Wouter started his Continuous Delivery journey as an Extreme Programmer in his first years of engineering experience. He shares the story of how, as a team, they sat together with the operations department to learn how they developed their software. Thanks to that, they radically changed their build system to export the kind of packages that operations needed. A brilliant story that also illustrates the adage: “Your first customer is the next step in the process!”
Read more to learn why testing is such a key skill and technical area when adopting Continuous Delivery.
Testing, is the main challenge for teams adopting Continuous Delivery
For all the technical challenges that teams face when building their CD pipelines, the one challenge that Wouter highlights is testing. How little is done, or how testing does not build up confidence by the team on the quality of what they are trying to deliver. In this segment, we discuss why testing is a key challenge, and how Wouter has been able to help teams learn to trust their deliveries to the point that they can release automatically, after each commit.
Continuous Delivery delivering millions as a “side-effect”!
That’s a situation that rarely happens: Continous Delivery enabling a company to “find” millions in revenue thanks to the continuous delivery pipeline. It’s surprising but possible. Wouter shares with us how that happened for one of his clients. Listen in to learn what they did, and how the work to enable Continuous Delivery eventually led to a benefit no one expected. An incredible story of how technical excellence brought about by CD can have a huge business impact.
Resources to help you adopt Continuous Delivery / Continuous Integration
In this episode, we list the following resources to help you dive deeper into Continuous Delivery:
- The book Accelerate by Forsberg, Humble and Kim that goes into the science / study of the impact of Continuous Delivery
- Measuring Continuous Delivery by Steve Smith, a book that explores how to measure your Continuous Delivery journey, from how fast you are currently going to how fast you want to go.
- We discuss Behavior Driven Development and the book Specification By Example by Gojko Adzic
- We talk about User Story Mapping, the book by Jeff Patton
We also discuss how important it is to get requirements right, and in that context we talk about Seb Rose’s and Gáspár Nagy’s books on Discovery and Formulation of requirements and scenarios.
About Wouter Lagerweij
Wouter Lagerweij is an Agile Coach who likes to cover the whole spectrum: from the technical practices of Dev and Ops to business and product. He works with organizations to help them do continuous delivery, and provides training and workshops on agile development practices, and dealing with legacy systems.
You can link with Wouter Lagerweij on LinkedIn and connect with Wouter Lagerweij on Twitter.
