The Journey to CD

What is the point of Continuous Delivery? Where should you start? How do you know you are making progress?

In this talk, Dan argues that the purpose of Continuous Delivery is to support Business Agility, and that you shouldn't try to boil the ocean, but instead choose one thing to go after.

Transcript

1. THE JOURNEY TO
   CONTINUOUS DELIVERY
   Dan North
   @tastapod
   

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3. WHAT IS THE GOAL OF CONTINUOUS DELIVERY?
   Release into production more often?
   Automating build and deployment?
   Standardising processes and tools?
   The goal of Continuous Delivery is to increase Business Agility
   

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4. BUSINESS AGILITY
   “The speed and effectiveness with which we can adapt to new information”
   Reducing time to market is the only game in town
   Technically lead time
   OK really technically cost of delay
   

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5. WHY DOES BUSINESS AGILITY MATTER?
   

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6. LEARNING REQUIRES FEEDBACK
   Feedback
   is invited
   Feedback
   is offered
   Feedback
   is heard
   Feedback
   is actioned
   

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7. BUSINESS AGILITY INVOLVES THE WHOLE
   ORGANISATION
   Commercial
   Management
   Operations
   Technology
   

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8. WHY DOES CONTINUOUS DELIVERY MATTER?
   It impacts the speed at which you can respond to a need
   It impacts the speed at which you can recover
   It impacts your level of quality and consistency
   

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9. WHAT IS SLOWING US DOWN?
   Hand-offs to other teams
   • Creating environments for dev and testing
   • Onerous Release/Change governance and sign-off
   • Security, Audit, Compliance sign-off
   Manual testing
   Manual deployment and release processes
   Manual troubleshooting and recovery
   

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10. WHERE SHOULD YOU START?
    “Start where you are”
    Identify what is really slowing you down
    Pick one thing and go after it!
    Scale out as you build confidence and trust
    

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11. WHERE SHOULD YOU START?
    Turn a problem statement into a desired outcome:
    “It takes ages to get an environment around here!”
    Goal: Self-serve provisioning of environments
    “We spend all our time filling in release documents!”
    Goal: Release docs populated from work tracker and code repo
    

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12. WHERE SHOULD YOU START?
    Visualise
    Stabilise
    Optimise
    

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13. VISUALISE
    Map the value stream
    Identify where time is being lost
    • The Inactivity Principle: Watch the work product, not the worker
    Look for where work items leave the team
    Look for where work items pile up in queues
    Identify the trouble spots
    

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14. STABILISE
    Bring system variance under control
    • otherwise you can’t determine the impact of a change
    Eliminate or mitigate hand-offs
    • Stabilising often speeds things up!
    Simplify and standardise manual processes
    • Makes them candidates for automation
    Make cross-cutting “utility” functions self-service
    

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15. OPTIMISE
    Define an experiment, or “bet”
    • What do you want to improve?
    • How will you measure this?
    Baseline the current state
    • You may get a surprise!
    Carry out the experiment
    Interpret the results
    Kaizen is first-class work
    Plan
    Do
    Check
    Adjust
    

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16. THEN DO IT ALL AGAIN!
    Visualise
    Stabilise
    Optimise
    

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17. LOTS OF DIMENSIONS TO EXPLORE
    principles
    processes
    tools
    governance
    organisation
    FedRAMP by 18F
    

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18. DON’T BE AFRAID TO ASK FOR HELP
    We are in a Cambrian explosion of tools and methods
    Not everyone is Google or Netflix
    Take inspiration from them, but resist web-scale envy
    • Unless you are web-scale!
    Start tomorrow—pick one thing—measure it!
    

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19. THANKS FOR LISTENING!
    dan@dannorth.net
    http://dannorth.net
    @tastapod
    

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