Where to start with Continuous Delivery

A lot of people have already started the journey without really knowing it. Its few companies today that don´t utilize some key parts of a Continuous process. When reading books and listening to speakers at conferences its easy to feel totally stone age. But the key is to remember that the journey is baby steps towards a vision. But Continuous Delivery is just progression of Continuous Integration and a lot of the basics are built upon in the progression.

By realizing we have something we can start to think about what we really need out of a Continuous Process. In some sense we all want to release all the time and we want our artifacts to be server images deployed on cloud nodes monitored by super cool graphs of all the metrics we can possibly think of. That is all nice but we all do need to provide a, hate the word, business value. So where is the business value in a continuous process for our organisation. That is the question we should ponder before we start.

In fact we had didnt have to ask our selfs the question in that way. Instead we where provided a challenge. For us it was key to solve system regression testing. Test automation and lowering cost in regression testing is obviously one of the key reasons to have Continuous Delivery. For us the key business case was to solve Continuous Regression testing. Continuous what ever else would come as a bonus.

Knowing that Continuous Regression Testing and not Continuous Deploy was our main priority made it easy for us to prioritize our efforts. Our efforts went largely into Testability Architecture in our application, Test Architecture in our test automation frameworks and automating a pipe that would deploy and test each code commit.

So really as with any agile development find your business value, focus on delivering it with a minimal effort "good enough" approach and iterate from there.

Over the next coming posts I will go though what we focused om in order to achieve Continuous System Regression Testing.

What drives my interest in Continuous Delivery?

I want to mitigate the risk of my presence in a project.

My weaknesses as a individual both privately and professorially are that I'm horrible at following instructions I cant do it once but I'm even worse at doing it multiple times. I´m feel physically sick if I need to do repetitive tasks, I get demotivated and hence I do an even worse job. I also tend to forget to do things because I've got my mind full of other stuff. I'm also very bad at testing. Ive worked with test automation for nearly six years now and I still suck at  good test cases.

What I am good at is creative problem solving, finding solutions to problems and thinking outside the box. I'm also quite good at inspiring people.

This is a horrible combination for any project. This guy who cant follow instructions constantly comes up with new "bright ideas", cant event test them and even worse he gets people to engaged and enthusiastic towards his crazy ideas, do we really want him on our team???

Yes I am a high risk and I need to be mitigated.

In all seriousness, I do love change, I thrive in an ever changing environment. I love the positive energy towards solving problems and not dwelling over them. I love high pace and new challenges. I also do know that in order to do what I love to do the "maintenance" of our work needs to be minimized as its a huge time and cost sink for each project.

The "maintenance" part isnt just our production applications. Its our code, our tests, our mechanisms and of course our production deliveries. Every hour not spent maintaining these is spent on bringing in new business value into the organization and solving fun new challenges.

If I can contribute towards lowering the onetime and run time costs of a delivery then Im satisfied because I know my work has really mattered. Im also satisfied on a personal level because I know that Im spending time solving new problems and not maintaining old problems.

I want to come to work and feel satisfied...