Don’t forget the people

‹#›

James Heggs

Head of Development ResponseTap

Systems Thinking

Don’t forget the people

‹#›

Dev is down!

‹#›

‹#›

Continuous delivery in a government setting

• Worked at part of a 3 man Ops Team• 2 development scrum teams with around 15 devs• Fashionistas

• Infrastructure as code with Ansible• Microservices• Jenkins delivery pipelines

• Git flow branching• Apps built as yum packages

• Dev -> QA -> Pre-prod -> Live

‹#›

In come the people…

• Error reports of ‘Dev is down’

• Dev environment was ‘volatile’

• Innovation and rapid change comes hand in hand with failure and learning

• “I didn’t break it”, “I haven’t changed anything that would cause that”

• More Dev vs Ops than DevOps

‹#›

How did we solve it?

• Change embargo

• Collaboration with developers

• Education of volatility

‹#›

Remember the people - Co-operation and trust

• This type of environment requires a high level of trust between team mates.

• Continuous delivery means continuous change

• Change comes with failure

• Change is an opportunity to learn

• Collaboration quickly resolves failure

‹#›

We should automate our

testing, you know, like this Spotify

demo

‹#›

Automated testing

• 2013 blog post on automated testing by Spotify

‹#›

‹#›

What about the testers?

• Checking VS Testing• Checking can be automated• Testing requires sapience• Quality in all that you do

• Humans can

• Test the specs (even before code) meet customer expectation• Can explore the solution in ways the developer hadn’t thought

of• Can test if something ‘just doesn’t feel right’• Have you thought about X? Have you thought how that impacts

Y?

‹#›

Remember the people - Utilise the human mindset

• Utilise the skillset and mindset of the individuals in your team

• Automation does not and will not replace humans

• Testers will explore

• Utilise testers much earlier in the development cycle

‹#›

We’re going to be releasing every few hours, how brilliant

is that!!

‹#›

‹#›

What about the impact on other departments?

• Support - How is the incremental education of the support team handled?

• Marketing - When does the marketing team perform launches?

• Operations - What more things to monitor? Support?

• Sales - Continual training on new features aiding selling process

‹#›

Remember the people - Consider impact

• Moving to continuous delivery is NOT just a technical decision

• Technically it may be achievable but are your colleagues ready

• Think what impact it may have on your colleagues life

‹#›

We are hiring

careers@responsetap.com

http://bit.ly/1VAuHFX

Thank you for listening

Systems Thinking

https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/roasted-pigs-and-digital-transformation