangle their code from their tests.

We refer to the work of Chris Matts and Dan North and how that helped the team that Dave was a part of.

The main challenges teams face when adopting Continuous Delivery

As a technique, Continuous Delivery (CD) pushes the agile principles to the maximum. It helps teams to work with much smaller batches, which leads to smaller increments. We discuss the paradigm shift that this focus on smaller batches enables.

Another critical aspect of CD, is the speed at which teams collect feedback. In the State of DevOps Report, we learn about the critical business advantages that come from all the benefits that CD enables.

The key business benefits for organizations adopting Continuous Delivery

The State of DevOps Report already enumerates a few of the improvements organizations can expect when adopting CD. The immediate benefit is related to quality and reliability. Although this is no surprise, given the high focus on testing and continuous integration, Dave shares the results from surveys (State of DevOps Report) pointing to the fact that organizations adopting CD are consistently more profitable than those not adopting CD.

Step by step on the way to high-quality software

When teams first consider Continuous Delivery, it might be because of a team member that brings the topic up. However, the adoption has it’s own challenges. In this episode, we trace a roadmap for adoption with Dave.

For Scrum Masters, it is critical to understand what are the concrete steps they need to help their teams through, and we review a possible set of adoption steps with Dave.

Books and resources for those adopting Continuous Delivery

Here is the list of recommended resources by Dave Farley, himself the author of Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation.

Dave also recommends Specification by Example: How Successful Teams Deliver the Right Software by Gojko Adzic.

When it comes to tools, Dave shares the significant evolution that tools have gone through since the inception of CD. He mentions Teamcity and Jenkins as possible tools for teams to start looking into when preparing to adopt CD.

About Dave Farley

Dave Farley is an independent software developer and consultant, and founder and director of Continuous Delivery Ltd.

Dave Farley is a thought-leader in the field of Continuous Delivery, DevOps and Software Development in general. 
He is co-author of the Jolt-award winning book ‘Continuous Delivery’ a regular conference speaker and blogger and one of the authors of the Reactive Manifesto.

Dave has been having fun with computers for over 30 years. He started working in large scale distributed systems more than 25 years ago, doing research into the development of loose-coupled, message-based systems – a forerunner of MicroService architectures.

You can link with Dave Farley on LinkedIn, or visit Dave Farley’s website.