@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io From bi-annual to fortnightly releases in 4 months for 15 teams and a single monolith Tenderhearted Thierry Korenlei & Graslei Ghent, Belgium

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Being vulnerable … I’m shy and introverted

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io A Belgian federal agency 15 teams (~ 150 people) and 1 monolith

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io 3-4 planned major releases per year 2017: 3 major releases 2018: 2 major releases deployment lead time of 28 days consuming 334 person-days

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io September 5th 2018: Can you help us go from bi-annual releases to fortnightly releases by the end of December 2018?

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” -- Dwight Eisenhower, 1957

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io What not to do? Maturity Models They are fundamentally flawed.

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io ● Improvement Kata ● Value Stream Mapping ● Measuring Continuous Delivery ● Theory of Constraints

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Establish a core team representing all roles to lead the Continuous Delivery adoption.

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Investing in Continuous Delivery is very valuable. But it isn’t easy nor cheap !

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Technological changes Version Control Test Driven Development Trunk Based Development Acceptance Test Driven Development Deployment Pipeline Contract Tests Continuous Integration Exploratory Testing Automated Configuration Smoke Tests Automated Infrastructure Test Data Management Evolutionary Architecture Monitoring & Alerting Database Migrations Incremental Releases source: Steve Smith

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Organisational changes Small Batch Sizes Everyone does On-Call Empowered Product Teams Continuous Change Review Cross-Functional Teams Traceability of Changes Shared Incentives Upskilling and Empowering Employees Blameless Post-Mortems Conway's Law Alignment You build it, You run it Continuous Improvement source: Steve Smith

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io The Improvement Kata

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io The Agency's Improvement Kata

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io The Agency's Improvement Kata

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Major release ~ 6 months lead time 5 months: accumulation of features 3 weeks: code freeze 1 week: production deployment Champagne 🍾🎉 🥂 334 person-days

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Patch releases - every fortnight

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Theory of Constraints Every system has a bottleneck. Spending time optimising anything other than the bottleneck is an illusion.

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Where is the bottleneck? activity lead time activity failure rate not here

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Where is the bottleneck? activity lead time activity failure rate VCS Branches but here !!!

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io First experiment: the deployment pipeline and its metrics

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io The Agency's Improvement Kata

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io The Agency's Improvement Kata

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io The Agency's Improvement Kata Set up a Deployment Pipeline ✔ Daily evaluation of failing tests Dedicated environment for automated acceptance tests Recreate database before running acceptance tests to clean up test data Stub 3rd party services Collect lead time and failure rate metrics from the deployment pipeline

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io “... but plans are worthless when the fighting is once begun, and all depends on the inspiration of the moment.” -- a war correspondent for the British newspaper “The Daily News”, 1877 ➔ Fear conversations

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Fear 1: Fear of Complexity

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Complex branching strategy

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Proposed branching strategy roadmap

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Fear 2: Fear of Missing Key Steps

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Meanwhile … 18/10: LT of 8h, 21/3529 failing tests 29/10: LT of 4h, 545/5390 failing tests 05/11: no pipeline run for 5 days due to a Jenkins upgrade 23/11: first green pipeline, all tests are passing 🎉 After which the pipeline went red for another 2 weeks 😒

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Fear 3: Fear of Deadlines

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Introduce a manual overrule step “Sunlight is said to be the best disinfectants.” -- Louis Brandeis

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Fear 4: Fear of Bugs

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Introduce quarantined tests

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io “They did not know it was impossible, so they did it.” -- Mark Twain

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io But, but, but … are fortnightly releases considered to be Continuous Delivery? Yes!

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io It is possible to achieve Continuous Delivery without first reaching Continuous Integration. But we will not be able to sustain Continuous Delivery in the long run.

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io WTF am I doing here? And yet, it happened. In the most unexpected way

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io @[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Acknowledgments: Els, the one I love. Steve Smith for reviewing this presentation, always making sure I do not hide myself. Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel for including this case in “Agile Conversations” https://www.conversationaltransformation.com/ Johanna Rothman for reviewing and helping to improve the abstract. https://www.jrothman.com/books/write-a-conference-proposal-the-conference-wants-and-accepts/ Slidedeck: https://thinkinglabs.io/talks/from-bi-annual-to-fortnightly-releases Hello, I am Thierry de Pauw fancies dark chocolate, black coffee, peated whisky

@[email protected] @tdpauw.bsky.social thinkinglabs.io Bibliography Lean Enterprise (ch 6 Deploy Continuous Improvement), Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, Barry O'Reilly Supplemental chapter to Accelerate: How to transform, Jez Humble The Improvement Kata, Mike Rother Measuring Continuous Delivery, Steve Smith The Goal, Eliyahu Goldratt A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware, Gary Gruver, Mike Young, Pat Fulghum Dual Value Streams, Steve Smith Got a wicked problem? First, tell me how you make toast, Tom Wujec, TEDGlobal 2013 Agile Conversations, Jeffrey Fredericks and Douglas Squirrel