Continuous Delivery? Easy! Just Change Everything (Well, Maybe It Is Not That Easy)

Abstract

Rally Software transitioned from shipping code every eight-weeks, with time-boxed Scrum sprints, to a model of continuous delivery with Kanban. The team encountered complex challenges with their build systems, automated test suites, customer enablement, and internal communication. But there was light at the end of the tunnel -greater control and flexibility over feature releases, incremental delivery of value, lower risks, fewer defects, easier on-boarding of new developers, less off-hours work, and a considerable uptick in confidence.This experience report describes the journey to continuous delivery with the aim that others can learn from our mistakes and get their teams deploying more frequently. We will describe and contrast this transition from the business (product management) and engineering perspectives. Agile Conference978-0-7695-5076-3/13 $26.00

DevOps Adoption Benefits and Challenges in Practice: A Case Study

“…Real-time monitoring has also been previously highlighted by developers as a factor which helps to create fault-aware systems [2,6] and DevOps has been seen to encourage experimental culture [11].…”

“…Developer and operations teams can streamline development processes in order to finetune the performance of services and increase scalability with virtualization [6]. Monitoring the production systems at real-time enables developers to react whenever anomalies are detected [2,6,11]. On-demand infrastructures and timely feedback from monitoring support continuous software delivery and deployment.…”

“…On-demand infrastructures and timely feedback from monitoring support continuous software delivery and deployment. Release cycles can shorten to hours instead of weeks and months [11], which is seen as a definite advantage of DevOps [4,7]. Monolithic architectures restrict the release frequency [13] but microservice architectures help to break down components into smaller pieces suitable for frequent releases [2,13].…”

Hitting the Target: Practices for Moving Toward Innovation Experiment Systems

“…At Conject AG [8], the transition from the traditional six-month release cycle to the continuous flow of small releases was enabled by aligning coding and testing activities to the same short cycles, by test automation and by implementing the CI system. At Rally Software [9], the transition from an eight-week release cadence to continuous delivery of software was enabled by abandoning time-boxed Scrum sprints and by adopting lean practices, such as Kanban and Kaizen. By first developing a better understanding of the entire process, the company was able to make many changes to the development process.…”

“…In allowing for more flexible ways of working with an emphasis on customer collaboration and speed of development, agile methods help companies address many of the problems associated with traditional development [6]. As a way to further advance agile development practices, companies are moving from release cycles of 6 to 12 months to more frequent software releases [7,8,9,10]. To achieve this, companies increasingly adopt practices such as CI [11], continuous delivery [12] and CD [13].…”