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Continuous Delivery in Practice

Posted on July 18, 2011 by jamesbetteley

A couple of months ago I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Thoughtworks live 2011 event in London. The main topics of this event were agile (as you’d expect from Thoughtworks) and Continuous Delivery. The event was run over 2 days, the first day included talks from Jez Humble and Martin Fowler, as well as a number of other speakers (Dave West did a session on agile vs the rest, Bjarte Bogsnes presented a very interesting session called “Beyond Budgeting”, and Scott Durchslag was guest speaking about how agile has worked at Expedia, and his interest in Continuous Delivery). My colleague Steve Morgan was also in attendance on the first day and has produced this excellent post on the contents of day 1. I won’t say much more about the first day because Steve’s post covers it better than I ever could (he cheated by taking notes/paying attention). However, I will just add that it was great to see so many people who genuinely seemed passionate about the evolution of agile, and the coffee breaks were a great opportunity to pick the brains of Messrs Fowler and Humble. I particularly enjoyed the “Beyond Budgeting” talk from Bjarte, and am happy to say he’s written a book about it, which you can buy on the internets!

The only other thing I would say about day 1 was that there was a reasonably good choice of biscuits. Biscuit variety is important and mustn’t be underestimated.

Day 2

Day 2 was somewhat more hands on than the first day, and also more tools-oriented. It started off with another session from Jez Humble and Martin Fowler, where they discussed continuous delivery, covering some of the contents of Jez’s book, and also going into detail about branching (feature branching vs Continuous Integration). The sessions then moved on to cover some of the products being produced at Thoughtworks Studios. There were talks from Andy Kemp and Suzie Prince about their products Mingle and Twist. Mingle is marketed as an agile project management tool. I’ve not used it myself but it seems to be based around shared workspaces and good requirements tracking. As you’d expect, it seems to integrate well with the other Thoughtworks products, which is probably one of its main advantages. Twist is a functional testing platform, which is very agile-centric in that it allows you to run requirements specs as tests in the “As a user, I want to…” style. Again it’s the integration with the other tools and products that made it look good to me. I’ve used a lot of agile tools recently, which all seem to be great on their own, but putting them all together so that I can track a requirement through to a test and a change through to a build can be a lot of hard work. The final product that they presented was Go, which is their Continuous Integration system, and they even showed us how they used Go to deliver builds of Mingle, Twist and even Go itself (talk about eating your own dogfood).

Go ci implementation at caplin systems

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The centrepiece of day 2 though was of course my very own talk on how we at Caplin Systems are using Go in our Continuous Delivery system 🙂 I was invited to present a session on how Go is helping us achieve our Continuous Integration goals, and how we are using it to implement our own brand of Continuous Delivery. I’ve embedded my presentation above – sorry it’s not a video. I won’t go into too much detail (I’ll save you the lecture), but basically we’re using build pipelines along with a high degree of automated tests to deliver builds which are suitable for deployment. The other feature I have to mention is how Go manages multiple agents. We have about 60 active agents which Go manages. A build can be farmed out to any of these 60 agents, and if a particular resource is needed (let’s say I need to run a test on a particular OS, like Centos) then Go can be configured to send the builds to the right agents. Particular builds can be configured to be excluded from certain agents, meaning the system is highly configurable.

In the afternoon we had an open-space session, during which I spent most of my time with a group discussing database deployments and how to bring db changes under Continuous Integration. It seems there are still a lot of people around who feel that this aspect is largely overlooked with respect to Continuous Integration, and this was reflected in the way people were talking about using manual db compare tools as a way of deploying db changes to production. My own feelings on this are that database changes should be treated more like code changes, with each change scripted and deployed as a code change would be. There needn’t be destructive changes, and a good set of test data should help catch the issues that are often only found in production.

Continuous Integration: The Last Mile

Posted on June 18, 2011 by jamesbetteley

Conquering the Last Mile

I went to the London C.I. Meetup last week where Gus Power (how he chose a career in I.T. and not as a pro-wrestler with a name like that I do NOT know) delivered a talk entitled “C.I. The Last Mile”. Gus seems to have a comprehensive and varied background in lean and agile software engineering and delivery, and in this session he talked to us about “Conquering the last mile”, that is, getting working software out of the door.

This is NOT Gus Power

We’ve all heard (or maybe even said a few times) the oft repeated mantra “but it works fine on my machine!”. This situation is commonplace, a build, for instance, will run just fine on your own PC, but as soon as it runs on the build server, it fails. Gus reminds us that, although this scenario is common, it’s a million miles away from working, releseable software, for a number of reasons, and that the only true definition of “working” software is “running, tested, and in the hands of the customer”.

Continuous Integration – is it Just a “Software” Practice?

Continuous Integration as a practice is traditionally quite a few steps removed from the world of running, tested software in the hands of the customer. In fact, Gus suggested that C.I. is usually associated with automating builds and running unit tests (although I would suggest that this is probably an increasingly naive view in this day and age, but for the sake of his talk it helped to make a point). This is obviously a long way away from delivering working software to a customer. Gus told us of his own company’s realisation that software, in their case, was not the product, and that their “product” included a lot more than just the software that the dev team delivered. He was of course referring to the supporting software and systems, and infrastructure.

Think of a web-based company, for instance Uswitch.com (for whom I used to work). While their core product may be a lot of web pages and associated content, their overall system consists of a lot more – for instance, there’s the IIS configurations, the data in the databases, the load balancers and of course the infrastructure (servers, Operating Systems etc). Note that Continuous Integration, in many cases, doesn’t cover most of this supporting system, only the company’s proprietary software (including the database in the case of Uswitch.com – at least, that was the case a few years ago when i worked there).

Gus pointed out that all these other parts of the system should also be brought under the watchful eye of Continuous Integration, and I agree with him wholeheartedly.

Lean Manufacturing

Gus went on to introduce us to the Lean Manufacturing model as used by Toyota.

Image: Toshifumi Kitamura/AFP/Getty

He said that Toyota enjoy a great deal of success due to their use of a system based on tolerances, rather than rigid specs. He seemed to suggest that this approach could be applied to some of the non-software aspects of a system, such as infrastructure.

Acceptance Criteria for Systems

I think Gus raised a particularly interesting point about the lean manufacturing system, and it made me think about how much attention we usually pay to “acceptance criteria”. In the current agile environment, much attention is focused on what constitutes “acceptance” when it comes to designing and delivering software. Many tools exist, such as Fitnesse and Cucumber, which allow us to capture acceptance criteria in relation to a user story or use case. However, while this practice is now common across many software companies, the focus tends to be on the software that’s being developed, and often doesn’t include the supporting parts of the system, such as the infrastructure (hardware, load balancers, data, etc and so forth).

Of course, there’s an obvious reason for this. Most of the stories come from user requirements, the stories are made into tasks and the tasks are worked on by the software engineers. There’s a disconnect between those responsible for delivering the software (i.e. the software engineers) and those responsible for the supporting systems (who are they anyway???). Also, the customer’s requirements are often agnostic when it comes to the supporting parts of the system – they generally don’t care about the load balancer’s capabilities, or what type of web server you use).

What we’re talking about here is the difference between “software requirements” and “system requirements”, and how the latter are quite often overlooked, or at least overshadowed by the former.

Software Acceptance vs Product Acceptance

Gus finished off his talk by recommending that all parts of your “product” (I prefer the term “system” here, but that’s just me) should be brought under the control of your C.I. system and that there should be some effort to capture and measure system acceptance criteria – here he refers back to the Toyota system of using tolerances.

I raised the subject of Chef & Puppet in the Q&A session at the end. These tools allow you to treat what are traditionally considered “infrastructure” parts of your system as code. With these tools you can easily script up and deploy VMs and Operating Systems along with their configurations, and they also work well in a C.I. environment. Gus said that he has enjoyed some success with Chef.

This is not the chef we were referring to

Acunote – Agile Project Management Tool

Posted on May 13, 2011 by jamesbetteley

This is just a short little post about a task management tool I’ve been using for roughly a couple of years now. It’s called Acunote (http://www.acunote.com) and I’ve come to love it. I use it as a task management tool at the moment but in the past I’ve used it as a project management tool and a team management tool.

Acunote is based on the agile scrum system, and as such it allows you to create “sprints”. In your sprints you create tasks (in the real world these would be derived from user stories). You can assign tasks to individuals, estimate them, set a priority and continually update this information.

As you can see, acunote will work out a burn-down chart for you as you go along (which you can view by user, multi-user or team), and will give predictions on whether you’re going to hit your targets etc. It also allows you to keep a backlog, and to add a bunch of tasks from you backlog into a new sprint is as simple as a click of a button.

All in all I’ve found it to be fantastic, and I couldn’t imagine not using it now. I highly recommend taking a look at it.